On Companies

Since no electoral politics could focus on such boring topics, the politics in question must be carried out through companies engaged, first, to advance lawsuits of particular types, and, then, to use the same means to target fraud all along the lines of the judicial and legal establishment. This means finding good judges, channeling cases toward them and leveraging the results of those cases to get more good judges. A political arena focused on establishing such things as what is to count as a lie, what is harmful to one’s reputation, what counts as an attempt to deceive, how should we judge the distance between a particular utterance and a particular violent act, etc., would be far more civilized than the politics we have now.

Such a system of crisscrossing lawsuits would itself, without the assistance of the state, build up extensive tracking and tracing machinery—those expecting others to defame or incite against them will be recording not only speech and writing but movements and associations; the specter of such lawsuits will lead people to take out insurance against them, and insurance companies will likewise want extensive records of the doings of everyone even vaguely associated with possible cases. The condition of the leader of an organization who has to run every statement past legal will become the general condition and this will also mean that genuinely truth-telling individuals who can successfully defeat lawsuits against them will come across as especially free, uninhibited, and trustworthy—and enormously admirable.

And each plank is a prefiguration of a comprehensive replanking, as a single sample includes the all. And the sovereign companies, which tokenize arbitration, I’ve proposed repeatedly could serve as patrons of the arts and sciences as they would in turn help provide the data those companies need to grow themselves, one plank at a time, into the central intelligence, and central intelligence would entail routing the linguistic drift of names into data distributions that help settle cases.

Not only is this not fragmentation but it makes the emptiness at the center, the carnivalesque replacement and behind the scenes arranged succession at the center, increasingly untenable because agencies will need to be able to range freely across all the disciplinary spaces and the meta-disciplinary spaces and protect and ascertain data security. And this will break up the existing forms of sovereignty, except insofar as some of them can transition into data security companies competitive with other data security companies on the field of providing vital assurances to other companies and institutions that their own data will stand the strictest juridical scrutiny.

The winners of this competition, those companies that supply the most reliable data security services will end up exercising new modes of authority with the fee for their services resembling the tributes paid by subjects to monarchs as sovereignty relinquishes all of the bureaucratic trappings that made it appear an indispensable and immovable machine, returning them to what sovereignty has always been—the largest property owner, establishing and presiding over the nomos. And there will always be competition, since data can never be completely monopolized once and for all (your own work at securing data produces more data), but there is reason to believe this competition will remain “meritocratic” since trying warfare would assume you already had a decisive data advantage but if you had that why would you need war?

The first part is the hardest, as it overturns several hundred years of entrenchment and would arouse the ideological suspicions of the entire debt-ordered world (forming companies that could bring capitalism increasingly within the law, in particular as we approach its outer limits in the outside spread, are of the highest priority, as these would also be very innovative tech companies). Right now, the US is defending the debt-ordered world organized around the dollar and Treasury bonds and this requires escalating military supremacy (but for that reason not necessarily escalating military action). This is only sustainable if it translates into accelerating industrialization within the US core, first of all the US itself, of course, but also transnationally through what we might see as a kind of internalization of multipolarity.

In such an ordering, credit would increasingly be directed in advance, called upon, for longer term state aligned projects and grounded in what would ultimately be data security companies whose exchanges of data would eventually supplant currency. The coordination problem money was originally invented to solve would be solved in such a way as to phase out money while making it possible for many in the credit-offering section of the governing class to transition into other managerial and planning positions. Oscillations are thereby recouped within fields of succession around which cluster juridical and disciplinary scenes answering questions that come from what will increasingly be stage-managed, not in the sense of fake “psyops” but of induced collisions between different paths that might be taken from wherever we are now, disputes at various levels of the expectant scene.

Fit the category as best you can while scrambling the terms of the category so that it oscillates between recognizing you and failing to do so. Be the GAN you want to see in the world. Make your selving a public process, raising the question of whether you are the same, and under what scenic configuration it would be slightly more likely than not for some “average” cataloguer to say you are the same. A company that helps you blockchain your idioms for advanced petitioning practices might build databases out of the latest research in AI, singling out terms of varying degrees of specialized use and obscurity to recoin as descriptions of selving.

we'll all have much bigger problems than antisemitism anyway. Follow the model of these little law firms that focus on suing and building cases against terrorists and their sponsors and scale them up to include defamation, incitement, negligence of governments protecting

But by the same token, these various branchings and streamings out of intelligence involve contracting out for services, from firms with more advanced technology or interpretive sophistication. So, there is already something like a market here insofar as there is competition over who is going to be assetized or deputized by the central intelligence and if the director of central intelligence governs then whoever at the moment has tied together the most strings of clean data will be governing, i.e., will be central intelligence, regardless of titles. We’d have to assume some threshold past which a particular company becomes the location of the central intelligence simply because it has in turn provided intelligence to the juridical and disciplinary institutions responsible for producing the necessary data in the first place—that is, whoever learns and tells the truth most reliably acquires a monopoly.

Capitalism can only be transcended by forming companies which discount against expected future earnings foundationally, by charter, beyond the life span of anyone running the company. The problem is forming what would be permanent companies which can pay dividends, of course (people have to live), but, kind of like the endowments of universities serve more as collateral for taking loans to maintain operations. Only various kinds of data security companies, based on one or another mode of the preservation of knowledge, capacities, information, technological, archeological, philological, biological, and so on, could fit the bill.

Companies that require extended terms of deferral so that knowledge only adumbrated by current research provides the goal of the company. And ultimately what makes it possible for such companies to survive is providing valuable services to the central intelligence, which provides services to all the other institutions. In the end, central intelligence will be a kind of rotation or “head of the joint chiefs of staff” of these companies. To put it bluntly, the state very much needs all those kinds of knowledge I listed above, along with many others, and once the knowledge gets organized and imperative-issuing to the point of algorithmic governance you have something other than the state.

If you are not in a position to found and maintain such a company, then you can act as if you might one day be employed by or contribute to one, and donate your resentments to the central intelligence in the forms of the continuing unfolding data of your existence.

The token issuing institution might then be signing onto the charters issued by the center, committing to issuing a certain line of credit. All the time we are pushing towards the subscription and token issuing system I have referred to many times, going back to the GABlog, in which networks of suppliers maintain the chains tying them altogether with each company or team holding the “right” (really, the ability) to exercise outside options with their suppliers or recipients—“usurpation” is internalized as part of the transfer translation of “free market” operations to the subscription and monopolistic order. Conflicts are possible at each point along the supply chain and in each act of interference in the other’s charter and the juridical order will be shaped to settle those disputes. Again, the focus is on each party’s use and repayment of the credit issued in terms of the charter, which represents a particular configuration of “needs” and “abilities.”

Also, despite the centrality of the juridical, it has never been more than a carve-out within the ritual, as a way of regulating distribution and hence preserving the nomos. We can’t, though, consider the abolition of resentment, which would therefore require some other mode of expression and settlement. We would have to think about judgment being completely brought into existing institutions within the subscription system, and the subscription system being made to cover all territory and all activity (as is already really the case, albeit in haphazard ways). So, street crime is not some public issue but a problem for whichever security firm runs the city, or a particular part of it, subscribed to be the various businesses and residents.

I have in mind Balaji’s “Network State” and other proposals (whatever happened to Moldbug/Yarvin’s old “patchwork” idea?) but, following my recent inquiries, would start more “traditionally,” with extending, perhaps most fundamentally, models of insurance to their limits, making them transgenerational, even eternal. Insurance is creating models of the human—the human as extended, against shoals of risk and reward, across decades, even centuries of the just barely but sufficiently predictable to lay down some markers of futurity; insurance is anthropomorphics, as we, in accord with Peirce’s magnificent prophecy, all become insurance companies.

Just think of all the requirements an insurance company meaning to cover you and your descendants over the next two centuries would lay down, in terms of provisions you would be expected to make for yourself and therefore many of us for each other. What would we have to build, what kinds of research into health care and longevity, what designs of cities, environmental programs, etc.—maybe even a certain degree of fertility could be mandated to ensure payments would be maintained. Over time insurance might be morphed into various kinds of “companions,” built around and into us in a further anthropomorphic increment and calls by various teams upon the most promising students across the educational systems.

Center study’s “telos” is to restore this on the vastly expanded scale of the stack of scenes, and this involves the tokenization of deferral and exchange in what I have been calling “pedagogical futures.” At some point, this must involve something like a political party issuing currency, i.e., credit, and establishing institutions that would enhance that credit by organizing people in such a way that they would be better able to maintain it. Since organizing such enterprises around existing political parties—certainly in the US but probably anywhere—could not be properly done and would in fact likely be illegal in various ways, they must first be located in companies adjunct to the government (central intelligence) which are in the business of converting assets into data, i.e., mapping out the existing credit system for the sake of simulation and prediction (“assets” really are issuances of credit, which can be drawn upon in accord with the legal provisions ensuring a reliable interplay of debt enforcement and forgiveness—and let me mention here that if we wish to turn assets into data we might first need to generate a range of novel assets).

There’s nothing more important, and really nothing else than, imagining and building such companies. Such companies will seek to monopolize and thereby guarantee sources of credit, i.e., step further in from the precipice—they will make their debt the bank’s problem, so to speak. A lot of sabotage might be necessary along the way (we could think of sabotage as eliciting especially punitive debt enforcement on others) in order to get to the point where expected future earnings are projected well beyond the possibility of any sabotage, which also means beyond the cashing in of anyone alive or even their known descendants.

In a sense, then, center study takes sides in contemporary politics—it tries to impact credit, i.e., engage in sabotage, in accord with whether its preferred party is in power—but the real issue is ensuring credit flows to promising companies and keeping those companies promising by relying on data collection from institutions within juridically intact spaces and keeping those spaces juridically intact so as to feed their hunger for nutritious data. The simplest way in here (not to suggest here aren’t already promising companies) that I can think of is data collection and curation for the sake of large scale lawsuits for defamation and fraud, with the goal of making lying very costly (on this point I agree with Curt Doolittle, but this agreement may end—I genuinely don’t know—once I point out that not all human utterances can be classified as true or false because not all human utterances are solely declarative).

The leveraging of private companies to route around and surround the legislature is much more promising in this area. If you listen to Trump speak about NATO and the US’s relation to its allies, you can see he sees the US as essentially contracting out its superior military power to the Europeans, and he is appalled that we should have been doing this for free and at a loss for all these years. If the government becomes more like a protection agency, intelligence service and, even more, an insurance company (which, strictly speaking, it has been since the 1930s), then the availability of resources outside of those raised by taxes and controlled by Congress presents itself.

Those located at critical junctures in the stack of scenes could, of course, leverage the imperative chains available to them and speak much more directly and bluntly—preserving and enhancing the imperative order by using it regularly and consistently is also a mode of deferral: uncertainty in the chain of command is a significant source of rivalry, crisis and violence. All other utterances themselves have reference, at however many removes, from that imperative order, coming ultimately from the occupant of the center or, we might say, the “primearch.” The closer you are to an actionable chain of imperatives the more direct, explicit utterances are enactments of higher modes of deferral; conversely, the further one is from such a chain, the more demands, much less commands, become ridiculous, to be displaced in favor of utterances that might circulate as likely increments of deferral. But by now I’m at the point where this line of thinking needs to be instantiated in a company.

We can narrow the question down to the dual relation of the business monopoly to the state monopoly—the state monopoly will sometimes leverage and delegate responsibility to the business monopoly and sometimes consider it a competitor, powerful enough to align itself with other states or interfere with the state’s relation to its subjects. This might mean that a good way to transform the state is by having monopolies supplement and eventually redistribute the adopted functions of the state and thereby reduce it to its core functions, with the state now just another monopoly. If we’re thinking outside of liberalism we’re thinking outside of the state (and sovereignty), but there does need to be something like a tendency toward a monopoly on data security, upon which other essential governing functions like justice and insurance depend.

Every institution sees to its own data security, and let’s reduce those institutions to the juridical, the financial, the stack and the disciplines. There are areas of incommensurability of data across these institutions but also areas of transferability and translatability. There are interfaces articulating them all with each other, modes and degrees of reciprocal infiltration, and protocols governing all of these. Here is where a specifically data security monopoly enters into it: the financial system needs to be certain that disputes can be settled reasonably, the layers of the stack need to be certain of credit and liquidity, all areas need to be sure that the pedagogy and research undertaken in the disciplines is geared toward determining “what will prove to be the case in the long run,” and so on.

All companies in these sectors will need to hire other companies to provide such assurances and it is my hypothesis here that the companies they hire will ultimately form a single company, capable of handling data transactions across the board. That’s the residue of what we now call the state. And the monopoly data security firm will prefer to deal with other companies that are as close to being themselves monopolies as possible—it will certainly feel no need to break up companies once they reach some ill-defined monopolistic threshold.

The entire “economy,” then, or the paying down of the debt to the center, is operationalized through teams communicating with teams: the companies in the supply chain are also comprised of people at the end of the supply chain—those who deliver steel are also those who buy cars, and teams can look out for their own members. This would leave the problem of those ill-suited to any team, but that problem is hardly unique to this system—if anything, it can be addressed more straightforwardly. And we can identify a specific mechanism that replaces the market in exchanging information across monopolized teams: what I would call “controlled usurpations.”

If one monopoly is dissatisfied with the performance of someone on the credit line or supply chain then the head of that team/monopoly can cultivate a relationship with a subordinate within that other monopoly and sustain him as (to reference Drumm again) the “outside option.” All the companies in some proximity to each other on the supply chain or credit line would be leveraging such potential usurpers; needless to say, this is all conducted non-violently, and we don’t even have to assume whispering, defamation or smear campaigns because we still presuppose a data security monopoly (itself subject to such external leveraging) that is vetting information to be leveraged against another company.

We could then see the precise boundary between deterrence and reprisal, on one side, and collaboration on the other side—signs indicating the initiation of hostilities could be seen to become signs indicating the initiation of some project in shared governance, and all this shown on something like a big ticker. A prediction market might be established accordingly, in which even those betting on war would contribute to peace by detecting interference with the conversion of retaliatory tendencies into modes of deferral. Think about this passage from a [recent post](https://ericjacobus.com/2024/03/31/the-roba-chip-a-pi-sized-ai-model/) by Eric Jacobus:

If there were to be a way of evading the juridical, the stack of scenes would be the place to look, because juridical decisions can, in fact, be automated, and so one might imagine this could be done “all the way down.” Perhaps, for example, rather than arresting violent criminal offenders, putting them on trial, incarcerating them, giving them parole hearings, letting them out on parole, policing them for parole violations, etc., institutions, companies and other establishments would record, through surveillance devices, transgressive behaviors, with those records shared across all institutions. Institutions would establish risk assessment and tolerance protocols which, past a certain threshold, would trigger the exclusion of individuals from those institutions, rendering them unable to participate in society, i.e., get jobs, go shopping, use banks, etc.

The prediction market proposed by Thirdness aims at achieving learncoin through a carefully curated market, to serve as a model for other markets, to ultimately get to the point where the tacit assumptions ungirding the market and supported by its makers can become increasingly explicit so as to become something other than a market: a form of ledgering directly interfacing with singularized succession in perpetuity. I’ve been presenting this prediction market as involving a bet on the results of a process of inquiry conducted by a trained team transparent in its theoretical assumptions and reliance on available data so that a decision grounded in real uncertainty between two very clearly delineated and equally likely options will result from further inquiry carried out between the time of posting the options and making the decision.

This is true, but as the boundary between those whose actions are bet upon and those doing the betting is permeable and meant to become more so, those participating in the market are really betting on their own decision processes: you come to think, once I do a really deep dive here, how might things look different to me? As you come to think this way within the confines of the Thirdness market, you come to think this way more generally, and apply the justice logic of reasoning to every choice, as every choice can most effectively be framed as one between competing claimants. Even you, yourself, are an ongoing process of settling accounts between competing claimants—this is a modification of Charles Sanders Peirce’s assertion that we are each of us an insurance company, because what would insurance companies be without independent arbiters of some kind? There then ensues competition between differing layers of the Thirdness team to make the bets better by making the decisions more nuanced and therefore less predictable, so that there remains something to bet on.

Thirdness then has a direct interest in the development of the Stack as a system of data collection and preparation and will be running askew of the originary distribution which is now, and increasingly, a matter of allocating licenses to secure financizable monopolies on knowledge. Thirdness counters the partitioning and parceling of the imperative of the center by creating new forms of adjudication that can transfer financialization and intellectual property to preliminary versions of learncoin, that is, companies that create conditions of succession. Judgments are always judgments on the continuity of the nomos or originary distribution which must be protected from judicial vendettas or lawfare by creating spaces of power as judgment.

The data exchange therefore involves actions that bear a family reference to such legal concepts as “penalty,” “incarceration,” “damages,” “liability,” and so on, while shifting attention to the operationalization of these concepts through the stack. Actors are encouraged by the judgments in question to respond in a voluntary and deliberative way, activating higher level of agencies, while the ledgers built into the stack will record those actions in increasingly comprehensive and granular ways—your actions will be your own, but escape from their consequences will be increasingly impossible. This doesn’t mean being “doomed” forever by some bad decisions but, rather, providing for transparency regarding those decisions and the kinds of decisions that would be needed to pay some of the interest on the originary debt thereby accrued.

Determined how, in that case? We need to answer this question in such a way as to operate within, infiltratingly, capitalism, as well as to indicate post-capitalist (and decidedly non-communist) directions. Here is where the notion of making markets, and in particular prediction markets, which have come into my thinking via Thirdness, adds something to SSIP. We assume a world of closely knit reciprocal subscribers supply chaining each other. New suppliers need to able to enter the game so as to provide the necessary mimetic tension (competition) for existing suppliers; those new suppliers can be from other teams redirecting some of their capacities to a new line of production or from teams within the team being elevated within a renewed capacity.

This set up is not all that distant from current arrangements where, at least in the stories academic institutions tell themselves, employers are looking for certain qualities in their employees and universities can make themselves attractive to students by providing them with those qualities. It’s as if companies were to take a more direct role in assessing curricula and pedagogies and acquiring “rights” to students through contractual arrangements with the universities—a horrifying prospect under today’s conditions, but not at all if we are imagining teams whose explicit purpose is always to surface some new human capacity within the stack of scenes—our whole replacement of the “economic” system presupposes a comprehensive and socially sanctioned and sanctified apprentice system.

