Manifold | Serhat Yenisan

Commodity Idealism, or Techno-Economic Singularity

The Six Elements Air Is Made Of: Atmospheric Pressure
Commodity Idealism, or Techno-Economic Singularity

Capitalism is an asset accumulation system; as such, it is characterised by a widespread ineptitude with regard to acting as a representative for private property. Property does not constitute capitalism’s intrinsic goal: whenever a property-building platform takes shape, it invariably promises liberty and circulation. However, as its distance from empirical capital wanes, soon a labyrinthine conception of property emerges, tantamount to a mere involution. Capitalism is the commodity-model that computes the variance between all by-products of property, as well as these products’ fine-tuning processes. This experimental course produces an inter-commodity – commodities being understood as components of the transition from one congeneric item to the next – communication network (much resembling a viral contagion cycle), and, as a stand-in for information disclosure apparatuses, supplants the value systems that underpin collective beliefs. Such digital curtailments are, naturally, connected to the economic essence of capitalism and, as such, resort to ideological polarisations that directly obey the interests of capital, rather than those of any given class; they possess no ideological bearing whatsoever. Capitalism safeguards stability, not the privilege of a class. It possesses no liberal inclination at all. Liberalism, on the other hand, falls victim to delusions that lead it to equate the stability of capital with its own interests. As for neoliberalism, by furthering this delusion on a global scale, it has given rise to an utterly paranoid system of thought.

Diagramming capital as a go-between, enigmatically coupling liberal interests to a super-cycle, enabling the mapping of Stirnerian property differences, and disappearing in the process, allows it to shrivel towards an insubstantial point and to instantiate commodity-models equating accretion to a function, generating even greater profits. Thus, a virus, a parasite, a cyber-overemphasis, tantamount to a technological integration positioning itself beyond production, logistical and political relations and spurning the assumption of time as linear, begins to reverberate through the markets, and generates price as a universal language. Capitalism provides no direct solution to the property issue inherent in assets; in fact, its goal is by no means directly related to property by-products. The property issue has everything to do with you. Capitalism utilises volatile property in order to expose the “invisible” mechanisms at stake behind capital, and, by shoving representations into the background, to cause ruptures within the depths of time. Property has assumed the role of a surrogate mother for the monopoly-engineering of those information systems that ensure capital formation.

So long as it falls short of suggesting a transcendent property owner, the left’s hatred of property cannot suffice to thematise capitalism, analyse it, or construct an ideological line likely to enact the class struggle. That is why it still uses capital as a tool to procure hegemony, and attempts to undermine the fetish nature of economy politics by turning collective labour into an intelligence network: within a competitive market, insomuch as it is being exchanged, commodity loses its value-in-use, and, by melting into its own forms of value, becomes a sort of divine super-good. In order to happen, the proletariat revolution must (on paper) smother this fetish law of value independently of the central state, through collective-economic principles targeting local production and distribution networks. During the establishment of collective paradise, this “capitalistic” mode of production, presumed to have reached its final stage, is often run by a state monopoly (in other words, a proxy administrator disowning democracy). However, Sovietic Marxism (and, as a matter of fact, even Marx in person) remained unresolved as to exactly how far the productive forces ought to proliferate. Within a fully industrialised, autonomous economy, production must be revitalised; as it happens, through exchanges, this mode of production always bespeaks a web of social relation forms. Soviet Marxism aims to form a singularity axis not suffused with ownership by etching the communist future, which shall dispel the inequalities of the past, onto a divine commodity. Rather than promoting the socialist vision of the future, that mode of production, in which exchanges are supervised by those vested with executive power, actually deepens capitalism’s internal contradictions.

