[ICTs-and-Society] Pre-Conference Online Discussion

[Sean Cubitt]

I'm not sure I'm really up with Gilson's term 'iconomics'
(http://wi.hexagram.ca/?p=54) but to me it suggests Baudrillard's
Political Economy of the Sign. Twisting Baudrillard somewhat, what this
suggests is that the markets for goods and services are supplemented
(Baudrillard says replaced) by a market of icons, let's say brands rather
than shoes. In our times the most interesting way of reading an economics
of symbols is finance capital's more 'advanced' machinery for producing
wealth out of debt defaults. Here money no longer stands in for material
goods (in the Aristotelean as well as the economic sense) but operates
without anchorage in material wealth. This I think is what Louis means by
his distinction between neo-liberal and capitalist.

In this instance the problem, as always with historical accounts of the
changing nature of capital, is the falling rate of profit. This not only
drives the obscene ver-production and consequent discipline of
over-consumption, leading among other things to excessive energy and
resource use, and to massive waste, but to the colonisation of fields not
previously subordinated to capital. This is the case currently with
Intellectual property, which is increasingly the driver of post-Fordist
USA industries like Apple, Boeing and Hollywood: the US is dominated by
sunrise industries in hard/software, military tech and entertainment which
require an intricate state regulation of intellectual property rights,
even harder than ordinary property to maintain because they are
non-rivalrous etc etc.

If creative economy models are simply an attempt to get a slice of the
same pie for the dispossessed, then it must be worth noting that the pie
is potentially toxic. As Louis argues, peer-to-peer offers a long term
sustainable alternative.

What is implicit in this is the externalities (I think I have the term
correct): both the free labour of wikipedians and linux hackers, and the
negatives of pollution, disease etc. These are the values which do not
appear in economic calculations which focus exclusively on wealth

The power of critical economics is in part that it assaults the
disciplinary boundary demarcating the economic off from the political,
thus echoing and reinforcing the boundaries established in neo-liberal
governments between politics (how shall we spend our money) and economics
(how will we get it). This results in an institutional politics which
cannot address the central issue of all politics: the good. Politicians
with rare exceptions never debate the value of 'value' - they are cynics
(in Oscar Wilde's phrase, I think it was, 'A cynic knows the price of
everything and the value of nothing'). Reintegrating political economy is
the biggest challenge.

The next phase is to open political debate. In effect we recognise already
The Market as a political agency, even though we know that it is largely
automated, a massive cyborg machine with human bio-chips. Is it then so
far-fetched that we might begin to ascribe political agency to the
planetary and local environment?

As it happens I believe that close analysis of the icon (in the sense of
iconography plus the technologies and techniques deployed in its creation,
dissemination and consumption: in short mediation) is the route royal to
understanding the material specificity of the operations of capital in its
micro- as well as macro-hstorical evolutions, and to building alternatives
like P2P, but that is a rather different story

Foucault writes in Security Teritory Population that politics mediates
between populations and environments. The question then is this: at what
stage can a population become its own environment, and thus do away with
the necessity for institutional politics?

sean

On 21/01/2012 03:49, "Louis Suárez-Potts" <louis at ageofpeers.com> wrote:

>iconomic