We create more informal prediction markets whenever we frame conversations in terms of equally moral but consequentially different decisions emerging from a single event. This is when we get interested in, curious about and immersed in another’s deliberations, rather than being anxious over whether they will fall short of our expectations. You pursue their moral reasoning by narrowing down their decision to a 50/50 chance so that something that is only noticed as a result of the reasoning determines the decision and a new idiom is created. You can frame decisions at a lower moral level in these terms as well—the one considering betraying his friend doesn’t really want to betray his friend; you can simply assume this as a fulcrum point in the conversation and insist that he’s really, say, exploring possibilities rooted in his history so as to refine his moral thinking.

The idioms of singularity, meanwhile, convert all cases into selections of successors and it is this that bends the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center towards succession in perpetuity: to decide a case is to appoint, even if in the abstract, someone to superintend its enforcement. It’s the way you would think in building a company that is meant to last forever, to incorporate all other companies, to issue its own currencies and create spheres of justice among its actual and potential yet to be incorporated partners: the ever more finely tuned medium of the juridical is the means of conveying the imperative of the center.

The Thirdness team, for its part, acts according to the logic of the bookie, who establishes odds or a point spread that evens the bets on both sides, allowing for a guaranteed profit through the vig. But this kind of prediction market also suggests a new mode of thinking, and therefore a new mode of writing, predicated on searching out the 50/50 in every topic of conversation, every referent, every propositional claim. This is an idiomatic logic—speak only of the 50/50, and continue your discourse by spreading the 50/50 through all the implications of the starting point of your discourse.

The title of this post is a proposed name for this company which would aim at putting itself out of business and transitioning into becoming a governing agency, part of a larger security system. It would create a new market for anti-leftist and just adventurous lawyers, and for the disciplines, from laboratory to textual analysis. It will give new direction to the humanities, the originary vocation of which, I would say, is authenticating texts and accounting for their provenance (which by now would mean the way any given text is a product of a large pool of intentions interacting with generic conventions, literary traditions, the economics and politics of publishing and so on, going back as far as necessary), now invigorated by corpus-searching technology and the study of automatically generated texts.

In fact, the kind of company I’m proposing here would privilege security firms, in particular those concerned with data security, over those kinds of “late industrial age” corporations more likely to spill chemicals into rivers (or fill fast foods with poison), so that it would be possible to take action against the latter.

This can be (hypothetically) operationalized through the (hypothetical) Thirdness apparatus. We have here a prediction market, where what is predicted is the judgment to be rendered on actual or potential conflicts articulated as cases. We don’t want to issue odds, so we try and construct cases so as to be as close to even as possible which will often involve constructing cases around conflicts at the margins or what would ordinarily be taken to be the event in question: for example, rather than predicting the result of a trial, or even a would be trial, which will almost always weigh more towards guilty or not guilty, we might construct a case in which we imagine the plaintiff suing a media outlet for incitement for a particular claim about the case.

So far, I’ve been speaking of this as a bet one would lay down once a case is announced (with a time frame for the case to be studied and judgment rendered)—one is betting on one’s own greater discernment into the case, the knowledge base drawn upon and the intellectual habits of the team involved in rendering judgment. I consider this all to be critical “human capital” development of an unprecedented type. I’ve been thinking about these bets being made in conventional currencies, with tokens or coupons being issued that turn into a specifically Thirdness currency. Since Thirdness aspires to become the world company (either by taking over all other companies or being taken over by a company more capable of actualizing the Thirdness program), it imagines Thirdness currency becoming the only currency.

The equivalent of a community and network of patronage today would be a company designed to provide intelligence useful in proportion to one’s proximity to power and one’s commitment to making singular succession in perpetuity more likely and imminent. That is the institutional framework within which the asymptotically self-abolishing idioms of Thirdness can operate and proliferate. But this institutional framework itself needs to be organized so that discourse flows accountably into upper level decisions or decisions that could understudy upper level decisions—that is, the institution has to be a pipeline, an ongoing dress rehearsal for governance and intelligence operatives.

Start-ups are proto-empires, and mediators of governance, as Jews have always been, and are needed to propose and try out start-up forms of governance—Israel itself should be completely transformed into a start-up in governance, as part of inscribing the Jewish anomaly in a new approach to Jewish law that recognizes the partial abolition of the diaspora. Bringing the complexity of inquiries into and debates over Jewish law (which reach systematically into questions of technology and commerce in very distinctive ways that ask what particular arrangements do for a very specific purpose) into the network of surveillance and buffering of “pre-violent” movements would produce conversations worthy of those instructions for building the tabernacle in the desert.

Kinship would need to be tokenized in some way in spaces where sovereignty is loosened or lapsed, which means where sympathetic administrative insiders provide for such loosening and the licensing of intermediate private agencies. And this in turn requires the space for a new kind of company party—in the US, at least the Republican party might be targeted as a shell within which such a company/party can grow. Something like the much reviled (supposed) Chinese “social credit” is necessary here: whether you get into a particular school, get a particular job, are considered marriageable by a particular mate, acceptable as a homeowner within a particular community, etc., must be made to depend on whether you have drug addicts, criminals, or even unemployed in your extended family.

Begin with "affinity groups"—geneticists could develop criteria for degrees of genetic proximity and corporate entities could be established to create modes of exchange (reciprocal obligations) for different degrees of proximity. Within the inner circle of affinity you oblige yourself to engage in, say, crowdfunding for members of the group in demonstrated conditions of need—in exchange, of course, others are obliged to crowdfund for you when you need it. Dating/mating sites would be set up within affinity groups, shared business enterprises, etc. The boundaries of groups would be continually revised and refined in accord with scientific developments and changing demographics (there would be formal and informal rules regarding how far out of the group a new member can be accepted through marriage, or adoption for that matter).

It is true that monarchy is the only real form of governance—everything else is either mimicking monarchy or predicated on the endless struggle to prevent others from installing “their” king (the “tyrant”). But monarchy itself can take a lot of forms, so for the sake of inquiries into possibilities we need the concept of “singular succession” to include all that we want to in monarchy without restricting ourselves to forms of governance “similar” to known forms of monarchy. Let’s say a tech security firm with contracts from the military, intelligence agencies, etc., gets more and more of those contracts, incorporates more and more of the other security firms and tech companies, establishes protocols of interoperability across functions that make the government increasingly dependent on it; meanwhile, the government becomes increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt, sensationalized, i.e., a joke, but a frightening one (or eve, for that matter, just falls behind this company in terms of competency)—at a certain point, in some crisis, would not that security firm simply assume with general, even if tacit, consent, the attributes of sovereignty?

Would the CEO of that company be the king? A dictator? Let’s say that company directs, through friendly and remaining competent members of the official government—especially, I would think, the judiciary, which is far more likely than the legislative and executive branches to hold to its moorings—to go through the process of revising the constitution so as to make the transition from “liberal democracy” or “constitutional republic” to whatever we’re going to call this new form of government completely legal, and enable it to retain and reform whatever is still of use in existing institutions. There would be no reason to assume that this process will establish the position of “monarch.”

The final judge wants to foresee these possibilities to the extent possible and thereby prevent cases from emerging. We can think of the entire order as established to perfect juridical conditions so as to make recourse to them as rare as possible, and this becomes a motor for the entire system as it involves the creation of data systems that produce the knowledge needed to adjudicate potential cases which at this point involves all knowledge, physical and human. This, then, is what the “sovereign” is doing: using his own resources (whether we’re imagining a monarch who is also the largest property owner or our data-tech-security company that has acquired a functional monopoly and therefore great wealth and power over markets) to identify and pre-empt tendencies toward the recrudescence of the vendetta and the higher order vendetta involved in antinomianism.

Thirdness and Nomos/Class Action are both ways into blockchaining the center and we just have to go on creating other models, or prototypes, as Denisa Kera speaks of in her Algorithms and Automation . (To paraphrase William Carlos Williams, no ideas but in the companies themselves.) She wants a democratic model, based on rights, dialogue, participation, and so on, but we can treat all that as a series of demands to be input while sharing her interest in maximizing agency—not random agency of decentered, independent citizens, but duly appointed, anointed, assigned and delegated agencies positioned variously within the stack in accord with each’s need for data and ability to further shape that data for juridical and successionary purposes.

The company would serve as a kind of employment and talent agency for its clients, and as marketing for its partners. The company would give out something like “degrees,” with something like “grades,” which, much like the degrees and grades handed out by universities, would serve as tokens providing access to other institutions. At the center of it all is, of course, center study and the originary hypothesis, for which this like any other proposed prototype is a kind of advertisement and proof of concept. And this would require continual increasing precision in the identification of practices, and the exercises that enable and refine them.

The prototypes such a company would produce might include moot courts, trying out various ways of refining juridical scenes, film and theatrical productions, music, and so on, testing out ways of measuring the value or the “fit” of various talents (and their conditions of production) in actual or possible communities and institutions (and it’s easy to see the possible spin-offs of such enterprises). But it would also be a hub of scientific and technological innovation. We are again thinking of a kind of boundary between the capitalist, even ultra-capitalist, and the no longer quite capitalist order: betting, prediction markets, employment agencies, new currencies, investment inquiries; but, also, a space where well-being, learning and inquiry are ends in themselves—whether a new, qualitative enlargement of the nomos, not territorially but in terms of added layers of the stack, is possible along these lines would be one of the hypotheses placed on trial.

What that would look like today would be a pedagogical company which could begin modestly by providing a pathway for gifted young people to skip college and be prepared to work for, first of all, the most forward looking (pathfinding) data security companies, those who must be grooming themselves to assert sovereignty. Scientific and engineering education would, of course, be central, but the holism of the medieval university would be recalled as well and center study would provide the all-encompassing and open-ended (ever hypothetical) curriculum embracing the human and social sciences, and the physical sciences within them.

Even within this space, credit and debt bearing idioms must have their function—sheer reward and punishment is never enough to ensure that those you need to do X tomorrow will in fact do X tomorrow, if for no other reason that if reward and punishment are the only mechanisms of control there’s not even any way of knowing what will count as X. Someone must be able to say, “sure, I’ll get this done by next week,” be believed, and indeed get it done by next week. Any company to be built must occupy that space and enlarge it, and the only way I can think of enlarging it is by creating such spaces for others, which is to say by building a pedagogical space, which would also be a technological space, a modification of the stack of scenes such that the expectation of future actions and outcomes can be brought into closer correspondence with those actions and outcomes idiomatically than monetarily.

It's helpful to think about what and whom such a machine would be for, and it’s possible to be more precise about this now. Such a machine would be part of the officer class pedagogical company (let’s say: The New Officer Class Academy) discussed a couple of posts back and which would ravel up Fitness, Nomos/Class Action and Thirdness (with its strictly controlled predictions markets on judgments—which now, due to a suggestion from Eric Jacobus, I can see as a way of tokenizing deferral). Even more, building, maintaining, updating and deploying the machine might very well be the central, maybe in a sense, the sole, activity of the pedagogical company.

Everyone will eventually be working on the universal translation machine because everyone has worthwhile data to offer while at the same time the need to gather forces against antinomic vendettas means filters are created that allow only a few in for now: Nomos/Class Action will be part of the machinery for this very reason. Zack Baker’s tokenization of kingship argument provides an approach—those producing and handling data in more useful ways receiving tokens providing access to the subscription system the company builds with other companies, serving as currency. The translation machinery should be able to instantiate Alexander Good’s goal of using AI to predict the economy sufficiently well to invest successfully enough to, ultimately, govern.

There might be many firms offering judgments, perhaps specialized across separate fields, but I would hypothesize the emergence and perhaps continual re-emergence of a centralized data security firm that attains a temporary monopoly on treating data for purposes of judgment. That firm will exercise the closest thing to what we currently call “sovereignty.”

But there’s no reason any member of the highest governing bodies, even the head of the data security firm selecting his successor as hypothesized above, cannot be brought within the scope of judgment. I think it must be a willing submission, in which, for the period of judgment, the governor delegates to another the right to set succession, and such judgment must be taken to be somewhat extraordinary, establishing very precisely who might have claims and standing in this case. This might be something like a current prime minister calling for new elections, precisely in order to confirm his mandate. Perhaps pre-emptive rituals of judgment are incorporated into succession rituals, like the festivals of medieval Europe when power relations are temporarily reversed: an orderly process of advancing claims before a highly skeptical tribunal might be instituted.

To provide data on the position of challengers and back-up capacity to provide capacity (to mobilize credit or “confidence” on one’s behalf) money is presently necessary. The question, then, is how to provide for what is really succession in a given industry (whether it be continuity of existing large firms or a transfer of power to newcomers) and confidence in the surrounding industries without money? The answer I have so far is teams and something like a subscription system: companies are converted into teams of operators who subscribe to other teams to supply them and those teams subscribe to other teams until everyone is all subscribed up.

Fitting something that no one had realized was misfit is eminently commemorable. It’s like seeing the human world as composed of incomplete gestures that need to be fit to each other to be completed. Then, it’s a question of the scenic arrangement to do that. Such a practice is the origin of any ritual, and the only source of continuity in an order centrifugal to ritual. The best way I can think of to institutionalize this today is through the making of markets, as I’ve been proposing in recent posts, that would anticipate the dissolution of markets into pedagogical derivatives. This must involve, one way or another, setting up bets on the outcome of events that presuppose the possibility of a broker who can be trusted on all sides to name the event and constitute its boundaries—boundaries that are ritual, juridical, and disciplinary.

This is really covered by creating prediction markets on, e.g., just decisions, and turning that into currency, as discussed in the previous post. But we’re bringing in the maxim now, which can perhaps include the others in the generation of idioms as currency.

Doing this systematically in itself makes the problem of social continuity explicit and solicits more sophisticated data gathering and cataloguing. What would be the odds of a particular demographic showing declining rates of abortion between 2035-2040? What, exactly, would such a bet comprise, regarding the prospects of future family formation, the various ways of preventing pregnancy, the obstacles or inhibitions to reporting such medical decisions, of formulating the question so as to make it as 50/50 as possible, the existence of an honest broker who will provide a version of the numbers both sides could accept, and so on? Companies would be formed to arrange for the possibility of such bets, to make such markets, which would themselves become succession rituals.

The best example of such craziness today is the insistence on escalating antagonisms with both Russia and China on the part of those governing the US state; while much remains obscure, the deliberate shedding of one of the few valuable pieces of Cold War wisdom, that war between nuclear powers is to be avoided at almost any cost, is a sure sign of dysfunction. In our _Anthropoetics_ essay you’ll see repeated the proposal I’ve many times before in these essays as a way forward: the establishment of (or conversion of an existing institution into) a political party and/or research/consulting institute (the two options are not mutually exclusive and may have to become one) that also operates as a business, pedagogical center and currency issuing institution ready to take sovereignty through a gradual assumption of responsibilities.

I’ll push this proposal a bit further by insisting that the only governing institution that can ensure singularized succession is one that is economically self-supporting, reliant neither on taxes nor loans, on the model of the king living off his own lands (whether any king ever did so live is beside the point). Just like the king was the largest landowner in an order where wealth derived from land ownership the new sovereign must control the most powerful engines of data gathering and analysis in a period where that is increasingly the main source of wealth. Isn’t it possible, then, for the government to go out of business through a series of bad investment decisions, bad luck, corruption, etc.?

Yes, but only insofar as it ceases to be the leader in data collection and analytics, because by definition being such a leader guarantees business success and bad decisions, whether out of carelessness, arrogance or cupidity, will vitiate the data collection and analysis. And such decline will be noticed by other, “contracting” companies, as well as elements within the governing company itself, and a new company will emerge as the primary data power.

Current forms of sovereignty operate through increasing the centralization of power while keeping rotation of occupancy at the center at the pace needed for the best advantaged speculators to ensure their arbitrage. Enough data is required so as to know that a specific package of policies and “made” administrators can ensure the exploitation of that advantage as far into the future as one can see; but not too far into the future because past a certain point the option of transferring power to those with best access to the data would eliminate those advantages. So, the model of a “politics” here is the data security company which can impose reliance of sovereigns and the corporations and banks that enable the imperial center to be the outside option and eventually leverage this reliance into the creation of a new tributary order.

In the meantime, though, the data security company must exist as a company, attracting (and making) investments, maintaining profit margins, coordinating with suppliers, meeting customer demands, and so on, making it vulnerable to the courses it has been constructed to counter. Resilience and ultimately conquest is possible insofar as the growing disorder increases the leverage of the data companies while, data being highly fungible given sufficiently powerful analytical tools, huge monopolies capable of taking over educational, health care and other industries required for team building will result in sovereignty being more or less indiscernibly transferred.

And any one of us can equip ourselves to contribute in our own small way to this project by becoming samples of data abundance and scrupulousness, by marking what we say as it travels across the infrastructure until it arrives at a meaning that, if we have been sufficiently abundant and scrupulous, will be the same as the saying. And behaving in such a way will make you a preferred candidate for the model data security company.

And any institution is a kind of educational institution, or closely downstream of one, insofar as they all run on knowledge, i.e., data security, which someone will have an edge on. You are, then, taking out options on succession from the greatest height you can ascend to, producing knowledge that can only be handled by those who could provide an outside option when there is a great enough gap between the data provided by assets and data incommensurable to assets that enables the formation of teams that can divert revenue flows to themselves by providing indispensable sovereign services. This knowledge is also the transfer idiom, existing on the level of meaning—the very difference between what one says and what one means is itself an option on the sign being the same at some later point where it might be redeemed. Knowledge is only such if it can be redeemed in the long run, even if it must hedge, leverage and arbitrage along the way in order to make it to the long run.

In almost any case, there will be a strong bias towards the present tense, and the boundary between declarative and imperative, which is the register of wisdom literature. Ultimately there needs to be a laboratory and even a start-up dedicated to this.

Build yourself an insurance company or refine or scale up the one you have. Make markets and make marks on markets others have made. None of this can be said within GA—I know, I’ve tried. A firstness fork off of the originary hypothesis is the only way of giving the hypothesis a fair chance (a greater likelihood of dissemination and transmission, of finding suitable carriers), a fork that takes on board the contingency of the hypothesis and simply disregards “liberal democracy” as propaganda, while paying close attention to the social orders currently labeled as such: there is no “liberal democracy,” but there are election procedures and technologies, media companies generating narratives in collaboration with intelligence and security agencies, juridical orders, bureaucracies, debt regimes, securitizations, infrastructures, data regimes, etc.