The innovative revolution recently propounded by Srnicek and Williams referred to a social entity, calling people to establish a “socio-technical hegemony”. Despite its claim that myopic acceleration dismisses both the past and the future, this universal project gleans its theoretical grounding from spurious technologies and civilisations, and endeavours to borrow its ideological references from a delusive future. For all its seeming eagerness to view the intrinsic oppressiveness of technology as an obstacle to civilisation, this “left-accelerationist” scenario, expected to bring itself into existence, seeks a peculiar harmony between both.Inasmuch as they become embroiled in centralised industrialism, technology-specific social relations transmute themselves into an anti-technological fetish product; in other words, they cling on to a peculiar attachment to negative liberty. Intent on clearing new grounds and discovering previously unheard-of transformative subjectivities, this profit-oriented counter-socialist project is ultimately bogged down in the swamp of a sustainable culture-founding profit model. Neither elaborated politics nor structured sets of concepts are being put forward. Therefore, no cracks likely to upset the capitalist mode of production, nor the left-accelerationist openness required for a radical transformation are there to be found. More dramatically still, its own blowing on the embers of “inequality, conflict and chaos” is in fact (despite its authors’ claim to the contrary) nothing but one of the superpowers of neoliberal capitalism itself. An assessment of whether the paradigm (or, as is the case in Srnicek and Williams’ manifesto, mere commodity cycles translated into leftist courses of action) is unjust and perverse is not considered primarily necessary.

No matter how reluctant we may be, let’s admit it: there is a fallacious, populist connection, purporting to incapacitate capital (something phrased by Srnicek and Williams as “human acceleration”) between the introduction of unclear notions such as equality, liberty, collectiveness, etc. into your political course of action and the acceleration of the technological diagram. Such is the reason why left-accelerationism keeps expanding Marxist commodity fetishism, and even the overall fetish character of economy politics, the “inverted world” of the Capital as a productive simulacrum, until coinciding with the neo-Keynesian imperfect competitive relations (in other words, it keeps abstaining from reciting the slogan “either socialism or barbarism” the same way it occurred on a world-historical scale). It does not instate neoliberalism’s self-image as an instrument of modernisation. Modernisation itself is yet a deeper internal contradiction within capitalism: it is indeed “one of the contingent means to ward off the crisis of value”, and, as it happens, one of the repressed accelerationist tendencies of capitalism as well. Within the layer of capitalist reality, everything, from your identities to representations, social inequality, or the climate crisis, all have become but parodies. As it turns out, these are far more restricting than even the “strictly defined set of capitalist parameters”. For the notion of a “universal space of possibility” (no less than the “Victorian ‘back-to-basics’”, or the “speculative image of the future economic system”), constitute but a capitalist-fictional future. In that sense, capitalism forms the most inclusive utopia that ever was. To put it in shorter terms: the neoliberal production platform, as a spurious edifice well past its expiry date, cannot be re-purposed so as to serve common goals. An altogether developed society, autonomously run by individuals, merely underscores the limitations of the Enlightenment tradition. Eluding accountability or disgrace, on the other hand, are the technological advantages that capital grants.

The belief that you may overthrow this radically corrupted structure intrinsically presumes a committed history. This in turn leads us to the very core of the techno-economic time war. Just as they dismantle all of your pre-capitalist forms of exchange, capitalist superpowers – that is to say, the sum of the assets which, as a form of exchange, produces its own prerequisites and, as such, purportedly produces itself – also produce, together with their prerequisites, a pre-capitalist, sacred resistance (and exchange). This technomic revolution – wherein capital accelerates in and of its own – occurring on a spatio-temporal continuum disconnected from GMT time figures may refer to capital as the institutional layer of revolutionary hyperactivity, but once abstracted from all of its discrete qualities, the organisation that underpins it appears to possess not a single revolutionary, or institutional trait. Capital may display the reflex aptitude to generate space, but by shoving the issue of ownership into the background, it instates its own specific boundaries. As for institutionalism, it has now become contagious by nature. Within the capital model entrusted with administratorship by the cybernetic-state, so long as the latter factionalises the overall economy, techno-economic deadlocks survive parasitically and, even worse still, just like crises, are not met with a political response until they occur. Crises are the outward reflection of deeply entangled themes (various financial anomalies), so much so that resolving this complexity by means of feedback spirals proves utterly impossible. On the other hand, the reflexive reaction which you give to deviations occurring within the system not only turns your online identity into a simulator of those deviations, but also strengthens its coherence through this very retro-contamination. Operating as some sort of reset, that intervention enables the said identity to change its shell, and mesh with it as it adapts to the anomaly. Moreover, it causes your online identity to undergo a rhetorical mutation that determines the boundaries of reality, and, through this reformatting, generates a new area of exchange. Such is how immanent contradictions acquire the power endowed with enough flexibility and depravity to overturn all system architectures.

