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Infrastructure As Critique 2044 2045 ŠUM Revija Za Kritiko Sodobne Umetnosti Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism Št

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Infrastructure As Critique 2044 2045 ŠUM Revija Za Kritiko Sodobne Umetnosti Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism Št Infrastructure as Critique 2044 2045 ŠUM revija za kritiko sodobne umetnosti journal for contemporary art criticism št. / n. 15 Infrastruktura kot kritika Infrastructure as Critique IZDAJATELJ / PUBLISHED BY Društvo Galerija Boks Marije Hvaličeve 14 1000 Ljubljana UREDNIK ŠTEVILKE / ISSUE EDITOR Maks Valenčič UREDNIKA REVIJE / JOURNAL EDITORS Tjaša Pogačar, Andrej Škufca AVTORJI BESEDIL / AUTHORS Ash Milton, Zoë Hitzig, Maks Valenčič, Glen Weyl, Jaya Klara Brekke, George Papam, Menni Aldo, Pierce Myers OBLIKOVANJE / DESIGN Jaka Neon PRELOM / LAYOUT DESIGN Nika Lapkovski LEKTORIRANJE / PROOFREADING Miha Šuštar TISK / PRINT Demat, d.o.o. DECEMBER 2020 ISSN SPLETNE IZDAJE / WEB EDITION: 2536-2194 ISSN TISKANE IZDAJE / PRINTED ISSUE: 2335-4232 [email protected] · www.sumrevija.si Izšlo s podporo koprodukcijske mreže in Mestne Občine Ljubljana – Oddelek za kulturo. Šum is supported by the coproduction network and the Department of Culture at the Municipality of Ljubljana. 2045 CONTENTS EDITORIAL Ash Milton EVERY FIRM IS A PLANNED ECONOMY 2053 Zoë Hitzig OPTIMIZE THIS! 2064 Maks Valenčič WHEN YOU KNOW YOU'RE WINNING: AN INTERVIEW WITH GLEN WEYL 2081 Jaya Klara Brekke CRYPTOPOLITICS—AN UPDATE 2098 George Papam and Menni Aldo REWRITING THE EARTH AS PRAXIS: GREEN TOTEMISM, ACTUALLY-EXISTING-GEOENGINEERING, AND THEIR OVERCOMING 2119 Pierce Myers MIAMI 2138 2049 MAKS VALENČIČ EDITORIAL Whenever we are talking about planning, we are talking about in- frastructure as critique. What we have in mind here was best en- capsulated in a diagram1 Pierce Myers posted on Instagram. In it, he swapped the left vs right axis with emergent distributional communism vs planned hyper-capitalism—in other words, he combined various supposedly contradictory elements and made a convincing case for how the battle between communism and capi- talism will take place in the 21st century. On the one hand, Myers switched the emphasis from Soviet-led central planning to a decen- tralised cybernetic version of it, and on the other, shifted from ne- oliberal consensus of market efficiency and equilibrium to mecha- nism design and the new role of economist-as-engineer. What this diagram does best, then, is that it decodes the idea of what com- munism and capitalism as two different models actually are, and thereby challenges the various preconceptions of what is efficient and necessary in the current system. This enables us to think differently about ideology as well. As Mckenzie Wark wrote2 in Molecular Red: Theory for the Antropo- cene: “Ideologies are not so much ‘false consciousness’ as the ‘true’ limited consciousness of particular modes of organization.” The same can be said in relation to planning or infrastructure as cri- tique. We can put forth a different measurement of ideology, where ideology is measured as the ability of a group or a collective to pur- sue and implement different societal mechanisms that increase the degree of societal complexity and the ability of self-determination. If this sounds abstract, let us give a further example from Radi- calxChange founder Glen Weyl. In a rather Marxist-Spinozist way, Weyl points out various internal inconsistencies3 between capital- 1 See: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8ZalfkFbx_/. 2 Verso, 2016, p. 46. 3 “The Political Philosophy Of RadicalxChange”, RadicalxChange, 19/12/2019, ht t p s :// b lo g. radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/2019-12-30-gqx4th/. 2049 ŠUM #15 ism and its own theory: what he suggests is to critique capitalism at its very roots, through the parameters capitalist economists take for granted, but which don’t actually lead to the benefits sup- posedly characteristic of a capitalist society. What all of this tells us is that planning (or infrastructure as critique) is not primarily about planning at all, since it can, for example, mean less planning. It’s not about the management of X-risk, systemic surveillance or even better resource allocation, but about exposing alternative narratives and capabilities (mean- ing: inter-systemic speculations) that were intentionally or unin- tentionally not pursued or left behind. Planning has this primor- dial excess, as it always includes a completely different view of the world and expresses the changing relationship between matter and society or between ideas and the physical world. Simply put, planning is in fashion again, but for different reasons as it has been in the past. Every time we plan, we make visible what was previously hidden. We mine the history of ideas and denatural- ise various assumptions and conclusions, which could not have been addressed without the new emphasis on infrastructure as critique. Planning is therefore a toolkit for realising new (and al- ready present) futures, just as the film screen is a canvas for alter- native histories, such as the first Moon landing by a Russian and not American