It follows that no one can see further into the future than furthest derivative one might buy. I have no idea how far away that is—can you buy a derivative allowing you to purchase a stock 10 years into the future? 20? 50? What’s the world record? At any rate, if you remain with the system of capital, that’s the furthest along any social change can be imagined in a way that could be discussed meaningfully—otherwise, it’s just imagining new technologies aligned to ideological positions of the present. The only way to peer beyond those confines is to start making markets, and being explicit about making markets aimed at serving specific needs of specific communities and answerable to specific authorities.

I’d like here to outline a proposal for a company which would put into practice the trajectory of my thinking of the center up until this point, which could start small while containing the capacity to scale up indefinitely, and which is fully imaginable as a new reality while perhaps also taking form as an aesthetic object. The proposal is first of all an extension of my centering of the juridical as a minimal condition for the constitution of events: nothing “happens” that could not be framed as including potential claimants before some tribunal. The juridical is secondary to the ritual, on one side, and dependent upon the disciplinary, on the other.

This also means that those parties interested in honing grudges for the sake of institutional blackmail would avoid the firm like the plague. This in itself would draw a firm line between serious and frivolous disputants. All this would depend, of course, upon the reliability of the firm’s judgments—only insofar as those judgments and the reasoning offered for them were seen to be impartial could its success as a company and metric of civilizational layering be assured. The success of the firm would in turn entrench its judgments as models to be emulated. The judgments would exemplify the juridical, but operate extra-legally, on the model of the following provision in George Washington’s will:

The journal/firm was to have an innovative technological component, employing specially trained large language models and data search and analysis programs so as to pose questions at scales and with precision and speed that would not have previously been possible. But the thought of how to make this a genuinely profitable business and one that would draw investors (even just to play out its possibilities as an aesthetic object) and, ultimately, as I have been arguing any firm must if it is to flourish and remake the world, issue currency, led me to think of the model of the stock market and derivatives, which loomed large in Zack Baker’s and mine “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center”: all this must be included and operationalized.

The mode of juridical thinking I have been proposing would solve this problem and make it possible to bet on any event precisely by constituting events as juridical, in which case the market would depend upon the faith invested in the company constructing events and issuing judgments. The overtly and strongly pro-social and pro-civilizational nature of the project is thereby retained: higher forms of judgment are being modeled. Thinking about this on the largest scale possible, such a company would then be constituting hundreds, maybe thousands of events continually by identifying the parties and virtual tribunal that would be rendering judgment.

This will be a virtual justice system with no direct impact on the world and it might become a kind of marginal, “dissident,” even “prophetic” reproach of a world where the eruption of vendettas from below and degeneration of succession practices from above render the originary distribution increasingly a mere base for launching sabotage operations. Or, it might gradually come to approximate the real world by proving a model for new disciplinary elites to infiltrate and reform institutions. Perhaps we would look for a tipping point where it becomes profitable for institutions to take longer term bets on higher internal levels of justice or fluid data exchanges in anticipation of improved succession practices. Thirdness would then become the one big company, continually closing but never, Achilles and the tortoise-like, quite, the gap between prediction and realization across all human orders.

Ultimately it should become the new media, or a kind of world brain. This would all depend upon establishing and sustaining traditions of juridical thinking and impartiality that remain immune to the markets it makes and oversees—we are speaking of very high levels of integrity and impartiality that would need to be periodically pedagogically renewed. The argument implicit here is that only such an institution, and its spread through all institutions, can transition humanity past the current recording of debt through state-initiated expropriations and sabotage and create a new center as central intelligence. As I would have hoped for the journal, the prediction market would also transition into arbitration and consulting contracts, which would in turn serve as data gathering, or new data exchange markets.

This would mean that genuinely alternative currencies could only be created by sizable institutions, not opposed to but also not subsumed within state institutions. A couple of models for such an institution would be a political party and a kind of research institute or scaled-up think tank: in the one case capable of mobilizing substantial demographics, in the latter case capable of making itself useful perhaps to the point of indispensability for its consulting and contracting services to governments and corporations. Such institutions could be large and powerful enough to create their own tokens which would serve as currency for participants in the institution (e.g., party members) or members of contractually associated institutions.

A simple example is tokens that would be acceptable at aligned businesses. Such institutions would have to have their own investment strategies and would therefore have to enter the derivative world itself, but rather than shareholder value their investment strategies would focus on the purpose of the institution itself—some combination of political and “ritual” power, some mode of succession, that would target broader social dysfunctions and privilege some social practices over others. Such institutions would, we could say, bet the outside spread on the outside option, “shorting” weaker institutions so as to weaken them further and going long on more promising ones and thereby countering the corrosive political effects of financial firms and speculators like George Soros over the past few decades.

The engagement with politics can’t be eschewed here—full spectrum conversion of assets into data is required. Why leave any field unoccupied? But it should be a politics undertaken with the intent to serve as the highest judge, the court of appeal, including regarding who can compete for positions that would “prosecute” the occupant of the center. Enormous attention would have to be devoted to legal and monetary regimes, to convert them from sources of data that provide information regarding shifts in expected future earnings to sources of data predicting and enacting the creation of a center immune to trial. Instead of market signals, the ebbs and flows of prices of assets provide signals regarding weaknesses in the existing regime and opportunities to leverage one or another institution or company to take over control of the data of other institutions or companies.

Money issuing and creating would have to be directed first of all to designated central industries, determined in order of importance in securing data security, which means defense and infrastructure in the broadest sense. Perhaps such industries can have their own financial structure, like they can and should have their own intelligence operations. Discounting against and predicting the future should be continually reduced to staffing the future—firms ensuring the security of data that can be turned into a wide range of productive purposes would need to ensure the availability of raw materials, manufacturing, the education, care and training of personnel, and therefore the communal arrangements providing such personnel. It should then be distributing currency accordingly.

The more tightly interwoven the organization of data the more currency becomes the equivalent of company “scrip,” certificates and subscriptions privileging specific services and goods. Determinations by financial institutions of the degree of “instability” and possible return regarding investments gets replaced by continual updates in data security, with each update creating new potential weak links. As long as there is such a core of companies, national boundaries are a secondary consideration, and all kinds of more or less close alliances and “blocs” can be considered—but the way to progress is to mark anything that resists enclosure within juridical/scientific articulations and rework such “overflows” so that they can be enclosed.

A political party could advance the process of de-assetization by aligning itself with central infrastructural companies, creating its own currency, job markets and even legal and physical defense for its members and working on changing the juridical order so as to make the expansion of such tributarianism possible.

There’s no way of opposing this order without entering it—I won’t bother to argue against a “proletarian” revolution, but it’s worth making the point that a revolt of the engineers is just as much of a fantasy—to take just one obvious example, what would be the correct, indisputable engineering solution to the best form of energy to rely on in the coming decades? Scrupulous engineers and scientists could likely form a rough consensus regarding a range of possibilities, but disagreements, and very consequential ones, would remain, since we’re always working with estimates here. So, companies would need to be formed, and would need to be valued, and would need to therefore protect themselves against the ruin of financialization while participating in it.

This, then, reduces to the problem of forming data security companies—again, data in the broad sense described above—that would provide indispensable information but also the personnel suited to interpret and apply that information to sovereigns who are willing to give up one kind of sovereignty so as to preserve the means of governance. It may very well be that the whole unholy alliance of intelligence agencies, propagandizing media, and politically compromised social and physical sciences (MKUltra and all that) reflects nothing other than a realization that authority hand-offs must be organized in ways the formal political order disallows. The point is not to continue with such skullduggery, which I strongly suspect is completely screwed up even from the standpoint of the agencies involved themselves, but to make overt and aboveboard the problem of succession.

Which sovereign, or potentially sovereign, agencies, then, are marginally more interested in finding succor against the storm continually created by those best positioned to determine present expectations of future earnings? That’s really the only political question—that, and how to provide the service such governing entities are prepared to use. And this question transcends the more pedestrian one of how to keep such companies honest, because the answer is built in: if such a company becomes dishonest it will provide less data security and will be replaced by its partners, subsidiaries and spin-offs (who will first of all supply data regarding the infirmity of that company).

The staggering difficulty of such a program is why I’ve tended to assume that only close association with a new kind of political party would make it possible. Of course, such a political party would arouse the violent resistance and all the immune systems of the guardians of the existing order, but at least there would be measures of progress in the degree of power obtained by the party. And it’s also why I’ve assumed that this party will have to issue a specially designed currency for its members and supporters—an even more allergenic innovation. Such company and party articulations would, to make matters worse, have to be transnational, while strictly preserving all the legalities involved in sovereignty.

That is, where economic agents cannot be tried or sued for breach of promise, fraud, intellectual theft, or other violations of contract because of issues of size, location, legal anomalies, technological complexity making discovery difficult, etc., they will be subject to audit by data security companies interested primarily in bringing them within the scope of the juridical which will also mean separating out and protecting operations whose technical requirements resist reduction to the juridical. The juridical is reduced to points of contact, but everything lying behind those points of contact is legible at those interfaces or are to made so.

Obviously, the point is not to say “we” should do this but for intelligencers to commence and continue building such companies to eventually become the best last resort for all (or a critical mass of “all”) concerned. There is always the danger of familial, kin, ethnicity, or locality becoming a source of the resurgence of the vendetta, but the most immediate danger now is the rerouting of juridical capacities for the sake of conducting vendettas—i.e., “lawfare.” Here, it is the signs of such rerouting that must be addressed through data security, by translating the banners of lawfare—“racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “hate,” etc.—into legally actionable and legally irrelevant forms.

And, like all concepts I prefer, this one has a direct purchase on the reality we see before us, because viewing everyone, in every field of endeavor, as concentrating their efforts of selecting their successor, is the most powerful way of reading human practices in terms of the desire for immortality constitutive of the sign user. The most devastating critique, then, of the contemporary order, is how heedlessly, sloppily and maliciously this is done, with the upshot of that critique being to take the requisite care in building your own organizations, companies and communities to ensure succession.

The functionality of such companies in advanced industries as yet beyond the reach of the finance industry, along with the functionality of teams within companies that have been subordinated, and even teams within the finance industry itself, is where the work of converting assets into data would take place. One way or another, this would have to be seen as a kind of holy work, as “tenting” or “tabernacling” humanity, and it would take place in the face of furious resistance and intensified sabotage by the financiers, the conglomerates most tied up with them, and those states (no doubt including the leading imperial one) that has most aggressively and completely tokenized itself as a marker of the health of the market.

Only a mode of thinking and practice that can see the whole, without fraudulent divisions into public and private, economic, political and cultural, etc., and that can envision humanity from its origins into the distant future, could provide the ballast for such a project. As I’ve argued many times already, these companies and organizations would be fundamentally interested in data security and, I can say now, “search wisdom.” The gathering, classification, sorting, analysis, preservation, dissemination, etc., of data is constitutive of anything else you’ll ever want to do—in a way this was always true, even before there was anything that could be called “data.”

The interest in data is what tells us how to donate our resentments to the center, which means converting our resentments in indications that data is being corrupted back into assets. We could reduce it to control over increasingly massive and targeted search engines, keeping in mind that the search engine itself will never be able to design your search terms if they don’t already exist in. the system. Adventurous, scholarly scribes will have to man these stations, and some of them can be manned now. With such searchers, all the forms of institutional intelligence can be infiltrated—the secret police and surveillance agencies are more dependent on data security that they can’t entirely provide for themselves than anyone is.

This is naturally a global project—why in the world wouldn’t curators of the crisis from China, the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Germany, and so on not find common ground here? Data security is bound up with succession across the board. This means some form of global governance, but not a global government formalized as such—it would mean that the system of teams most effectively ensuring its pool of candidates for succession would effectively be a kind of global directorate. Their power would flow from them being completely open about their data management because they know that others’ use of it will just produce more candidates for them. All of this follows from frontloading the responsibility of singularized succession in perpetuity to the social order.

Reward points from your credit card company or frequent flier miles from an airline are a kind of currency which it’s easy to imagine exchanging and speculating on in various ways. Now, what I have mentioned here and there is the need for a political party to bind its supporters to itself through the issuance of currency (through loans and investments) and I would insist that no party or organization intent upon establishing the continuity of occupancy of the center can avoid doing so. If you join the party you receive, say, coupons, redeemable at places of business that donate to and receive the protection of the party (legal and, where necessary, physical protection).

The party becomes an increasingly “total” one. (If there are laws against operating a political party in this way then central to the party’s program must be changing those laws.) The reciprocity between party and its members, a multifaceted mutual loyalty and interdependence, increases the power of the party, which in turn opens new avenues of reciprocity. (The provision of insurance would be crucial here—the full blown financialization of capitalism has been, among other things, a way of dismantling here and curtailing there the welfare state, but the welfare state was itself an attempt to bring insurance within the state and financial systems, so the remedy to financialization must include a resituating of insurance within relations grounded in loyalty and reciprocity.)

I mention these qualities in particular because an officer class in formation would have to take on projects that anticipate power it does not yet have and would have to prove its worth by operating effectively within hostile media, legal and political environments—probably building businesses, a political party, institutions to protect its supporters, media platforms, perhaps even its own currency. This can only be accomplished if guided by a mode of thinking that rests upon unshakeable fundamental assumptions that can withstand all critiques, traditional, modern or postmodern; that is comprehensive and innovative, allowing for disagreements that get to essential questions while being orderly, collegial and ultimately given to productive resolution; and that arouses unending fascination with all things human. This post is a sample of GA as such a discourse.

The eligibility of subscribers would have to be regularly assessed. We must assume the highest value of all is a unified and coherent command structure stemming from a central authority and reaching into all institutions. Individuals reporting directly to authorities would be in each company, and everyone in each company would be expected to consider himself a “delegate” of the government. There would be social pressures from other subscribers, who would stand to be disqualified if some of their members were found to be defectors. (If a particular subscriber can no longer fulfill its responsibilities, the central authority’s responsibility is to replace or reconstruct its governing structure.)

Liberalism abstracts, ruthlessly; counter-liberalism should concretize. The central authority wants all forms of authority to flow into its own, and that might involve inheriting residual and possible modes of authority borne by its people. A great deal of the ruler’s activity should involve issuing and supervising charters: for corporations, for townships, for local forms of authority, for associations of various kinds. If you want a recognized identity, apply to the central authority for a charter, or apply to subscribe to an authority that has already been chartered. The more generic, and potentially disruptive identities, like those promoted by feminism, can be broken down and sorted out: women’s groups focused on the education of women, on moral improvement, on counseling wives, on the preservation of traditional ceremonies and customs, and so on.

In the second case, constraints can be imposed so as to limit standardization, or produce diversities within standardization. Local boards could propose the constraints to be imposed, and if they do so credibly and in good faith, keeping in mind that the final decision will not be theirs, their recommendations might be taken very seriously, maybe even routinely incorporated—this in itself would have a “heterogenizing” effect. In the first case, perhaps a certain amount of the capital held and gained by companies can be held in trust by the government, to be returned to that company based on that company’s adherence to a series of graduated constraints involving working conditions, wages, community investment, stability, commitment to stay put, and so on.

Companies that wish to surrender some of their capital in the pursuit of cheaper labor and greater profits aboard might be free to, since that would also provide what might be needed economic information and the repatriation of profits. And agreements with the countries capital might decamp to could also help contain such movements. In the course of all these decisions being incorporated into rule, a well governed order would make the central source of economic value the consistency and coherence of government decision making itself. A company that eschews short term profit in cheaper labor abroad would do so in the knowledge that its government will constrain the market at home so that, while it might be good to have newcomers nipping at the heels of established companies, large scale waves of investment and “dumping” will not be permitted to overwhelm normally functioning companies.

Moral, ethical governance involves protecting existing practices and disciplines, helping them to become more practice-like and disciplinary, and providing the conditions for other activities to become practices and disciplines. The simplest way of doing this is by establishing constraints to be adhered to by any organization or institution incorporated by the government, which is to say any organization or institution. These constraints would range from institution specific to society-wide; from purposeful and efficiency-oriented to aesthetic and even arbitrary. All buildings, or all buildings of a certain kind, might be required to include a particular design; how they have to include it might be loosely or tightly prescribed (some may have it prominently exposed, others may hide it in some corner).

Now, families are also teams, as are neighborhoods and towns, and these kinds of teams, if they attain leadership positions, will make it part of the game to continue to deserve it. We have never, in fact, had any kind of society in which family names didn’t mean something, and that’s in large part because in any society families can and do invest a great deal of energy into ensuring they do. A genuine aristocracy would probably have to be landed, but an absolutist order would have to at least be at ease with informal aristocracies, which get formalized in various provisional ways (the ruler might give a particular family firm an established position in some industry, or establish a university under the aegis of an especially accomplished academic family).

There is a familiar (but I have no idea how common) pattern whereby a new leadership, brought in to save a failing enterprise or institution, or to carry out an important project, selects a team, either of marginalized employees or those brought in from the outside, and sets them to work outside of the normal rules of functioning of the institution. This is called “skunkworks.” The alternative to liberal and democratic governance is governance by skunkworks. On the model of Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science, we would distinguish between the normal, rule-governed operations of a company or institutions, and government by skunkworks which, ideally would always be held in reserve and never used. An executive ready, and known to be ready, to resort to skunkworks, would never have to. The model citizen or subject would be the potential skunkworker, and educational institutions would be constructed so as to single out potential skunkworkers for various fields.

So an absolutist state today would have to become a lot like the major power centers it rules through: information gathering and collating like Google, staging social interactions and networks like Facebook, efficient and productive like the best manufacturing firms. It’s kind of like those aliens in science fiction movies that mimic human beings. In order to do that, though, the activity of these corporations (and other institutions) has to be channeled to the center—everything each center does strengthens the sovereign, nothing they do must weaken or dilute it. The more this is the case, the more the institutions can be sovereign in their own sphere, and subordinates within those institutions sovereign in theirs.