Control requires time. Capitalist debt contracting restructures the capital-time cycle as well as the labour process on the commodity-space-time scale. By restricting the time interval required in order to recover the historical potential of labour, that state of things turns its revolutionary potential into some sort of digital asset surety. Too frail to be integrated into the decentralised financial war, the labour dynamic, incapable of actually turning into a revolutionary subject or becoming radicalised at the commodity level, loses its historical dimension. Standard-defining sets of ideas unable to repel democracy interfere with the flow of time by focusing on the alpha-historical-economic essence of politics. The meaning of politics here is ambivalent in economic terms. The adaptation of cybernetic states to cosmic mega-machines locks up the NPC labour force, eschewing adherence to a coherent social struggle, in the irremediable void of the machine-temporal cause and effect cycle. That is being represented through habits that are impossible to map by revolutionary means.This mega-company proves incapable – as Marx predicted – of rendering the working class superfluous by leveraging the mechanisation process, brought to such a point where it rivals labour. The time machinery which disregards humans’ economic response duration, and defines its own stance as an alpha being exclusively out of consideration for its own “standard machine time”, inverts the function of value in every single respect: the machine not only physically, but also mentally and perceptually repudiates human labour and, as a self-sustaining construct, generates a model where time can be stretched in view of procedural priorities.

Now, accretion has been forcefully brought to the point of being injected into this techno-economic assemblage point. Now, a monopolistic destiny emerges, wherein the money-commodity cycle is relegated to the background. Operational identity is being replaced by an organic body that takes no notice of either social or historical possibilities. By fashioning this body into an object and, in doing so, severing it from its social relations, the machine-temporal cause and effect chain has succeeded in making it comply with its own “standard time”. By becoming a conditional part of the machine-temporal cycle, virtual barter has instigated an era where human labour and social relations will become even further dispelled. The very moment when you begin to choose between things, that is, the moment when you begin to pick one item over another one, congeneric to it, you allow the latent “political” consequences of that object to become responsive. Time (as a financial rupture created by this response) ceases to be a mere measuring tool, and instead turns into a flow, determined by specific paradigms. Thus, economic and social constructs may be redesigned in line with machine-time’s standards, and labour may lose its sense within this new temporal arrangement. This rules out the Marxist politico-economic definition of commodity as pertaining to the plane of social relationships formed between isolated individuals, referring to the whole of fetish goods produced for the purpose of exchange. In other words, the notion of commodity as a difference, and even as the difference between various preferences, theoretically triggers the fetish production network initially set in motion by customers, and upturns the classical economics recipe, according to which no good can be produced without labour. This imaginary production apparatus, perpetuating its own existence as the ruling power within the time infrastructure, set in motion along with all those of its modules that are freed from their own cause and effect cycles, this viral-ecosystem, reorganising itself within its own commodity-space-time, is not directly related to the capital generated by means of the conditions of production, or, in the most banal sense of the world, to exchange, global trade, or the self-commodifying capitalist division of labour. As a marketing tool, simulative trade entirely redefines consumption habits anew. Thereby, it further dismisses labour, and ruins the traditional relationship that binds it with time. This inward-bound circularity enables the “self-reinforcing capitalistic diagram” to identify which products are the most convenient. As this method is being implemented, the redesigning of these goods soon becomes a natural objective. Besides, by exchanging certain goods, you may also extend their economic life and cause technological deflations. Viral-exchange is the monopoly-engineering reconstruction of this diagram. Once capitalist restoration turns commodities into procedural cycles, their constructional monopolies form your market-oriented public goods partnership. Ideological obsessions couple public goods and corporations with hyperstitious institutions, stuck to such resources by the Thatcher illusion, by means of a techno-commercial synthesis; they condense them in such a way that they consider only their interests, and thus capitalist assets turn into the value-form of those “institutional slots” (or parallel egoistic realities and practices).