astronaut, or the existence of multi-world fascism on a cosmic level. There is, of course, a difference between a descriptive or prescriptive take on planning, and also between infrastructure as critique within and outside the system. Because planning has this speculative dimension in both of these forms, it can challenge the status quo of a given society, even if it’s embroiled in all the dirty mechanisms as well. The best example of this is the crypto world: despite its absolutely capitalist way of planning, it radical- ly challenges the neoliberal consensus and produces an opening in its stead. Jaya Klara Brekke formulated4 this predicament in a very clear and insightful manner: “This suggests that even the metallist monetary ideas that Golumbia traces to anti-central bank right wing ideology (2016), is to some extent motivated by an ambition to resolve political economic questions through infra- structure … Rather than an entrenched affiliation to neoliberal economics, the economies and economics of Bitcoin, blockchain, DLT and cryptoeconomics are better understood as efforts to- 4 “Hacker-engineers and Their Economies: The Political Economy of Decentralised Networks and ‘Cryptoeconomics’”, in: New Political Economy, 12/8/2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10 .1080/13563467.2020.1806223. 2050 2051 ŠUM #15 MAKS VALENČIČ wards engineering particular kinds of network behaviours, and achieving specific information security properties.” We could therefore say that planning is, in its essence, post-critical. To quote Weyl: “The key point is that if you want to undermine a system, the most powerful way to do it is using its own internal logic.” To criticize a system in a way that, through accelerating its underlying foundations, leads to a logically con- sistent conclusions that subvert the existing model from within. In this sense, each system has its own Black Hole image that acts traumatically and a Copernicus that looks at the stars. And it’s safe to say that something similar is happening in the post-cov- id-19 world, where the sedatives from the capitalist realism era are slowly wearing off and the new paradigmatic shift in knowl- edge production is taking place. As Reza Negarestani said, “con- sciousness is hard work” and maybe, just maybe, this unexpected pandemic hit will prepare us for the truly distributed problems and challenges we will face as a society when hyperobjects start to bomb the Earth. But when this happens, we will, thanks to the emphasis on infrastructure as critique, already have our values set differently, optimize for something else, set our parameters more holistically, know the necessity of governance futurism and embrace the need for smart visual culture. 2051 2052 2053 ASH MILTON EVERY FIRM IS A PLANNED ECONOMY Did you ever hear about the future? Maybe you even remember it yourself. It lived for a brief moment, somewhere between the Soviet Union’s death and Mi- crosoft’s rise. Young Muscovites were becoming day traders in- stead of party apparatchiks, and Gorbachev was eating1 Pizza Hut. A world order of markets and democratic freedom was in full swing. The new frontier lay in a borderless, anonymous in- ternet. The great powers, the multinational conglomerates, and the panopticon security agencies? All were on the brink of being felled by decentralization, disruption, and tech-driven liberation. Free and sovereign individuals were walking out of the wreckage of the 20th century. Liberatory visions of the future have left strong echoes throughout our culture. The dystopian Blade Runner images which have replaced them seem more like the result of a griev- ing process, rather than a real acceptance of utopianism’s death. But the technologies which drove those images of the future have not died. The result is extreme dissonance between the future we were promised and the one in which we live. Much of Silicon Valley pop ideology—whether cypherpunk, or the various iterations of libertarianism—is nominally suspi- cious of centralized power. Cryptocurrency was embraced as a 1 “Pizza Hut Gorbachev TV Spot Commercial”, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg- m14D1jHUw&ab_channel=TomDarbyshire. 2053 ŠUM #15 way to escape the coming collapse of central banking. Geographic escapism has always been popular as well, in the forms of seast- eading, charter cities, or residences in New Zealand. The irony, of course, is that digital power has accelerated nearly every trend which this attitude should theoretically op- pose. Both great powers and great firms are able to monitor pop- ulations like never before—for the world-shakers like Amazon, Facebook, or China, that amounts to hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. Communications, content, or the ability to sell goods may be decentralized and more accessible, but the individ- ual person has been made legible like never before. The only ob- stacles are how to properly analyze and use the enormous amount of information which commerce, security, and other aspects of daily life now make available. The same logic has played out in other forms of decentral- ization. Rather than free cities or autonomous communities, we have special economic zones.
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