The notion of viewing the government as a corporation is foundational for Neo Reaction and Absolutism, having first been proposed by Mencius Moldbug and presently being revisited by Imperial Energy . The government is in the security business: its customers (formerly known as “citizens”) pay a fee (formerly known as “taxes”) and the government provides internal security for property and person, and external security from, presumably, the other security corporations in the world—or, perhaps, from more primitive and therefore maybe more dangerous state organizations. The idea has its roots in libertarian thought. It might gain more support from the recent work of political scientist David Ciepley, who in one essay argues that the framers of the US Constitution very deliberately constructed the constitution as a “charter” and the government as a corporation.

Chartering corporations of all kinds—and here the medieval and even ancient roots of the corporation are important—religious, educational, scientific, exploratory and, of course, profit-making businesses is the best way for the sovereign to recognize socially relevant and beneficial activities and scrutinize them in the most economical and non-intrusive way. And, as Ciepley points out, the corporation form itself is consistent with all kinds of internal governance—to his credit, it’s very hard to get a sense of Ciepley’s own politics, and I sense they wouldn’t fall very clearly in one place along the left-right axis, but he does acknowledge the viability of worker participation in some forms of corporate governance—as a way of helping keep the corporation focused on its long-term prosperity, rather than turning a quick profit for shareholders.

But this suggests some uneasiness on Ciepley’s part with the undemocratic character of corporations. We could more easily argue for pushing the needle in the other direction, toward the corporatization of the rest of social life. While the whole notion of free speech, free assembly, religion, and so on, is becoming increasingly inapplicable in public life, it seems to particularly ridiculous to try and impose it on corporations. You want your employees to speak freely about problems they notice in the engineering design of the latest product; and you want them to shut the hell up about gendered bathrooms. What do we need “people” in general to speak freely about?

Whatever the sovereign says it is, it seems to me—if I get together with a couple of friends and form a corporation to make gifs ridiculing prominent public figures, we’re the “media” just as much as the Times, NBC, CNN, and the rest—and our charter will reflect that our purpose is to enrich public life through satire. So, rather than saying that corporations should not participate in public life, because they are not “natural persons” with rights, we should say to “natural” persons to de-nature themselves, incorporate, get a charter, and enter public life on terms agreeable to and with rights granted by the sovereign.

Let's say that different enterprises, individually or conjointly, found educational institutions, allowing for free or at least affordable education for 1,000 children (perhaps subject to admissions testing) on the condition (enforced by the sovereign) that those children be willing to work a certain number of their post-graduate years with that enterprise? The genuinely singular students would be held to that agreement, while being rewarded handsomely and given the freedom necessary for innovation, while many or even most of the rest are set free to find employment where they like (the enterprise would reserve the right to hold onto as many as it might need).

It may very well be that, along with self-disciplining movements within communities by those terrified by social collapse, a reactionary restoration of sovereignty will require that the major technopowers first actually assume and formalize their actual power, and then deliver that power to sovereigns who will integrate the disciplinary structure and vocation of those corporate giants back into a renewed social disciplinary project. Google and the others may have to realize that they don’t really want to rule, but are the only ones capable of seeing to it that someone does. That the giants and the new sovereigns will accept the need (and find a way) to replace the high-low war against the middle with an ordered hierarchy of powers that confers formal recognition upon differentials in discipline may not be overwhelmingly likely, but it is possible and, probably the only way of preserving civilization—that is, the only alternative to the more extreme exigency of more desperate and marginalized civilizational reboots.

America First in relation to the world means the sovereign being a systematic filter between the country and the world. For starters, dual citizenship will have to be eliminated: you’re an American or you’re not. The internal market can be made much freer (no minimum wage, no unions, drastically reduced regulation, no corporate taxation) in exchange for capital repatriation—corporations, too, can be made to choose whether they want to be American or global. Tariffs will slow, but not eliminate international trade; corporations can set up shop within the US by paying for the privilege of accessing the American market, or through bilateral arrangements with peer countries.

Individuals will ultimately have to make up their own minds about that, but, either way, the natural right to self-defense in bearing witness to truths in danger of being lost can be the basic unifying principle around which resistance can gather. And, this, incidentally, is also the only way of ensuring that there will be enough trained, organized and moralized people to fight the Caliphate, when it comes to that. Ultimately, these new centers will have to attract the younger, digital crowd to help construct new economic and security networks—the only way to do that, though, is to allow them to do their jobs in a way that the politicized incompetence of government-linked corporations doesn’t, and that’s more of a long term matter (there are probably quite a few libertarian hacker types, though, just to get things started).

Still, since that threshold has been rising steadily from the mid-20th century on, it might be better to start using the principles of private property to defend those commonly held tokens of reciprocity, rather than relying upon the state, which provides an opening to the Left—so, if a community would like to preserve a park, rather than having it sold to developers who want to set up a shopping mall, let them put in a bid and purchase the land corporately. Some bids will be lost, of course, and the wealth of the community perhaps diminished when they are won. There will be free rider problems, but these can be solved by having voting rights in the newly corporate property be based on stock ownership. Arguments about future uses of the property will surely follow—perhaps that is where political energies will come to reside. If so, those energies will be far more productively engaged than they are at present.

There would have to be some combined formal and informal means by which other property owners would, first consider, then discuss, and finally decide, to withdraw their support for that property owner. They might, before forcibly intervening, draw up charges and invite the individual to answer them, proposing a forum for the purpose. Then, finally, they would decide to act—and so inform that individual’s insurer and security agency: it would be made clear to the insurer that this individual was about to become a very bad risk, and to the security agency that it was about to lose some other customers if it insisted on retaining this client, if it was a security agency shared by others in the community; or it was about to be met with overwhelming force by the combined security agencies of those determined upon the “invasion.”

Such disciplinary spaces I would imagine as the first detachments of the exodus from the dead end of history I outlined in my previous post. They can take very simple forms. Imagine a town which has gone bankrupt and can no longer borrow money, and further assume that state and federal governments are similarly unwilling or unable to intervene. Let’s say some of the town’s citizens look into buying out their local government, and create a legal argument to the effect that the town as a whole is really the property of all its citizens, held in trust by the elected officials. They will organize a corporation that will take over and renegotiate the debt with the town’s creditors; as part of the package, the group of citizens arranges for various exemptions from state and federal mandates (environmental, labor, regulatory, etc.), on the model of those “free enterprise zones” we no longer hear about.

For me, the first presupposition, something of an intellectual revolution for me, is that nothing done by the state needs to be done by the state—either it doesn’t need to be done at all, or it can be done by a private agency, hired by clients, or run by its stockholders. Social security and health coverage can be turned over to insurance agencies; defense and policing to private security firms, in conjunction with the insurance agencies. Hans Hermann-Hoppe lays all this out pretty well. I, at least, find the task of re-imagining state functions, especially the most entrenched ones, as privatized services, intellectually invigorating.

What about hospitals? Pharmaceutical companies that eschew FDA approval and only deal with customers who waive said approval, accepting internal studies and agreed upon third party investigations in their place? New forms of currency? To what extent could lawsuits insisting upon the rights to such arrangements help to create the necessary space for their emergence, and to what extent would stealth and civil disobedience be necessary? Once a critical mass of such institutions emerged, it would be possible to negotiate with the government over, for example, the right to withdraw tax dollars to institutions which no longer have one’s consent—including, I would be willing to say, the military.

Every contract produces a property right. One has private property in a promise made by an insurance company to provide coverage under certain conditions—that is, the insurance company, in contracting with me, would be granting me that property right as one that could be adjudicated if the insurance company comes to disagree with me about the boundaries of my “property.” If the streets of a neighborhood were owned corporately by those who own the houses, crime could be addressed by voting, as shareholders, to expel law-breaking neighbors, or forbidding entrance to specific individuals; of course, such property rights could be used to exclude members of particular racial or religious groups—but couldn’t that be dealt with by boycotts exercised by other neighbors and neighborhoods and other means of marginalizing the explicitly bigoted community?

Similarly with, say consumer protection agencies created, say, in the wake of the dismantling of the FDA. Companies which do their own testing would contract with producers, which would in turn advertise the approval they have been given; companies would provide different levels of guarantee, depending upon the product and the desire of the company (as a consumer you could buy only from companies that have achieved 98% safety level, but if you prefer cheapness to such elevated levels of inspection, you could go with 80%); competition would make sure that dirty deals between inspectors and companies are exposed quickly—this could easily work better than the current system of government inspection. At any rate, once such functions have been won back for the private, voluntary sector, we could speak of the “redemption” of expropriated state functions and their return to society. Private agencies would literally be buying back those functions, and politics would focus on forcing the state to allow them to do so.

“Redemption” might take on even more powerful meanings when it comes to, say, a community buying a river or woods back from the state and, rather than letting the EPA dictate their environmental needs, going ahead and suing the industry that has been polluting the area—property rights, rather than ecological fanaticism, would lead to the right balance between economic and environmental imperatives. Similarly, the houses in a run down, crime ridden neighborhood might be “redeemed” by members of the community, who would all become shareholders, lease and sell according to strict principles, hire private security agents and thereby establish rigorous community standards.

Boycotts can get more sophisticated and targeted (new companies would spring up to consult on them), and companies will more and more market themselves as “pro-family,” “pro-community,” or anything else. Of course companies do this now, but given the kind of development I am proposing, these claims would come under closer scrutiny all the time, and branding become an activity carried out by consumers as much as producers.

In this way, the Christian morality that has emerged and sustained itself as a check on predatory Big Men (think of how focused both Judaism and Christianity are on the “haughty”), could become an economic value in its own right—perhaps one we could even learn to calculate. Surely some economist could (or, for all I know, already has) invent a formula for determining the value of the moral economy (of course, we would need to be anthropologists to devise measures for the moral economy). What is x number of people willing to leave cutthroat firms when they cross the line and become, not “community organizers,” but more honest versions of the business they have “exodused” from, “worth”?

Or x number of individuals willing to form companies in which their own money is at stake, instead of playing only with others’? These are challenging questions, because below a particular threshold above which there would be enough of such firms to survive and impact the economy, their worth would be zero. Even more challenging is determining which other, only indirectly economic elements of the culture would comprise a moral economy making such thresholds attainable. We’re not just talking about honesty or altruism here—rather, “fair dealing” involves the ability to create, revise, and continually re-interpret, on the ground, in conjunction with others, sets of rules that are largely tacit.

And, ultimately, these assessments, conversions and measurements must be tested as companies gathering data under the auspices of actual and possible disputes considered under the most rigorous juridical conditions to the point where the accumulated disputes empty out into a new nomos where everyone contributes to ensuring that imperative exchanges never reach the threshold of formal resolution. Try to see everyone in the light of a peaceful settlement of all the possible disputes over the obligations of an outside spread dissolved into distributed pedagogical accreditations.

This kind of interference across boundaries would just become part of the interface, which would therefore be penetrating all the way into each organization, in layered forms with varying degrees of granularity. This replacement of market forms of valuation would take on complex forms of tokenization as assessments of performance become increasingly precise and important and ways of measuring it take on forms accounting for tacit understandings in ways we are still unable to surface. And in this way values measured through tokens are, simply, data, which, on the blockchain, travels with people across institutions as part of the process of controlled usurpation.

Distribution now takes the form of assignment to teams, issuing credit to specific initiatives, securing of supply chains, the creation of smart contracts, the drafting or recruitment of future members and, therefore, the pedagogical futures supervised without any guarantee of calculable return. And the originary question of the human as a derivative of the center will inform distribution in a way that some might still want to call “theological” or “philosophical.”

One argument I could make for a kind of “accelerationism” is that this continual linguistic updating will likely accelerate with accelerations in the expectancy of scenes (the myriad ways operating on one scene requires reference to other scenes with devices planted in the one you operate on) and that, furthermore, participating in this process as intentionally as possible is what will count as “freedom” under enhanced scenic expectancy. Think of it as blockchaining (another obvious candidate for various metaphoric extensions) your idioms. AIs are extremely unlikely to coin phrases in ways that will be immediately recognizable and “contagious” within a shared space, unless, perhaps, they are very intensively trained upon carefully selected databases to do so—which, then, opens a space for new institutions, pedagogical and corporate, that would contribute to the coining of idioms for specific sites and groups.

If those amongst the ruling elite trust each other sufficiently, as they must if something better than the troubled American imperium will result from today’s collective cluelessness about the problem of tyranny, then we can easily imagine the chief executive of the central intelligence company simply handing-off command to the successor who best meets that moment and perhaps receiving it back in return at a later point. And this also leaves open the possibility of introducing a bit of randomness into the selection process, maybe first of all in the lower ranks, to give people a chance to govern who might otherwise be overlooked.

(Some of Trump’s recent attempts to subject the chair of the Federal Reserve to his will might be seen as a kind of faint prefiguration of that transformation.) This, then, would also solve Hayek’s information problem, insofar as relations between institutions within supply chains would exchange information through attempts to engineer usurpations in other institutions or companies, giving another form to the internalization of the outside option—institutions would directly test one another’s robustness and signal new needs, dissatisfaction with current operations, etc., in this way. And, since each institution would be competing with the others in recruiting new talent and therefore seeing to the production of the needed talent, the system would be run on “pedagogical futures,” i.e., pedagogical practices within educational institutions upon which institutions would acquire “options” by providing ever more discretely dissected models of necessary practices. So, that’s what I have laid out, here and there, so far.

Each institution has a head, and this head has an appointed successor, and the successor has an appointed successor, all the way down through each institution. But the appointed successor will be assessed and replaced regularly, for any number of reasons, and these changes will ramify through the entire system. These constant fluctuations in succession replicate price change by providing information about who will be directing a particular link in the supply chain. All this information can be made available in some form through new data science disciplines who will model these fluctuations the way investors model fluctuations in the stock market.

Ultimately, maintaining regular, if flexible and unpredictable in the details, succession practices requires “investing” in pedagogical futures. If you’re going to guarantee a steady source of successors, that means you would be rather obsessed with the prospects of future generations, who will give meaning to your present efforts. Institutions would be contracting with pedagogical institutions, which will in turn bolster and draw upon renewed kinship networks. This replicates the defining feature of capitalism—discounting against expected future earnings. Every question concerning price or credit (and price is ultimately derivative of credit) becomes a question of some node in the broader intelligence network.

If there’s still street crime, though, then there will need to be some accepted way of arresting, judging and punishing criminals—transcending the juridical would mean a deferral of crime—that, then, is the responsibility of the security firm. So, for example, some past behavior provides for someone, through facial recognition, DNA samples, etc., to be deprived of access to various facilities, maybe culminating in something like house arrest. Such deprivation might have a very low threshold, if banishment is to kick in before crime as such has been committed. We’re speaking of very high standards of civilization here.

(And, of course, we all know the sci-fi dystopian versions of this kind of order.) Such a person might feel aggrieved at his exclusion, which might seem arbitrary, based on a misreading of merely idiosyncratic behavior, and so on. In a post-juridical order, his appeal would have to be toward the security firm and the subscribers, not to some third party adjudicating between them. And here he could draw on the disciplines, in the same way someone operating within the juridical would, in this case requesting “data-driven” reassessments of his banishment or sequestration, perhaps negotiating over possible behavioral adjustments.

The juridical order would be organized around adjudicating claims, the disciplinary directed toward testing out futuristic models in physical, chemical, biological and social terms. And the pointmen governing us might be the uninsurable, because a suit brought against him might so engross the entire system as to swamp any outside spread capable of covering it (not to mention the possibility of regicidal violence, which could never be completely eliminated)—they would be pioneering the further anthropomorphisms that insurance companies then insist get standardized. And the uninsurable would in turn be a new model for the human.

But we can also counter and include new forms of assetization (Bitcoin is not credit so it’s not really money) by proposing tokens issued by the United States backed by the blockchained obligation to maintain the scientific, technological, and educational capacity to go to war in a timely manner against any state upon which some of such capacity still depends—i.e., an obligation to be able to convert to total autonomy virtually instantly. (Establishing and maintaining this obligations would require exactly the kind of data security “subcontractors” I referred to earlier.) This should be the case anyway, and points to the inclusion of credit and tokenization, or the outside spread, within the order of succession.

This is all peaceful and productive rivalry, just like the market is supposed to give us, but here in a much more transparent and “merit-based” form: the head of some team/company is only likely to be at real risk of being “overthrown” if several closely related companies on the supply chain not only intensify their leveraging of the outside option but can agree on who that might be. And we’re not talking about regicide here: the head most probably is either simply demoted, after gracefully handing over the reins to the selected successor or looks for another team to join. (Note that I’m not assuming something like a Board of Directors in this model—those leveraging from the outside serve the equivalent purpose.)

This oscillation between rivalry and cooperation across companies implies and would help maintain a very high level of civilization, including the “creative” component of capitalism while minimizing the “destructive” component. The system can be closed because it has its own openings, or “valves,” within it, and those valves are interfacing with the Stack as a whole and with the natural environment. Starting from the problem of securing data, building an increasing reliable and robust flow of information, leads us to this result—and who could be against ensuring that we are obtaining a steady flow of truthful, relevant and open-sourced information, scientific, technological, and anthropological?

It seems to me that under such conditions the commission of violent crimes would become increasingly futile—if one could impose technological sanctuary conditions on individuals then one could probably construct the technological conditions making robbery, murder, rape, etc., increasingly marginal. So, we are back to the beginning, where the very thinking of the cybernetics of a concept produces the horizon of the concept’s abolition. All political agendas can be channeled this way towards, of course, the abolition of politics. In setting up Thirdness prediction markets, then, we are also setting up a kind of conceptual game of reframing confrontations so that they are channeled toward data exchange with the center and the horizon of the abolition of the conditions of the terms of the conflict itself.

This means that the tendency I’ve described above remains the same, as ever greater powers of detection (i.e., data gathering and analysis) would be needed to pick up on offenses. This makes it clear that the messianism I invoked above is always a horizon, which is to say a kind of measuring rod. So, the difference between the opening and closing state on the Thirdness prediction market is a question of the antagonists becoming better at measuring and better measurement devices. Those two poles converge in each, in their reciprocal entanglement, becoming more meaningful, which is to say more idiomatic, more simultaneously enacting the imperative and declarative side of the if… then, studying and protecting the originary distribution at the site of justice.