Microeconomic shocks are yet another superpower of capital. These random effects serve to turn your political agency into a reproduction that mimics your image. It emulates your authentic actions and, in the meantime, ensures that their political forms, that is, identities, are integrated into a simple, superficial spatial dimension.The capitalist ecosystem has turned each of these identities into as many historical parasites. Thanks to the irreversibility of investment, what is known as political praxis now bounds your political compass to the production of a destiny. The transitory economic policies that represent your modes of living and channel what, where, how and when you ought to do what you do, can now ensure that both “learning” architectures and a digital spiral pertaining to sub-optimal processes be trained in a “politically correct” way; in other words, this process can construct “its own reality” through either algorithms or procedural loops, or spread political rumours prompted by a sensory logic in line with empirical (and even algorithmic) experiences. This process, which refutes its own unconsciousness, is not evolving towards developing the consciousness of either pure-logical concept or reality. What fundamentally transforms these behaviours designs rational knowledge in compliance with specific representations and, thanks to an abstract-expressionist perception bootlegging which formally allows you to absorb lifestyles, generates new ways of thinking that reify the specific character of production, thus monopolising innovation and analogy (or logos as a semantic plait). The free market has operated, from the very onset, on a privileged system analysis, and that privileged model constitutes an isolated case of irreducible historicity. Thus, the symbolic privileged position of commodity, designed so that it lacks sustainability, is consolidated, and a vast number of goods become outmoded. By setting itself into motion, this techno-economic assemblage point models your ego at the formal level as an avatar of its own desire, and meshes with it. So long as incorrectly defined (that is to say, as long as it is not turned into a capitalist formation out of which you may generate political destiny), the state remains but a sum of subjective abstractions. Capital lies beyond this sophist desire for property. It is external to this desire.

The Relation Between Fictional and Real Value

In Y2K isometric games, when the artificial intelligence (AI) computed that its own defeat was inevitable, it would abandon the area it controlled in order to minimise its losses. The problem, obviously, concerns what to do with the remaining troops after such a retreat has occurred. As a matter of fact, this issue pertains to the sum of decision-making procedures: if the AI attempts to wait for a new unit to come, the player may occupy the area in question, and the conflict will resume, rested on the same balance of power. This means that as long as the AI does not behave as a unified subject, communicating with all other units in a comprehensive way, it remains miles away from causing any problematic situation regarding the aggregate decision. The capitalist neural network on the other hand is in no need of a leader in order to fight you. The system possessing no kernel that might be destroyed, most of its units will never surrender. Such a resistance cannot assume either a coherent battlefield or a consistent timeline. Its economic manifestation also poses a problem the opposite way, that is, with regard to how capital borrows from the future. The slightest doubt regarding the repayment of that debt is enough to destabilise the entire range of economic production and exchange. This economic dissolution also schedules the foreseeable limits of historical progress, and the rate at which technology will be reified. Thanks to there being a specific credit problem remaining to be solved, “political economy” keeps being considered a science. Thus, while capital becomes empirical, value keeps being generated in a chaotic, unrealised space-time that possesses its own cyclical product: a sort of anti-climax process, of equilibrium, or stasis, or even of capitalist stability, is constantly associated with its own development process. As long as you do not distance yourself enough from the elementary, technical elements of existence or reality, the basic framework remains unchanged. The translation of your everyday life into distinctive procedural processes ensures that your actions, what you eat, drink, and feel satisfied by, become reactive. That procedure also enables you to translate fictionality into a design for action. Human capital, which now resorts to an interface that determines how, as a social delusion, it should experience those commodities that have been redesigned, is turned into a global debt contracting network; thus, your daily habits begin to result in constant budgetary deficit.