A flourishing gift economy can co-exist with the stack of scenes; indeed, judges and technicians will have their own extended families and will be the ones bringing resources into the gift economy. Whether or not a particular case will be taken will itself be a decision posted on the prediction market—does a case make the threshold to be considered juridically; do the complaints have standing? Each case decided should set a precedent—this is a precondition for posting cases, because only in this way will some learning threshold be passed and learncoin idioms mined.

Israel, then, is to be expected to comport itself, not with hysterical denunciations based on inflationary interpretations of already tenuously grounded human rights law but, rather, in accord with the requirements of an international system reliant upon imperial hierarchies. Our judgment, then, would insist upon identifying signs that the Israel government is or is not so comporting itself, with creation of a prediction market registering and thereby incentivizing behavior that further approximates the demand-limiting commands of the center. All existing figures in all relevant governments, with government understood in the broadest sense, are to be assessed and solicited in terms of their likelihood of participating in such market-making and might therefore be included in the judgment.

We want to identify moves existing power centers could make that would have them betting that (by definition uncertain) new arrangements that have them shedding certain buffering and hedging auxiliaries would further secure their power. We then set up two possible forms of the bet, because we are so far genuinely uncertain, and then conduct a study, to be published along with the judgment, to determine which of the two bets is in fact more likely to be considered by the largest pool of power of the agents involved to be the better one.

Thirdness does probably need first of all to be a more conventional online journal, albeit with an interactive component aimed at incorporating feedback and recruiting writers and researchers. Since I don’t anticipate any substantial (or even insubstantial) flows of cash in the new future, the incentives would have to be non-monetary—the project would have to produce a transferable idiom that can be leveraged as power and money in other institutions. An obvious model is consulting firms, like Samo Burja’s _Bismarck Brief_ , but it’s better to be more of an academy, training the new officer class. There’s nothing to do but continue modeling and mapping and assume that an extremely powerful, if seemingly esoteric (although really the problem is it’s too exoteric), theory will make its way in the world.

So, maybe this is where Thirdness plants itself: in shifting political discussions towards proposed modifications in the Stack, proposing mini-regimes of data collection, analysis, mapping and simulation (I’m draw upon Josh Pang’s _World Game_ , which draws out the implications of Buckminster Fuller’s proposal for submitting all world problems to the rigor of computation). The irreducibility of the juridical, the question of justice and, in fact, it’s explicit permeation of all social interactions, serving as the mode of measurement of data security and exchange—that’s Thirdness.

I’m thinking of Thirdness here, assuming that the best form of thought experiments possible right now might be those imagining potential prediction markets that might be organized around scenes and events determined with precision through the juridical and transdisciplinary originary inquiry (center study). Does anyone really have any idea how all the “deep states” or “intelligence communities” of all those states that have such institutions with transnational reach interact with each other? Where are they aligned and cooperative, where competitive and inimical? How would one measure their respective power? How do publicly observed and recorded events correspond to their machinations?

What kind of prediction market might be established to gather information on the various correspondences between political activity on the surface and intelligence activity in the depths? Maybe we’d discover direct and indirect ways of communicating with the “depths,” by affecting the algorithms they rely on. But only if we clear our heads of our succession fantasies.

That’s the program, then; to get there involves creating markets constantly on the way towards the abolition of markets by creating spaces where currency is created by betting on pro-social, which is to say singularized in succession, practices. What is moral is not so much making one choice over another as creating a new space of choices in which moral deliberation can be exercised and displayed. And the moral is really a derivative of the juridical, presenting decisions as adjudicable before a virtual tribunal, ultimately God, which is freed of the ritual and lingering vendettas that mar any actual court. Obviously, it’s immoral to betray your friend, but this is a lower level of morality than that involved in the consideration of how to enable your friend to deal with getting betrayed by reality (once you’re thinking in those terms, it’s simply a given that you wouldn’t betray your friend).

I might, though, think of setting up a bet over whether a particular media outlet, or set of outlets, will end up correcting certain factual or legal claims made in the course of reporting on the ICC’s call to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu—that might be a way of getting at 50/50. That might give you a sense of the kind of prediction market Thirdness would create but, more importantly for my purpose here, laying a bet one way or another here already presupposes a great deal that is known well beyond 50/50 about the world’s media, and therefore the political, corporate and financial governing groups whose imperatives they convey.

We students of the center can always then see ourselves as straddling the boundary between the juridical and data exchange, assuming that the boundary will never be abolished once and for all or if it is only to create an analogous boundary within data exchange. This boundary mirrors the time lag allowed for judgments within the Thirdness prediction market, because what is presented in the initial state is a conflict in some juridical form while the outcome is some invented data exchange, with the obligatory ruling in favor of one side a pretext for and justified by that data exchange. The work of Thirdness, then, is idiom mining in the sense that its generating singular hypothetical data exchanges that would be oscillations between 50/50 microdecisions carved out of the formal case.

Several benefits would result from a sustained and intelligent strategy: first, an important body of law would be reconstituted and a significant civilizational imperative addressed; second the media, as we know it today, would almost completely cease to exist, because today’s media cannot exist without constant violations of these legal norms; third, the intelligence and other state agencies would lose a crucial means of controlling public opinion and would have to resort to doing their jobs; fourth, the right-wing would clean up its own side, as no doubt the Republicans contain significant degrees of criminality as well, as does the conservative media; fifth, it could be a profitable venture, while effecting a significant redistribution of resources from leftist organizations and donors (and, why not, a few rightist ones as well) to the investors in what should be a trust-busting litigation company.

It would give existing forms of power a channel that could redirect it from corrupting and debilitating pursuits. It would exacerbate divisions among the governing class while providing a conduit for the peaceful resolution of those disputes and the attainment of an elite settlement. No doubt the left would respond with their own lawfare strategy, a continuation and intensification of current efforts. My proposal is predicated on the assumption that a proper legal regime is deadly for the left while only being purgative for the right. Maybe some on the left could be induced to develop legal means of controlling financial and corporate rapacity through well planned fraud, breach of promise, negligence and other lawsuits that could direct compensation to documented victims (with, of course, a cut to the attorneys) so as to cut out regulatory middlemen and the protection racket regulation always devolves into. We might converge on abolishing the entire left-right distinction, which is anyway implicit in destroying the left.

It is worth pointing out that such a company would provide for lots of victories and humiliations of leaders of enemy forces and therefore a kind of festival atmosphere, thereby fulfilling one of the more important of Alinsky’s rules for radicals: make sure your people are having fun. It would convert “anti-woke” sentiments (for starters) into teams of private investigators, gathering and supplying evidence along with lots of insider knowledge. Wars on social media would be transformed from exchanges of insults and spite into evidence collection missions. Social media companies could themselves be sued from blocking or de-platforming people for posts that don’t reach the threshold of actionable offenses—I’m not sure exactly how this would work (i.e., establishing a legal regime under which you’d be liable for something like slander for closing accounts for posts that are not, in fact, slanderous), but that’s what an inventive and hungry team of litigators is for—to make new law.

Such a company would be far less esoteric than Thirdness with a clear path to profit—fleecing the left and retrieving its own ill-gotten gains. It would vindicate center study as a fork-off of the originary hypothesis away from GA, with the distinctive argument I’ve been making for the juridical as a provisional space between the ritual and disciplinary. “Resentment” has always been a weakly theorized concept in GA, despite its centrality (a word search in Gans’s works would, I imagine, locate thousands of instances)—it remains on the level of “I know it when I see it” or, to be a bit blunter, “resentment is when you’re against things I like.”

This project is not only compatible with but made more precise when conjoined with Brute Computation economic forecasting—investing in and eventually taking over and remaking the most powerful companies would generate myriad new cases—Thirdness assumes the intensive formulation towards ever lower thresholds tending asymptotically towards abolition of the laws of libel, defamation, fraud, slander and incitement in particular. (It might be very interesting to convert intellectual property cases into fraud cases: after all, intellectual property “theft” comes down to presenting as your own work what has been done by others, and the work of sifting through the threads of some intellectual work and determining where due recognition is called for might be less arbitrary than trying to determine who “owns” an idea and the monetary damages owed through “stealing” it—and if the “ideas” are real, public acknowledgement will provide the best material compensation anyway.)

What I am suggesting here would be a data exchange, first and foremost—partnering with “rogue” food producers, medical caregivers, pharmaceuticals, biomedical engineers, students of texts (especially those retrieving philological traditions), trainers, stunt men, and others, our company would recruit individuals interested in joining rigorous regimens for nothing more than free access to the goods and services provided by these partners, who provide such goods and services in exchange for nothing more than the data they provide. This would be a prototype of a broader total stacking of data exchange while in the present, of course, the participants would have other gigs, gigs for which the fitness company would make them more fit.

There’s no real divide between the physical and the intellectual here: learning to read and write in increasingly sophisticated, powerful and nimble ways can be broken down into parts that can be articulated in various ways no less than gymnastics. And this is what would be put to test and put on the blockchain: specific interventions, exercises, applications, assignments, etc., identified with sufficient precision to receive increasingly useful information from (with that information defined as such, along with its degrees and varieties of usefulness, by other interventions, exercises, applications, assignments, etc.), so as to allow for predictions and betting which, in turn, would serve as a model for real world investing.

But an officer class pedagogical company training its universal translation machine would be equipped to tokenize this artificially created event in a different way, to bring charges against the media outlets themselves—this is why the pedagogy company would have to have a Nomos/Class Action division as well. Then you drag those who believe they can produce the scene and stand outside of it, as shadowy prosecutors, onto the scene as defendants. And in this way you enter onto world scenes, create world scenes, while tokenizing them within a narrative that only the most patient and resourceful (in all senses) could assetize to the point where assets become data.

So far, this sounds like a kind of more complex and indirect barter system, and to make it something else we need to account for the break-up of the monopolistic conditions implicit in these arrangements, something which must occur if, as the name implies, teams are free to subscribe or unsubscribe. New teams, we can assume, will emerge from split-offs from existing teams—if subscribers are dissatisfied with a particular subscriber, a “dissident” teams from within that team would propose a new set of arrangements. (At a certain point it will be helpful to imagine how all this will take place on the blockchain.)

This will be especially interesting because it will be the most uncertain and risky part of the social order, and either directing or predicting which pedagogical practices will turn out the best team members will require prognostications akin to those highly refined and computational ones that currently go in to estimated the future prices of derivatives. So, teams across the board will be competing with each other in a controlled way (through the testing of split-offs) for subscribers but more fundamentally over which pedagogical practices will yield the best future team members. Indeed, pedagogical practices can be sliced up into pieces and assessed at various levels, and one could imagine a team looking forward to gaining access to some students at one institution on a particular track, and other students on a particular track at another institution, and so on.

And they would mobilize the subscriptions needed to maintain those tracks, in exchange for something like “draft choices” in professional sports leagues. This would of course be an offense against the freedom of students to choose from among various possible employers but, again, the situation would not be all that different from what we have now, where the best students have many choices while still being constrained by the degree to which their abilities and interests match a few prestigious firms, while everyone else more or less gets what they can. So, money, in all its forms, is replaced by bets on the future that take the concrete form of using the credit one’s team has with other teams to channel and adapt subscriptions to the pedagogical practices deemed most likely to provide the future team members most like to increase that team’s credit.

Working to turn the current order inside-out, then, would involve converting asset exchanges into data exchanges by shaping exchanges, to the extent possible, on the model of extending the reach of the pedagogical derivative. How far into the future can you buy a derivative? Let’s imagine writing up a futures contract that will end in an exchange conducted 50 years from now. 100 years. For such a contract to be meaningful you’d have to assume a great deal of continuity in the institutions enabling such an exchange—that the goods or services involved in the exchange will still exist in recognizable form, that there will be those able to recognize it in a way that others will recognize sufficiently so that the exchange can be repeated, that something “like” today’s legal and political institutions will still exist (or that there will be those able to make an authoritative decision regarding the legitimacy of the exchange who can establish markers of continuity extending back to them).

That doesn’t mean you don’t build an educational institution, just that if you do it has to be scalable, synced to existing infrastructures, and funded or fundable by sources with assets (otherwise, whence the funds?) but in dire need of data security and, especially, what we could call “anthropomorphic” data security in order to maintain those assets. Agents, in other words, who might have to choose between their governance position within the centered ordinality and the arbitrage position they’ve secured within it. Your educational institution, then, should be designed so as to help such agents make the right choice and see it through.

Idioms as samples and samples as currency: that’s the marker I’m going to lay down here. Currency can certainly be organized around bets on the future: that’s what derivatives are, and there’s a lot more wealth in derivatives than there is in money. Without money providing the store of value for derivatives, the derivatives couldn’t be priced, but if exchange is carried out through data between teams on supply chains that include the supply of future team members, then money isn’t needed. Wealth is distributed in accord with promises—the promise to supply certain teams proximate in the supply chain and their successors, backed by the promises of those pledged to supply you.

Give everyone a rank in the line of succession as options so that the field is saturated. Newcomers enter with a range of rankings and overlapping networks—even if the expectations aren’t high for a particular newcomer, individual or team (and people will be strongly encouraged to enter as teams right out of their schooling or apprenticeship), by giving them a rank, albeit a low one, an incentive is created to make them as fit as possible, if only to make the field of options as strong as possible all the way through. Derivatives can lose all their value if enough potential buyers lose faith in the eventuality of the exchange that will have taken place, but we can’t run out of the future itself.

Idioms would then function as currency insofar as prospective arbiters and brokers on such markets would be revealed as most likely through the deployment of those idioms, by themselves as others. You’d be investing money or something approximating money now while hoping to be paid off eventually by a more or less succession proximate position on a team later. That formulation is itself already very close to idiomization: donate your money so that your designated successor can designate successors. There would already be something different in such an investment, even if on one level it looked like any other: you’d be investing in an attempt to make a market that provides the beginning of an exit from existing markets; once all markets are “made” with increasing explicitness, we will be approaching the transition from markets to the promise and pedagogy based mode of absolute donation to the center.

Even more, it is a mode of inquiry that could be scaled up to the highest global level, including all of those agencies “implicated” in the war through systems of alliances, arms sales, corporate collusion and so on; it could be scaled down to the micro-level, including creating new virtual spaces of judgment within each of the adversaries; and time frames can be prolonged or contracted, with judgments either instantaneous or projected decades or centuries ahead, perhaps as a footnote in some future history book or as a literary allusion. This would really be formalizing, making explicit, the way we already (tacitly) discuss everything, as we never completely set aside basic questions of resentment and reciprocity in our examination of or participation in any event. The best theoretical thinking always aims at making the tacit explicit, which is to say the creation of pedagogical platforms, which is always a technological matter.

In its original form this proposal was to be, in the first instance, a journal, which would publish essays framing events as hypothetical, potential or virtual “cases,” so as to create an ongoing layering of judgment as a civilizational exercise. But this was to lay the ground for the creation of a kind of arbitration firm, as the power of the analysis demonstrated in the essays written for the journal would recommend the practitioners of this mode of inquiry as an impartial arbiter for real world disputes. This would appeal most immediately to parties with genuine, good-faith disputes, with each side believing that if only its side were fully heard, they would be vindicated.

So, the journal/firm was not to be bogged down in legal interpretation in the narrow sense but was, rather, to aim at restoring a “sense” of the juridical under the assumption, indisputable in my view, that we have been witnessing over the past several decades an increasingly irreparable corrosion of the same.

The notion of a prediction market then presented itself (God only knows how these thought thresholds where a new idiom presents itself “happen”). The limit, thus far, of betting upon events is that only an event with an official closure can take bets—sporting events are the most obvious example, as the rules for determining winners and losers are transparent and unchanging. Similarly with gambling in casinos. In the public world, only elections have that kind of closure—and here we can already start to see how betting on elections presupposes the integrity of the process—if it came to be taken for granted that elections were regularly, even if not invariably, fixed, then betting on elections would cease to be possible; or, perhaps, they would take on a very different character, in which one would be betting, implicitly at least, on whether they will fix it this time.

The better a bettor is able to enter the mode of inquiry being modeled, which is to say, the more the bettor scales up his civilizational intuitions and follows events closely, or perhaps creates his own organization or firm to do so, the more successful he will be on the market. Perhaps some successful bettors will join the company or create similar firms of their own. Meanwhile, the company would want to frame all events so as to make the odds essentially 50-50, so that the company, like any bookie, just skims the vig off the top. This might lead to idiosyncratic framings of events—rather, than, say, whether one party is going to be found guilty or liable, the bet will be on the degree or mode of guilt or liability. Hard cases might make bad law but they make good rods for honing meta-juridical thinking on.

Just as with the initial idea for a journal, I would anticipate this prediction market becoming a Schelling Point for all manner of social inquiries and practical projects. One sees occasional references to betting markets today as a way of orienting oneself towards events, but this doesn’t seem to have had any real influence on those events. Thirdness (a reference to Washington’s third man as well as Peirce’s concept of generality and significance created through agreement) would succeed here by generating hitherto unseen and unnamed event clusters that evade the radar of the media and even the world’s intelligence agencies, who would surely take an active interest in its doings.

This can ultimately only be done from within those institutions—all of them—which means what is coming to replace politics is intelligence, in all senses of the word: central intelligence, gathered and generated from within the institutions to be transformed and replaced (in which case their assets are transferred to another owner who will convert them into something other than assets). What, exactly, in capitalist relations is compatible with juridical and disciplinary forms—even if the answer turns out to be “quite a bit,” there is no doubt that creating legal regimes that provide standing to hold firms and individuals accountable for fraud, breach of contract and damages in consistent ways, on the one hand, and facilitating scientific inquiry without regard to profit, on the other hand, would set us on the road to converting property into formalized responsibilities. A “politics” can be devoted to determining what kind of figure at the center would put this question to the test, and to prepare for various possible results.

But the obvious response is to construct a genuinely juridical regime, one which revisits concepts of fraud, harm and standing, and which can construct an order of precedents grounded in transparent data collection that would provide such feedback to companies to ensure “socially responsible” behavior. This would require significant transformations in institutions and the corresponding dispositions of the people, which is the point, especially since those transformations would produce others in a virtuous circle. But, as with everything I argue for, this approach can be addressed directly and explicitly by presently existing political agencies—it implies easily composed “transition programs.”

And the only way to do this is to provide qualitative, incommensurate advantages to governing agencies (not necessarily states—let’s keep all possibilities open) that preserve and enhance data security which, in a more traditional idiom, means centering virtues like honesty, conscientiousness, dedication to the truth regardless of consequences, courage and decisiveness, and so on. So, the meaning of what I say or do now is the likelihood of someone, decades down the road, manning reliably under difficult conditions some bit of infrastructure critical to ensuring the pedagogical conditions of succession within an emergent idiom.

To figure out how particular classes of derivatives might be brought sufficiently within the frame of lawsuits concerning fraud is a question of knowledge and technology—how can sales and movements of money and assets be measured and recorded so that the behavior of legally defined agents can be made reliable enough as to make a system-threatening withdrawal of “faith” extremely unlikely is a problem to be solved through algorithms and increasing computing power. Perhaps a new technological development, or even the scientific development presaging such a technological one will generate new forms of juridical agency.

But while they can’t go up infinitely without destroying the capacity to extract even exclusive sources of income, they could conceivably go down to nothing if we get to a threshold of companies and governments able to protect them that can engage amongst each other in the equivalent of intra-company exchanges. This would not be so much a question of calculating the number of widgets needed for each department as the formation of teams engaged in skunkworks that operate on the logic of Big Men and at least some company founders in taking less for themselves so as to model the kind of teamwork required to sustain circuits of production and distribution.

If the problem of bureaucracy is the problem of the imperative gap, that’s another way of saying that it’s the problem of the disjunction between the occupied and signifying center, which I have been posing as the central problem for the originary hypothesis for several years now. And so the only encroachment upon of infiltration into bureaucracy I can proposed is that same conjunction of data security and singularized succession in perpetuity I have been hammering out: if you practice and demand from others a kind of cultic attention to succession, i.e., the continuity of your practices, including ensuring you have all the information required to guarantee succession, you will not eliminate bureaucracy or create a universally applicable formula for containing or controlling it; you will, rather, tilt the field in the favor of ruthlessness towards bureaucratic tendencies by forcing everyone in the institution to show themselves in the ways they have “sworn” to show themselves.

As with all transactions, the party will be an immense data-gathering operation (requiring an extremely efficient and trustworthy data security arm), and our phobias about data collection will have to be overcome—the party will draw upon data gathered by the financial system and its enemies as well. The entire operation will be a vast, no doubt international, experiment in whether distribution, even in an advanced technological order, i.e., an order comprised or layered and distributed scenes, can be tethered to increasing continuity rather than increasing volatility in occupancy of the center. (Finance is often said to be dependent on “political stability,” but while this might be true generally, it is untrue of those who most forcefully drive the system, which is those best positioned to seek out arbitrage possibilities.)

In addition to libel law, then, patent, copyright and corporate law more generally must be approached from the standpoint of improving data curation—enhancing the uses of a particular sample, which might simultaneously serve inquiries in biology, medicine, pedagogy, science studies, institutional ethical culture, and so on. Whatever interferes with this enhanced world of data exchange in the name of making it easier to discount a particular asset against future earnings is to be targeted. At each point along the way, built into legal strategies and public campaigns, an alternative model of use is to be tied to alternative terms of chartering corporations that bind corporations not to vague social responsibilities but to the highest standards of data curation beyond the specific uses made of the samples by the corporation.

In which case we’re modeling different hypothetical futures, represented by specific, imaged articulations of power and responsibility, needs and abilities. Targeting circulation and utility of data so to create a new set of incentives serves to encroach upon financialization. Property law can be skewed toward the stakes of engineers as against those of investors; investors themselves, as opposed to controlling funds making research and invention possible, are themselves to be converted into curators of intelligence in intense collaboration with the central intelligence. This will require a weaning away of significant groups from the habits of demanding that addressing interests and grievances be the foremost priority of government: demands to be supplied with the kind of data and the resources needed to create more data (including the data of the effects of inventions and their spread across the social order) would come to displace conventional grasping for a piece of the pie. Even if a minority, such a “faction” would have considerable advantage over consumerists in strategizing incremental inroads into power bases within institutions.

This very much includes a party currency, modeled, perhaps, on cryptocurrencies, but just as likely on the exclusive “clubs” promoted by credit card companies, and based on varying degrees of contribution to party activities (while also helping those who contribute what they can, on the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”). The party currency would direct members/users to businesses and activities actually or potentially supportive of or useful to party activities. The boycotts of hostile business and institutions conservatives now lamely endorse could be put on a properly wartime footing.

This, of course, would require a high degree of accountability and transparency within the party. Currency would be modeled as embedded in a better way of life, including the kinds of data exchanges now considered obnoxious but under different conditions (this is the challenge, at any rate) viewed as a form of reciprocal support, mediated through an emergent center. You’d want to push things to the point where all practices participate in making data as currency—helping secure the majority in some state legislature would entitle one to credits to be used in stores that supply party members in exchange for data regarding shopping habits of party members, which are continually shaped by the new businesses interested in entering an exchange with a guaranteed customer base, extensive legal protections, a political party dedicated to enabling producers to do what they do best, and so on.

But once this process is initiated, the different leading monopolies would end up in competition with each other, as the new companies they form or break off out of existing smaller ones would serve one monopolistic concern better than others. The more competition, the more instability and insecurity, the more collusion and counter-collusion, the more fully marketized and monetized the social order: it is only at this point that prices are again needed in order to determine which producers are creating more value for the community. Now, that point at which the leading monopolies would intervene in the smaller ones is the point at which a central authority could behave in exactly the same way, and undermine itself in order to have more direct access to its materials; or, the central authority would act directly on the emergent mismatch between formal designations and actual functioning by inserting teams into the relevant companies on the model I suggested above.

But once this process is initiated, the different leading monopolies would end up in competition with each other, as the new companies they form or break off out of existing smaller ones would serve one monopolistic concern better than others. The more competition, the more instability and insecurity, the more collusion and counter-collusion, the more fully marketized and monetized the social order: it is only at this point that prices are again needed in order to determine which producers are creating more value for the community. Now, that point at which the leading monopolies would intervene in the smaller ones is the point at which a central authority could behave in exactly the same way, and undermine itself in order to have more direct access to its materials; or, the central authority would act directly on the emergent mismatch between formal designations and actual functioning by inserting teams into the relevant companies on the model I suggested above.

Companies that are well established and well run, and that value their reputations, will, of course, charge one another for goods and services, but they might also be more open to various forms of cooperation and exchange where payment can be waived or indefinitely deferred. With enough companies like this, you have your network of subscribers, and below a top-tier of networks, you could have lower tiers that would be more unstable and might need further supervision, or might even rely on money, but the damage done by their failures might also be contained.

We can now add to that social network and surveillance technology. The state, then, perhaps in the form of its various agencies, would be a major subscriber within the networks. The state would be a major “consumer” of technological innovations and the co-ops who want to subscribe to certain forms of technological innovations could do so. (What does subscribing to the state entail? What does the state provide in return? Land, corporate and monopoly rights, airwaves, electronic networks, etc.) The co-op would then be able to provide a better product to its subscribers, and could solicit more subscribers as a result; as a subscriber to its suppliers, meanwhile, that co-op could be more demanding—its greater influence would enable it to get its employees into better co-ops or subscription lists.

This approach is clearly a “decelerationist” one, from which it further follows that innovation will be encouraged but so would efforts to mitigate the effects of innovation on companies, workers and consumers alike. Again, it seems to me that constraints, rather than more targeted interventionist approaches, will be most effective here. Perhaps constraints would determine the ways innovations need to be embedded in existing networks, structures, institutions, and disciplines. Ultimately, it would be simply taken for granted that of course we take a holistic approach to economic and technological developments, once the sociopathic reduction of all corporate decisions to the imperative to maximize shareholder value is a distant memory.

I think the appeal would go in the other direction: sovereign n+1 is not getting something he needs from sovereign n, so he gives sovereign n a chance to revamp operations so as to provide it or, if necessary, goes over the his head and solicits "appeals" from the masons. If the work coming from under n is unsatisfactory from n+1's standpoint, it's likely that some of the more competent and conscientious workers under n are frustrated as well. (If n+1, or the enterprises he oversees, gets everything he needs, what is that mason complaining about in the first place?) I also don't see why the higher up sovereigns couldn't maintain a kind of entrepreneurial fund, which takes "grant applications" from within enterprises at various levels. Those who get the grants could be left to try and make it on their own. It's always good to have some people tinkering around outside of the established channels.

But in an incorporated world, what kind of organization will the sovereign preside over? What kind of non-corporate organization will even be conceivable? The corporation institutionalizes, rationalizes and “routinizes” the founding; the sovereign retains the “charisma” of the founding, and is staffed by those who prefer the “team” to the “roles,” the anomalous to the rule-governed. The sovereign would mostly be chartering and inspecting the conformity of corporations with the terms of the charter—he would need a team of “generalists.” How to select the sovereign himself is a problem, because there’s no reason to assume a hereditary monarch will be up to the task.

Maybe some kind of rotation of the leading CEOs themselves, with each choosing his own team. Every corporation has those with abilities, ambitions and visions stifled by the institution—sometimes, of course, they should be stifled, but the sovereign would want to staff his own team with such “rogues,” who are more interested in innovation and excellence than “playing ball.” They must also be the people most interested in secure sovereignty.

Maybe some of those set free will be more useful in other enterprises or industries, insofar as the education received will be at least partly transferable. And some let free by other enterprises might move to the enterprise or conglomerate in question. We would get the same result: massive investment in education for the sake of a few exceptionally innovative individuals. But now the capital invested in education returns to the investor, while still serving general purposes. We get competition between different education systems and specialized education, while a common, basic form of literacy and numeracy (or relatively standardized tiers of literacy and numeracy) result.

The sovereign could set the standards for work done for his territory—quality standards, workplace standards, use of local materials and firms, environmental standards, etc.—which companies competing for that work would strive to meet, spreading those standards more widely, and establishing them as normative even when not obligatory. Of course, state contracts are a major source of corruption in contemporary society, but that’s in large part because people circulate back and forth between business and government (and other institutions) and so can benefit from all kinds of indirect and legal corruption (government officials going to work as lobbyists for companies they did favors for in office, etc.).

We could better formulate these questions by asking what kinds of spaces analogous to the political one a completely voluntaristic order would generate, and how they would parallel and differ from political spaces. Maybe I should consider it ominous that Marx’s observation that we should aim at making it so that social evolution no longer requires political revolution, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s Promethean portrait of a communist order in his Literature and Revolution seem to me helpful guidelines here, but I don’t. Trotsky, answering Nietzsche’s charge that communism would level all individuals to the egalitarianism of farm animals contended that, among other things, citizens of a communist society will stage heated, society-wide debates over systems of pedagogy—in a fully marketized order, in which we choose our own security service, our own insurance company, our own means of seeing to our children’s instruction, the legal forms of our own neighborhoods, so that titanic arguments over education, environmental, labor, foreign policy, etc., policies are irrelevant, then “social evolution” would likely involve things like demonstrations of different pedagogic methods and different methods of inquiry into all manner of things which would be made fully public for the sake of inviting people to sign up. The only difference between my approach and Trotsky’s is that he doesn’t say how the decisions about which systems are to be favored will be implemented and how people are to choose while I can assign such decisions and choices to the marketplace.

Here is the question, put bluntly: could we build schools or networks of schooling drawing completely upon private donations and tuition and therefore capable of rejecting government dictates tied to government funding—not only on the elementary level, but all the way through university and even graduate and professional study? And would the graduates of those schools (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.) get hired by private businesses or clients, who would in turn be willing to sign waivers exempting their transactions from government interference? Could private courts be established to adjudicate disputes that might otherwise spill over into the public court system?

It seems to me very easy to imagine private agencies contracting with schools and school districts to establish such norms—such entrepreneurial ventures would provide an essential service, and one which could be very easily judged by the contractee: does the student from Georgia who should be an A student according to the norms established and overseen by that agency in fact perform at that level in her new school in Ohio?

And the main role for a politics of redemption today is the joint task of evacuating those areas of government which would need to give way for a politics of redemption, and creating the preliminary or embryonic forms of such a politics, ready to fill the vacuums that will be created given either a favorable political environment or fiscal collapse. There is no need to create utopian maps of a fully libertarian order; the idea, rather, would be to target places where the state is failing and voluntary approaches could be tried. As the Left has always done, it is also useful to test the boundaries and antinomies of the existing legal order, through creative forms of disobedience. And it seems to me that, contrary to the favored arguments of the political class, we want to see much more money in politics—unregulated money, anonymous money, money that will prevent the political class or the media from ever dreaming they can again obtain a monopoly on “legitimate” public discourse.

This line will be drawn, like all lines, by events: in the midst of a commercial culture given over, or in danger of falling into, general fraudulence and corruption, someone and/or some group will come to exemplify fair practices. The establishment of fair practices would first of all be negative—we don’t do all the things our competitors do. But it would eventually become subject to verifiable norms, and embedded in relatively transparent practices, and advertised as an intrinsic part of your experience, as a customer, with that business. The fair dealers would seek each other out and, I think, would be genuinely “authenticated” by the business community and circle of customers once they had weathered some storm—once they had, for example, refused the compromise involved in obtaining some government sponsored monopoly, or abstained from participating in some boom or panic that wiped out other businesses, and ended up intact, perhaps even stronger, precisely due to the values implicit in their “fairness.”

“Credit,” “debt,” and “ledger” are very elementary terms—not Natural Semantic Primes, of course, but easily traced back to the most elementary social forms, and in such a way that we can use them to track the transition from pre-money to monetized communities. What is happening, then, in terms of those constitutive relations, when a scene is constructed in accord with an imperative from the center, involving the imperative exchange between center and periphery issuing in a declarative order produced through the metabolism between declaratives and ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits? An imperative, whether it be a command, demand or anything in between, always looks forward to some exchange—even the most imperious, uncompromising ruler expects petitions from his subjects, who he knows needs to eat, be clothed and housed, or even require clarification on occasion.

Start-ups that bring more of the infra-computable past and the future into the present articulate the anti-sacrificial tendencies on both sides. Such start-ups are a kind of prayer, then: a prayer into the creating world (what Heidegger says has been made into “standing reserve” but we can see as echoes, mirrors, trails and imprints of our imperative exchanges) predicated on faith in the infinite convertibility of that world and a prayer to the nomos, to human organization itself, to the center and to deferral. And any prayer is a renaming, which is necessary because names eventually get mismatched to their objects because they become sites of rivalry—for the same reason there are always mismatches between the nomos and the juridical, which is the same problem at a civilizational level—and renaming is both a technical and financial (insurable and collateralizable) matter, that is, both perfecting the imperative and soliciting the nomos on the expectant scene.

The imperative gap is where the imperative exchanges get worked out and where credit is granted, extended, retracted, forgiven and enforced. It is where tracking and tracing takes place and therefore the interplay of transparency and opacity. Here is where the questions of “citizenship” and “subjectivity” get worked out, as imperative exchanges increasingly take the form of data exchanges. Peirce’s “each and every one of us is an insurance company” remains largely true in this new form, as you prepare, generate, curate and emit data for all the tracking and tracing devices on every expectant scene and in return data assessments are made and disseminated on your behalf by the institutions through which you’ve circulated, providing you with access to positions within those and other institutions.

@Imperius__13 These kinds of groups, and ethnic ones as well, are less important than corporations and similar institutions, which are also less likely to constantly threaten civil war. The purpose of a constitution is to keep conflict within bounds, not to institutionalize war.

I’m not going to say that money will or must be completely eliminated (of course, I’m also not saying it won’t be), but I’m going to hypothesize the possibility so as to bring into focus the relationship between credit and succession as two sides of deferral. To bring credit and succession together, we can consider that money and delegation are two sides of the same problem. In fact, delegation is itself a kind of credit, and conferral of confidence upon someone to advance the commands of the delegator. So, singularized succession in perpetuity would have to solve both problems; or, rather, turn them into problems of data security for teams competing to occupy the center.

And this includes inquiries into the physical world, with the barriers separating humanistic from scientific and technological knowledge relativized to the research in question, as levels within the human, credit, and technological stacks (and boundaries between these types of stacks) are continually probed and reconstructed. Certainly microbial, viral and conceptual transformations are connected in ways we haven’t yet explored, to take just one example. This new ordering, toward which concrete action within the existing order can always be taken, in the form of companies aimed at prolonging the extension of credit, is what I would like to call “Ve/ortexticality.”

Still, there’s a “spectre”—the chances of the evacuation of the outside spread and the emergence of the outside option can never be zero. Center study implies what I think is a unique politics: placing all the bets on a center or prospective or type of pointman so inside as to turn the central bank and central intelligence into a single entity, thereby abolishing both, along with the outside spread and outside option. Everything is to circulate through succession practices. I would also add that, if degree and quality of obedience constitute a bet on the continuance of the pointman, we can say all bets, i.e., investments, are themselves ultimately bets on the degree of oscillation within succession, which is to say how much credit-wrecking each side in the rotation of power is likely to do, with zero being the point at which we have the center study bet.

This assumption would be consistent, I think, with Capital as Power’s definition of capital—the oscillation within succession (and the way it plays out in specific sectors) determines the expected future earnings against which current value is discounted. In this way we bring “politics” and ‘economics” within a single category: confidence in the pointman. It’s obviously, even trivially, true that any investment is ultimately a bet on the regime being able to protect that investment.

The outcome of the respective political, legal and maybe military strategies depends on the character of the occupant of the center and how he has filled out the field of candidates. Determining how to treat the suit places the occupant of the center even more squarely there. He calls in his debts, contracts new debts by making new promises, and penalizes those who are defaulting on their debts to the center. He opens the ledger and writes. If he goes bankrupt, he petitions for an orderly disposition of his assets, which is to say, their conversion into data. Whoever headed the lawsuit is best positioned to succeed him, and the occupant of the center exits the scene gracefully by appointing the victor as his successor, thereby maintaining the line of succession. This, at any rate, is a model to be approximated and broken down into articulable idioms.

Still, sometimes systems need to be shorted, but doing so should always be accompanied by a call option that others beside you will someday be able to cash out but will probably to continue to defer, maintaining it as credit and collateral. Never forget Peirce’s admonition that in the long run every insurance company will go bankrupt, but the meaning of that is we will then be left with the insurance company that was always backing the insurance company, the human power of deferral itself, falling back upon primitives, bereft of our vocabulary drawn from the world of investment.