These debt contracting networks routinely administer the financial resources of states, companies and individuals alike, and utilise their property rights as leverage in order to contract further credit. By utilising their possessions as a debt contracting instrument, companies and governments are capable of drawing capital, and ensuring economic security. That sequence of events increases the financial value of property and enhances economic stability. However, the tacit agreement that customarily holds between political groups is currently gradually disintegrating. The odds that your ideological obsessions should be allowed unrestrained freedom and, as they break new ground and invent new subjectivities, begin tilting at windmills, are nowhere near far-fetched anymore. Any conception of politics cast out of the capitalist diagram inevitably steps on such a landmine as either emulating or rediscovering (which is to say, reiterating) the consolidating models of expression of capitalist entities, in turn protracting the logic of lost roots. Conspiracist, fascist, para-political, anti-statist capitalists; leftism – or “revolutionary activity” – as a fractal impetus. Twenty years ago, such a phrase sounded merely annoying. Today, on the other hand, the consequences of the collapse that it has wreaked have pushed misery-spreading revolution fragments towards a whole new, pre-capitalist resistance.Ultimately, this is a quaggy thesis, heralding a supposedly brand-new equilibrium by granting everything the status of institutional nothingness, while avoiding to disclose its true consequences: the most exhilarating of beginnings, civilisation itself, the super-adaptive time spirit, has stationed itself outside the atmosphere, on a distant orbit, and thus no longer needs to withdraw.

The system now draws credits on the basis of your property security. Beyond guaranteeing economic and social security, its borrowing strategy, destabilising property rights, constitutes yet another new skill in the capitalist talent tree panoply, the super-advantage within the trade perks system. Modernity and nanotechnology both possess a fundamental propensity to magic numerology and magic squares resting on specific formulae. This esoteric mind frame may help you escape from primitive reality. However, it is imperative that the fundamental distinction (applying to the market’s structural design) between the misleading descriptive language of empirical capital and an institutional entity (that is, a magical diagram) be observed. Transforming fiction into an operational model’s structural design in order to enable a causal uniformity to arise may provide epistemological coherence regarding the operation or process’s genesis. The market indeed bears the mark of a design, which paves the way for both the loss and affordance of empirical reality. The very instant you rebut the magic braces of the company’s operational model, its entire operational identity crumbles as a result. This is the very reason why capitalist networks utilise property rights as a debt contracting tool. For instance, assets such as real estate, stocks and so on are utilised as surety in order to generate loans. This enables property to be turned not only into a guarantee, but a financial illusion on the other hand as well. As long as you avoid explaining to each and everyone what is “A” and what is “B”, the structure of A (here, let us accept A as presumptive common interests) remains fundamentally dispersible. On the other hand, when A is fictionally put into practise, it turns B into the real components of these fictional entities (here, let us – still – call B money for the time being, and assume that it dialectically contains the M-C-M’ cycle). Insofar as these fictional entities determine the entire actual space, A begins to be perceived as being just as real as B. In other words, these fictional entities entirely instantiate a space which you are actually convinced is not fictional. Such cultural stratification may be represented with various diagrams. For instance, A encompasses instructions concerning the de facto protection of property rights, while B does others regarding how (read: at what costs) these property rights are being protected. Now, you are faced with two options. Let us first assume that, in the face of such a chain of events, you should display a blind commitment to interpreting the way these events unfold. This strict adherence to a traumatic command is actually the result of an obsession for interpreting everything. An interpretation that operates as a semitic target, and even as the ultimate upholder of the logic that drives the sequence of events, is fit to define the market’s atmospheric pressure (outside of which capital hovers, as though a satellite), and to politicise it. Here, the market’s atmospheric pressure acts as an umbrella.Because in both cases, it remains unclear whether the sequence of events is being accepted or whether only specific sublimated findings are being referred to. In other words, either your experiencing a conspiracist kinship with the course of events (for instance, it is hard to identify a formal difference between 9/11 deniers and sports commentary) or your beginning to interpret it as the outcome of a sub-plot, appertaining to a larger “subdued” plan, remains, in essence, a compromise. Because the former interpretative sympathy is, by definition, impossible; your individual image is missing in the course of events. As for the latter interpretation of events as a sub-text, all it does is conceal that deficiency.