Liberalism is an anthropological anarchism + the police principle (I’m paraphrasing a remark of Trotsky’s here). The police principle is the source of all the “unprincipled exceptions” constitutive of liberalism, and the anthropological anarchism serves to give free rein to whoever has the reins over the police principle at the moment. But it’s also too easy to be “anti-liberal” because it may be the case that the liberal order was the only one within which the more complex juridical order that we find in the Anglo common law tradition could gestate and reveal its possibilities—a looser hierarchy, I’m guessing, even if merely notional, might have been required for a rich tradition of settling disputes, civil and criminal and, even more importantly, the back-up institutions of credit and insurance to take on quasi-governmental roles.

(It is completely unsurprising that England, beginning in the 17 th century, was the earliest to develop an extensive insurance system, followed by the US in the 18 th and 19 th centuries.) In regimes with a more monopolized sovereign power, insurance would be directly promoted, funded and controlled by the state and would therefore have a less rich vocabulary of faults, responsibility, and, more broadly, intentionality. New modes of governance would insist on recouping all this.

I will now introduce another, extremely important, consideration: anyone working on anything is striving to become a monopolist. A novelist doesn’t necessarily want to be the only novelist (although on some level, I think he kind of does) but he certainly wants to be the only one of his kind of novelist. We can revise Girard’s claim that all desire is for being to all desire is desire for irreplaceability. And irreplaceability is a kind of monopoly. This is obviously the source of mimetic conflict but Hobbes and others were right to see the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence as a way of capping mimetic rivalry and we can say the same thing about all other monopolies.

In doing so we can draw upon all the vocabularies bequeathed us by the institutions of deferral: we insure ourselves; we make deposits and withdrawals, invest, let interest accrue, short and buy put and call options, indemnify, copyright, trademark and patent, witness and subpoena, algorithmize, etc. Every sentence then becomes a summoning of the archives, or a search term, as well as a rich source of data deposited in the archive. That would be a likely scene of debt and deferral, upon which the distinction between forgiving and collecting what is owed is gradually eroded because the distinction between word and token would be dissolved in the sample. Generational debt would be forgiven once a progeny arrives who can re-found the corporate order.

out of the left and now being at least nudged out of the right makes this a perfect time to separate from both and prepare to engage directly with companies and organizations participating in the remaking of US sovereignty. There is a path to creating a new center here.

So, we’re all indebted to the center—this is originary, not modern, but what is modern is that the value of our debt is determined by expectation of future earnings. You may, personally, be all paid up, but inflation fueled at least in part by debt expansion can whittle away at what you own so that you own very little, and perhaps require you to work longer and harder than you would have and perhaps even re-enter indebtedness. Borrowing done to invest in a new technology that is expected to be valued at X-amount Y years down the road and which can in turn be collateralized and borrowed off of and broken up and sold off in pieces will determine the value of whatever it is you are capable of doing—the value, that is, of your “gifts,” “advanced” to you by the center with expectations that your intelligence, upbringing, and endowments more generally will become part of the circulation of goods.

Think in terms of the original American colonies as grants by the Crown to individuals and companies of land—we could imagine that the current states would still be owned by those families and companies but over time this mode of governance would have to adapt to the proliferation of claims between subjects, actual and potential, across the governed territory, even just in order to prevent the emergence of “untabernacled” populations outside of the terms of belonging that could be leveraged by other sovereigns, leading them to eventually become data security firms anyway. The development of technology, or the technoscene, or stack of scenes, is thus monitored by Thirdness in terms of its conformity with the needs to formulate and settle cases.

This may be Derrida’s “archi-writing,” appropriated by Bernard Stiegler in his theory of technics—tertiary memory, the externalization of the depositing in memory which, taken to its conclusion, means the emptying out of our interiors and leaving us with practices of literacy prompted by an ever more intricately designed environment. Commitment to a project—a building project, a travel or exploration project, a colonization or terraforming project, a research project—that can only be conceived of as multigenerational cannot be funded under capitalist conditions—at any point its continuation might be estimated to be of less value to its investors than some other potential investment; the support of a state, meanwhile, depends upon changes in leadership, which is radically discontinuous in “liberal democracies” (or debt enforcement/forgiveness agencies), and so far not at all guaranteed in a party system like China’s.

We are always, in every utterance, tallying up receipts, marking up our ledgers and ourselves as ledgers. I would want everyone’s language to eventually curve towards, be drawn to the gravity of, these inscriptural idioms—they should turn up as a better way of saying what you were in the midst of already saying. Inscriptural idioms are anti-resentment because they refuse to compare—comparison is itself always resentful, asking why the standard is applied differently here. Standards are always rules of thumb derived from a mixed bag of interpretable precedents and every case is singular. If a judgment in some case causes that feeling of resentment to start creeping into your utterance imagine some mode of deferral that would extend the one enacted in that judgment.

The tokenization of resentment lies, then, in the margins around and generated by commands, in the remainder of the demands those commands ravel up and abolish. Here we can loop back to Bichler and Nitzan’s definition of power as “expectation of obedience,” which I now notice has an interesting symmetry with “expectation of future earnings.” Everything that we have, whether it be freedoms, wealth or personal and even physical attributes, has been “given” us in some irreducible sense, which is to say “loaned” to us, because gifts always imply reciprocity. So, to recall Peirce’s “we are each and every one of us an insurance company,” we are each and every one of us a bundle of assets, most of which go unnamed and untokenized but nevertheless “backing” those assets that are (and the tacit assets might be made explicit at any moment).

Creating a nomos is the work of exploration, conquest and settlement, and is therefore the stuff of sci-fi but can also apply to earthly forms like the foundation of institutions and such things as start-ups, which therefore supply us with something like our modern myths. And events represented within the juridical will always refer back to this foundation, which itself always settles into a juridical form—which, though, in reality it always had as the discovery or foundation will have always had its origin in some charter or grant. (This is why an especially effective and somewhat cruel way of debunking such origin stories is by finding some legalistic sleight of hand that gave one or another of the founders the rights later exploited economically.

Sovereignty and its limits are engaged here, in an embattled entanglement represented by Shelley’s poem. The way of sustaining this tension is by acknowledging the dependence of centrifugal on centripetal representations and the ascendance of scribal activity to the primary means of exercising sovereignty: it’s no longer the case that the sovereign keeps knowledge-makers on retainer, so to speak; now, the originary acts of sovereignty is some enhancement of data security, some idiom that works to attract, arrange and protect samples. Treating samples pays our debt to the iterative center in the form of data security as we study with increasing resolution the conditions under which we will have been doing what we’re doing.

A lot of exchange, and especially on the largest scale, takes place without the direct exchange of money. If one large company has steady suppliers, the movement of goods and performance of services can take place with nothing more than adjustments in bank accounts. The more reliable the suppliers in your supply chain relative to alternative sources, the less often you will need to revisit the terms of the exchange—monopolies would organize supply chains with the greatest ease. But monopolies are never sufficiently monopole, and must always keep an eye out even for distant or potential competitors. They must invest in ensuring that governing institutions due not provide favorable conditions for actual or possible competitors, and that financial institutions provide the outside spread they need to keep investing.

In the end, as Peirce pointed out, even the best insurance company, with the most sophisticated actuarial information and probability calculations and the most responsible direction, will go broke—the black swan will happen—and it is precisely at this point that we will find out whether the community has acquired sufficient credit beyond the measurable in conventional terms to find some way to make after the same as before.

The state, then, would be the cult of data security—and what counts as “good data” is whatever enables you to know that the imperatives you’re issuing first of all _can_ and then _are_ being fulfilled. And this includes knowledge of the temporality of the imperative—the imperative is the source of temporality, as both the ostensive and the declarative are concerned with constructing presents. We are still fulfilling imperatives issued thousands of years ago, jostling for our attention with imperatives issued seconds ago and we should work on crafting imperatives that our successors will be fulfilling thousands of years from now, while also issuing the imperatives with much closer expiration dates that are nevertheless preconditions for the more “eternal” ones to be “platformed.”

The disciplinary, I would now say, circles back to the ritual (commemoration, distribution from the center) by taking accounts of ritual and the juridical. The account—record keeping regarding inputs and outputs, debits and credits—is the first form of writing, and it is all that writing ever does—account for where everything is on the scene. The disciplinary creates new scenes upon which the records of other scenes can be audited, so those scenes can be disassembled and reassembled. Money is itself just another form of account keeping and therefore of writing or inscription. The modern derivative represents a disciplinary space that is both deranged (a kind of pure weaponry) and an almost perfect inversion of the kind of disciplinary activity that must eventually replace it (the articulated system of imperatives).

Narratives revolve around exemplary figures whose stories are also a source of proverbs, by-words, sayings, and so on. We can assume that scribal learning begins by having students repeat and memorize the most widely shared versions of these idioms, which comprise, more than an analysis of grammar or lexicon, the language of the order. This training prepares the student to handle more complex and ambiguous versions of the idioms, and eventually—perhaps only the most advanced and trusted—to participate in revising, filtering, collating and archiving the collected texts of the scribal community. Treating the ancient Hebrew scribal communities as exemplary (yes, I am choosing them), I feel increasingly confident in asserting that this textual legacy amounts to the preservation, refinement and legitimation of a deed of inheritance, ultimately anchored in land and traced back to a trust, or bailment. Literary culture is a kind of legal and accounting culture, through which debts are ascertained, sorted out, repaid and deferred.

This contracting relation, then, is different than the direct delegation attempted in the Soviet-style states insofar as different businesses are allowed to compete for the contracts, allowing private enterprise to serve as a kind of realm of experimentation that the state can engage in cost-free, since if one contractor goes out of business it will always be possible to replace it, perhaps with remnants of the failed company, perhaps with a spin-off of a more successful company. Over time, monopolies and near monopolies will arise in the most essential industries, where long-term planning and consistency in standards is necessary, but it’s in the state’s interest never to let the monopolies be completely beyond challenge—we can see the emergence of an upstart company in some established industry as the state or some faction within it either pressuring the leading contenders to up their game or having decided they are unsalvageable. At the same time, these quasi-monopolies penetrate the state, which really can’t have any way of distinguishing between various initiatives without the guidance of established figures in the field.

The alternative to isolated individuals referencing vague and unclearly defined “rights” against increasingly global institutions is the institution of justice in the team. Everyone really does already “belong” to various teams, which do sometimes gather and control data and negotiate with other institutions on our behalf. If your employer is negotiating with a health care provider on behalf of the entire company, it is your employer who is the juridical actor, with “rights” and seeking “justice.” How your employer allocates agency and voice within the institution is another question—within that frame, you may be a juridical agent, with your employer as final judge.

I have compressed this condition into the concept of “data security,” a very everyday matter, of course (data security companies proliferate) but also a entry into “transcendence” insofar as one scene is the source of data for another scene which opens each scene onto all the others while making the problem of creordering them all perpetual. The tensegrity of the originary hypothesis as a scientific proposition lies in its identification of the particular form of data comprising the human scene: signs, or representations, as the deferral of violence; or, let’s say, measures of the potential intensity of mimetic violence in the form of measures taken to measure and therefore delay the succession of incremental intensifications.

Such an approach enables a much more precise accounting for one’s ledger of exchanges with the center, which records or inscribes in one’s practices and hypotheses what one has been given (what has happened to one), what one has taken (reassembled into doings) and the distributory logic or nomos according to which one gives back. These circuits form an infrastructure which must be locked in and tended to and the elements of which must be made increasingly interoperable. In other words, you want the most precise and comprehensive vocabulary for ensuring that if you cheat in your life it will show up and become an unavoidable reality for you.

This would be a genuinely hypothetical and paradoxical logic, with the thinker and speaker influencing the spread of probabilities and therefore ultimately coming to do so more deliberately. There’s a place for markets here, but not as an ontology which manifests anthropological truths; rather, markets are made so as to test out more precise “bets” on various scales, and thereby elicit scenes upon which the relations between ostensives, imperative, interrogatives and declaratives can be better known, which means better practiced and enacted. “We are each and every one of us an insurance company,” as Peirce, singling out one particularly innovative and representative institution of 19th century America, insisted.

And, as Peirce also insisted, every insurance company, however well run, endowed, actuarily calculated, hedged, etc., will go broke in the long run (what we can now call the “black swan event”). But the long run need never arrive and our vocation as humans is to defer it for as long as possible. There is always the center, and the center is nothing more than the increasingly dense self and other-referentiality of all the intelligence we produce so as to further defer the long run. “Prediction” has become a kind of menacing boogeyman for GA, the harbinger of “dictatorship” and all kinds of other nasty things (but if we are to treat events as inevitable, shouldn’t they be predictable?

The hypothesis I’m presenting here is also perfectly consistent with the hypothesis I previously entertained, regarding the Hebrew Bible as a product of scribal culture, rooted in the pedagogy of literacy issuing in iterations and variations of the kernels of wisdom literature, expanding them into narratives, often narratives that permeate legends and chronicles of kings and battles. Training for the writing and preservation of contracts, treaties, grants, and ledgers recording debts would have been among the central concerns of scribal pedagogy and would have provided a vocabulary for describing our broader exchanges with each other and reality.

The first writing is the first designation of property and the first token of exchange and issuance of debt. Implications must follow from this. When an entry is made of “3 cows” (with 3 ideographs of a cow and then a single ideograph with the number 3) in a ledger, and this is copied onto an envelope or packet designating the contents of a delivery, and this same envelope can then be used to promise someone else a future delivery of those items then we have the origin of writing tied up with the origin of property, trade, currency and debt. There may be no necessary reason to treat this co-origin as telling us anything about writing, specifically, and trying to figure out, say, how jotting down a few notes for myself to develop later (maybe by texting myself) has an intrinsic relation to ownership, money and debt.

You can see this in every discourse simply by noting who the discourse thinks should be doing what, or what actions deemed necessary by the discourse have had the doer omitted. Discourse should in that case aim towards producing nothing but idioms that work as redeemable tokens—words that only have meaning insofar as they entail an obligation and lay out the terms of the receipt of that debt by its holders. I can assert one of my oldest idioms here: if you imagine the kind of sovereign who could do what you say you want done in such a way that you can acknowledge it has been done you are imagining a sovereign who wouldn’t care what you want and would do something different from it. So, cut to the chase, peg your desires to the center, and work on the balance sheet, the debits and credits, the forgiveness and enforcement, an occupant of that center capable of singularizing succession might take as a program.

We hypothesize swapping the anthropological vocabulary derivative of central banking (with concepts like “self-interested individuals” and “market forces”) with a new minimal vocabulary derivative of the center. We are indebted to Eric Gans’ Originary Hypothesis and its discovery of the center: the paradoxical locus of attention that constitutes every social scene. Thinking through the center, and the transactions humans have with the center, reveals the “economy” as nothing more than an ideological representation of our more primary debt relationship with the center. This new vocabulary enables us to trace this originary indebtedness to the center through its various manifestations in money, banking, derivatives, succession, and sovereignty.

> In political money, accounting follows the logic of redistributive states, of the accumulation and distribution primarily of grain. Writing appears to have emerged in service of this accounting, and to have developed as an extension of earlier token-based accounting techniques that go back to the early Neolithic. Ever since we’ve had agricultural surplus, we’ve had technology to account for it. (ibid.)

> This latter form of accounting is a process of creating new, persistent computational spaces outside our brains to represent—and thereby manage—reproduction on a much grander scale. It constitutes a new medium for denominating and discharging obligations—ultimately, a new medium of money. But with this, it implies a new kind of obligation, a new way to exert power over an individual’s future, a new kind of bondage. We will have to return later to the deep association between slavery, violence, accounting, and money. (ibid.)

Liquidity is maintained by the dealer’s constant bet or faith that the outside spread will be able to cover him in time to meet the inside spread. We won’t pursue Drumm’s complex argument further here, but it’s already possible to see that something like a “lender of last resort” is constitutive of any market. And even those providing the outside spread might find themselves illiquid, as they also depend upon collateralized assets that might not be sellable at the price needed to cover debts being called in on the other side of the ledger. Drumm doesn’t say this but being a value investor must be nothing more than the dealer magnified, with a larger portfolio of assets distributed in such a manner as to hedge more substantially all other investments. In a long enough run, enough hedges will come up short, and this will directly raise the question of sovereignty—a point on which Drumm is also very helpful. We will present this part of his discussion more briefly.

> the elements of corporate capitalization—namely the firm’s expected earnings and their associated risk perceptions—represent neither the productivity of the owned artefacts nor the abstract labour socially necessary to produce them, but the power of a corporation’s owners. In the capitalist order, it is power that makes the owned artefacts valuable to begin with. Moreover, the power to generate earnings and limit risk goes far beyond the narrow spheres of ‘production’ and ‘markets’ to include the entire state structure of corporations and governments. (8, italics in original)

What constitutes the power of the corporation’s owners is precisely their access to the outside option, which is to say control over a political order which is organized as an immense debt enforcement agency with increasingly centralized power, but which has a high degree of flexibility with regard to who holds the levers of nominal, juridically legitimated power. The outside spread is leverage over the outside option. It’s not just a question of the quasi-bribery involved in funding political campaigns and candidates but of the ownership of media that can elevate or sink candidates or movements, the foundation of philanthropic institutions that engage in long-term planning regarding managing paths to political leadership and the establishment of think tanks with close connections to the media and universities that shape public opinion and the broader legal environment.

> the organization of learning, once the prerogative of state, church and community, is now increasingly capitalized—even when the teaching itself is still publicly administered. The process is discounted directly by its private suppliers—particularly the publishers of journals, textbooks and databases, whose profits margins can reach 100 per cent (Bergstrom 2001: 186–87). Education is also discounted indirectly insofar as it shapes preferences and mutes criticism, and in so doing helps boost profit and reduce risk (recall John D. Rockefeller’s pronouncement that his investment in the University of Chicago was the best he had ever made). (162)

A few observations seem worth making here. First, this is a mode of power that would be transferred to any functional non-capitalist political order: once we have probability, statistics and, lets add, massive databases for them to operate on, any future authority will be “futuristic,” that is, determining current spending and investment based upon increasingly predictable likely results. This is simply the form the center takes in a desacralized order. So Bichler’s and Nitzan’s analysis, while certainly “anti-capitalist,” doesn’t have the same moral charge as Marx’s concept of “exploitation.” Indeed, they are working more in a Veblenian tradition, thinking in terms of financialization (which they equate with capitalization) as sabotaging potentially beneficial technological development.

The space of the derivative is the true capitalist church. We would attempt to describe the derivative (a notoriously difficult affair) as follows. There is to be some exchange that will take place in the future. It will be an exchange where the debt is discharged at once: money for an asset. It is possible to be on both sides of this exchange, but in two separate markets. One can buy the asset on one market and sell it for more on another and gain an arbitrage profit. The construction of the derivative extends the instant of that future dual exchange to the present purchase of the derivative. In other words, that future exchange is itself an asset that can be bought and sold: the derivative is the bet on that future exchange.

There is a great deal of knowledge, skill, and other qualities like initiative and even courage that is involved in the derivative hunt, but this is the case for many rituals. In the end, the derivative constitutes a ritual because part of the knowledge and skill (and so on) involved is directed towards predicting the behavior of others while shaping that behavior. There is very much a scene of the derivative, and this ritual scene is the subject of Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies, edited by Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin; we will focus, though, on The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk and Time, by Edward LiPuma, one of the contributors to Lee and Martin’s volume.

We can even assign a date to the emergence of capitalism, and a place: late 17th century England, when, as Christine Desan shows in her _Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism_ , the state authorized banks to create money by funding the national debt, replacing the state as the creator and distributor of money and introducing the radical new idea of individual self-interest as the source of economic growth and therefore public good. Whatever adds to the wealth of the bank adds to the potential wealth of the state, and what adds to the wealth of the bank is loaning money to enterprises with the highest rate of expected future earnings, at least on the face of it, but one can imagine other imperatives entering into loaning and investing that might involve nothing more than increasing the comparative advantage of one firm or sector relative to others.

What characterizes capital as a mode of power is that it strains while confusing the juridical and scientific scenes. “Economic” practices used to be firmly located within juridical boundaries, whether it be within the essentially gift structure of feudal exchange, or the chartered markets regulated by monarchs and controlled by guilds. Capitalism took shape within the corporate form within which it continues to reside, but there’s no real way to contain finance within the juridical form—those agencies capable of generating currency and monetary wealth through debt, among other means are, creating the very terms which the justice system would seek to control.

All social institutions are more or less primitive modes of data collection, storage and interpretation—aesthetics, laws, justice, war, business, technology, etc.—but they are specifically these forms of archiving; so to realize their true character (in both senses of “realize”) is not to discard their shell and making them directly productive of quantifiable forms of knowledge; rather it is to make explicit and enhance the specific form of ostensivity each yields which, if it goes to the point of transforming the institution beyond recognition an exhaustive narrative of that transition will inform the new institution and this narrative will be guided by the solution of the fundamental social problem, the succession problem, through singularized succession in perpetuity.

I’ve tended to avoid the word “team” which seems too “corporate” (which means I haven’t been quite ready to take in all the intelligence offered by companies, and that’s something to fix), but, as is often the case, checking out the online etymological dictionary adds an interesting dimension. Here, we see that “team” in Old English (and its Germanic roots) includes notions of “brood,” “race” and “band,” among other meanings, which to me connects it strongly to notions of “breeding,” which I find extremely interesting and helpful. To put together a team is to engage in a kind of breeding process, which involves selecting, mating, looking into lineages, and so on. It may be a metaphorical breeding practice, but this is another case where this continuum between the literal and metaphorical is suggestive.

What can count as “proof” even now, when large portions of the population disbelieve in events that for other portions serve as a bedrock of their political and historical theologies? All information is someone’s disinformation, so maybe governance by blackmail dies of its own over-saturation. The kind of governance by intelligence I’m suggesting here would therefore have to look significantly different, as it could only be intelligence that increases in verifiability and acceptance by proving itself capable of serving sovereign functionality for institutions and companies that can only continue exist, however questionably ethical their goals, if such sovereign functionality is maintained.

This would also provide for a better distribution of power and responsibility across the social order and, while relying on systematic recording, measuring and monitoring devices, does not raise the kind of issues we are used to invoking when demanding some identity, as citizen or member of some other group, be recognized and protected by the state. Peirce’s declaration that we are each and every one of us an insurance company undergoes the not so great translation into we are each and every one of us a site of data exchange overlapping with myriad other such sites. There are plenty of things going on in your body regarding which intelligence can be gathered without any input from you, while there are also plenty of things that do require your descriptions and self-observation; this is even far more the case with your mind and brain where we can set aside attempts to define the contours of “respect,” “autonomy” and so on and set our sights on making each of us of the best carrier, recorder and reporter of data inseparable from our historical location in the world.

Aiming at global dominion is really no different, morally, than founding a start-up which always wants to go, as Peter Thiel says, from zero to one. Nobody loves competition for its own sake—everyone wants to win—and, if you’re right, or you’re the best, why shouldn’t you win? We don’t have to be Kantians to insist that your victory is likely to be more enduring and beneficial if you actually deserve to win, which is to say if you prove best at synthesizing scattered practices into a new stack. There’s no other way to win today, which is why we can set aside the fear of hearing anyone say they want to win, thereby setting in motion a destructive circle of violence—once we say you can only win by instituting “best practices,” through education, training, delegation, and anti-fragility, then there is no more need to fear the conquering spirit.

But reading against the grain of money does lead to imagining its extreme limitation, to the point of its disappearances, at least as a thought experiment. If money serves the same purpose as could be served by spies or plants or, let’s say, sensing and measuring agents directly responsible to central authority, then we could formulate a kind of “equation”: the more that money is minimalized, the more pervasive the sovereign sensorium must be. However “appified” all this sensing and measuring might be, there will always be authorized individuals making decisions. (One of the comical aspects of the systematic and often bizarre censorship exercised by social media corporations like Google, Twitter and Facebook is the fact that, for all the sophistication and complexity of the algorithmic-driven data collection and sorting, in the end the specific decision to suspend this or that account is made by some neurotic, hyper-sensitive, peer pressured, semi-educated 20-something.)

Capital is a distribution of power aimed at solving the succession problem by constraining the possibilities—no ruler can rule against capital. Succession within capital is solved by having the enterprise serve as a conduit through which state decision making circulates through disciplinary practices that facilitate the further abstraction of subjects from practices that obscure them in some way from the corporate-state center. Next up in corporate leadership will be someone who can plug the disciplines into the state through the corporation. So, the names of these processes identify sites of inquiry into the succession problem.

It would seem, then, that capital and industry share a common origin. Charles Sanders Peirce’s assertion that “we are each of us an insurance company” captures this common origin of the new mode of inquiry animating industry and capital. There can hardly be a better example of “capitalization” than insurance, which attributes a current value to the insured’s life (or well-being, or as Bichler and Nitzan point out, to some particular part of the anatomy—a leg for a model, an arm for a quarterback, etc.) based on expected future earnings; while, at the same time, is modern science, which is really applied math, anything more that the determination of probable future outcomes in accord with the data collected regarding some current state of affairs?

And yet—even the most gigantic corporations don’t possess armies or nukes. That there must be some distinction between state and capital is in fact consistent with their insistence that some understanding of the good life, irreducible to industry, would have to inform the ends of industry. I can call that articulation of industry “power,” because “power” holds no pejorative connotation for me. Nitzan and Bichler’s analysis makes clear that capital could never really establish anything like a model of the good life, as it is nothing more than capitalizing more and more of the planet. In fact, whatever is good would be good because it has not yet been capitalized, or insofar as it has not been completely capitalized, but that good thing would then immediately become a target of capitalization.

The fact that corporations need to be chartered by the state, which could in principle revoke any charter once the corporation ceases to serve its declared primary function means that the primacy of the state over economic agencies is already conceded, even in liberal societies. Indeed, the prodigious technological developments of modern Western societies owes far more to its enduring corporate structure than to more recent inventions like liberalism and democracy.

The community would be converted into a mass of competitive enterprises. Some would do better in the competition, and would put the less successful out of business, buy up the pieces and equipment of failed companies, hire the former owners, and so on. The trend would be toward a hierarchy of monopolies, in which case supply chains could be agreed upon by the companies themselves. The real purpose of establishing a market is to break up one system of distribution and create another. The market would essentially cancel itself, and we would end up with what is essentially a single company supplying all of the society’s needs, unless the more powerful monopolies undertook to introduce competition at the lower levels in order to provide themselves with a wider range of available products and workers.

All social conflicts can’t be reduced to this fluctuation, but all social conflicts are “processed” through it. This is most obviously the case for everything grouped under the concept of globalization, most especially movements of capital (at the “high” end), especially financial, and migration (at the “low” end). Globalization represents a raising of the threshold at which the paradox of power is made explicit: global corporations have been released from obligations to any central authority and construct their own command chains, which include governments as subordinate partners; advocates of increased migration exercise power across borders that national states find it difficult to counter.

In large part this book is a critique of (strategy for entering and transforming) the secular disciplines. The project, or imperative, implicit here is to roll back the power circulation that takes the form of equalizing abstractions (whether of money or votes) into abstractions conducted by formalized and explicit power hierarchies. I’ve been suggesting that rolling back money and votes is conceivable—if one considers, for example, how much of market activity is mediated by informal networks among agents who have been authorized by some form of power, it is easy to imagine minimizing the effects of market signals on economic activity—indeed, it’s possible to imagine abolishing economic activity in itself, and “incorporating” corporations as one kind of institution among many others within a well governed social order.

If everything is chartered—corporations, profit and non-profit, subordinate units of government—as, in fact, is already the case, then as individuals we are always already all chartered up. Questions of social order then come down to clarifying the terms of the charters issued at all levels, and the only agency capable of doing that is the sovereign, and sovereign agents. Charters bind all agencies to the imperatives of the center. To the extent that we’re all agents of the sovereign, even if not to the same degree of officiality, our main contribution to public discourse is clarifying the operations of the institutions we participate in in terms of their charters and our own competencies.

We live in a liberal, capitalist order—the two are interdependent, but not identical. The liberal subject is the capitalized subject, who has been discounted (and participates by discounting himself) against expected future earnings. If you imagine what you expect to be “worth” 10 years from now, 20 years, 30 years, etc., you can put a “value” on all your present “investments”—and then you can decide between different investments based on their respective expected earnings. From a strictly capitalist standpoint, this would be calculated monetarily, but even the most successfully capitalized subject wants something other than and irreducible to money.

“Big government” left-liberal political economy, meanwhile, always presupposes an adversarial relationship between agents in the private economy—all the state does is take sides in that struggle, or sometimes act as a referee. But if we are genuinely to see the central authority as the source of social organization, as, essentially, the owner of the entire territory over which it rules, with subordinate agencies having delegated quasi-managerial powers over the “productive forces, then we should try to formulate that relationship prior to any mediation, like the various departments of a corporation. A corporation has external constraints, of course, but, then again, so does a government: it must show itself a respected and responsible actor on the international scene, whatever its place among an international hierarchy of states. But more important than all this is how to think about the creation, or re-creation, of an ethics, morality and aesthetics that transcends liberal ontology and anthropology.

The market economy, then, becomes a measure of fluctuations around the threshold at which the paradox of power is made explicit. All social conflicts can’t be reduced to this fluctuation, but all social conflicts are “processed” through it. This is most obviously the case for everything grouped under the concept of globalization, most especially movements of capital (at the “high” end) and migration (at the “low” end). Globalization represents a raising of the threshold at which the paradox of power is made explicit: global corporations have been released from obligations to any central authority and construct their own command chains, which include governments as subordinate partners; advocates of increased migration exercise power across borders that national states find it difficult to counter.

Thanks. Yes, this is the argument I would need to counter or incorporate. I start from the assumption that the market could--and necessarily is--dialed up or down in accord with state imperatives, so I want to ask the question: how low could it be dialed down? I want to try to formulate the answer "all the way," but on terms as voluntary as possible so as to frame the market as derogation of power--possibly necessary, possible beneficial, but still a derogation that needs to be accounted for. So, "all the way" is not necessarily a final answer--it's more of a thought experiment to bring out what the features of this more intentional form of cooperation would have to look like.

I would give Seaford’s account primacy, because he is further accounting for how the Greeks became the first fully monetized society, and he also shows how the Greeks systematically connected money to the instability of power relations. Of course, money could have been introduced both ways, and other ways, in differing times and places. What we could say at this point, though, is that money displaces the sacrificial scene, but without abolishing the center-margin configuration constitutive of that or any scene. Insofar as money is established and controlled by the ruler, and so is the market wherein money circulates, we could say that a sum of money represents access to a piece of the center, whatever that entails in a particular place and time.

What would a market, built into which is an acknowledgement of the market’s dependence on central power, on the one hand, and the long term moral and ethical life of workers and consumers, on the other hand, look like? Let’s set aside the policies and governing structure needed to create such a market, and just examine how the people, especially employers and investors, would think and act within it. If I sell heroin, I’m going to keep running out of customers, because they will keep dying or ruining their lives and therefore be unable to pay me anymore. So, I need to keep finding new customers, which I can only do by exploiting unhappy, weak-minded, and desperate people, and making those people no good for anything else, whether it be their families, their jobs, or buying lots of other things.

Such a system requires that the elites be deserving, and seen as deserving, of their position. Achilles is the best fighter—he proves that daily on the battlefield, and if you want to challenge him you may be able to find out for yourself. Who are the richest men in town, or in the nation? We can dismiss Balzac’s witticism about crimes and fortunes—for the most part, at the origin of wealth and power is genuine accomplishment. Not everyone can build a giant, innovative corporation that will last for generations—Henry Ford, John Paul Getty, John Rockefeller and the others were definitely better at something which it is very good to be better at, than others, even if quite a bit of luck and ruthlessness facilitated their rise (exploited luck, and channeling ruthlessness are also worthwhile capacities to possess).

It may be possible that no one really likes “the market.” Eric Gans identifies as the “constituent hypocrisy” of Romanticism that the romantic stance is predicated upon resistance to the market in the name of an irreducible individual distinctiveness, while this distinctiveness is precisely what enables the romantic artist to circulate in the market. The analysis applies to contemporary marketing just as acutely, as the method of marketing is to sell identities that liberate the consumer from the judgments of others, that is, of the market. But anti-marketism characterizes producers no less than consumers: not producer really wants to compete; if it was up to the producer, he would secure a complete monopoly, along with absolute control of the supply chain comprising the production of the goods or services produced.

Here, I’ll suggest that the process of abstraction, under conditions (I’m speculating here) of loosened sovereignty, inter-sovereign rivalry, and relative advantages in transportation technology (like sea-faring) created a new figure, also placed by Graeber at the origin of the modern (European) world: the “adventurer,” a kind of synthesis of warrior and merchant (itself a further evolution of the craftsman). The adventurer is delegated his power by the sovereign—this, in fact, is the origin of the corporation as a politico-economic form. (Not a little of the adventurer remains in our modern CEOs.) But the adventurer, in lands far away, under unprecedented conditions, needing to make decisions on the spot, is in a position to force decisions upon the sovereign.

One fairly inescapable refutation of free market ideology is the way each new technological development leads almost immediately to gigantic monopolies. No one even bothers to go through the motions of saying we should find competitors for Facebook or Google. But there are probably new innovations, creating new megaliths, yet to come, which might yet marginalize them—less by creating a better Facebook, though, than something rendering Facebook obsolete. There are certain predetermined trajectories to the seizure of centrality, and rule through adventurers and scientists encourages such seizures. The government could cut any of these new centers down to size, like it did to Microsoft in the 90s, but secure sovereignty would rule through these companies.

According to Ciepley, mainstream political thinkers through the 19 th century were perfectly aware of all this, and used the words “charter” and “constitution” interchangeably. This argument regarding the USG is part of a larger argument Ciepley has been making, perhaps most prominently in an American Affairs essay , about the fundamentally anti-liberal character of the corporation. Contrary to liberal and libertarian accounts going back to Adam Smith, which see the economy in terms of contracts entered into by individuals and more recently updated by Milton Friedman, who misrepresented the corporation as owned by its shareholders (causing all kinds of mischief), corporations are fundamentally public-private mixtures, established by the state and rooted in medieval social forms—and these institutions, not contractually based partnerships, dominate the modern economy.

Any conceptualization of the government as a corporation, then, has to deal with the question of who has chartered the corporation—it’s enough for a business partnership to have customers, but a corporation, an institution that transcends the lives of those who run it and resists any effort by participants to fold it up by “exiting,” must have a charter, from a real, not notional, sovereign. This is why I think both that the corporate form is the ideal form for the absolutist state and that the state itself cannot be a corporation. (Ciepley points out that most of the European states were in fact corporations, but since that is what allowed the phantom sovereignty to be slipped in, they are not to be emulated in that regard.)

The corporate form has obviously lasted so long, through so many social transformations, because it is an extremely reasonable mode of organization. It is especially remarkable that the corporation has persisted in spite of its being in absolute contradiction to liberal principles—the Enlightenment liberals, and liberals since then, have wanted to get rid of or at least reduce to liberal imperatives the corporation, that remnant of feudal governance, with its fixed hierarchies, it being a quasi-law unto itself, its governance through “status” rather than “contract.” The Left has always been well aware of and suitably outraged by these features of the corporation—they’ve never quite been able to give the abolition of the atrocity of limited liability the high profile they had hoped to, but it’s still there, lurking in the shadows, al though perhaps now more for purposes of blackmail than any real transformation, as the Left has learned to work its will very well through corporations.

Corporations have been so successful (“adaptable”) because they presuppose an absolutist ontology. They presuppose a structured hierarchy prior to the individuals that will enter that hierarchy. We can ordinarily assume that those who originate the corporation and first acquire the charter will themselves fill those roles—perhaps that would often be stipulated in the “application” (much like the US Presidency was designed with its first occupant in mind)—the corporation will be designed to perpetuate that originary relationship and purpose. That’s absolutist ontology: any enterprise has a founding and a founder; the founder has “seconds” of various kinds (a “board”); and the enterprise is then ready to mobilize people and resources.

It's not a typo--the state should be made up of corporations but itself needs to be outside of the corporate structure--because who would have charted the state corporation. Since you speak of "selling," though, i would certainly agree that what you propose would be an immense improvement over what we have now. I'm more optimistic than you, probably because in my anthropological understanding, humans as a species are founded on "peace" (the deferral of violence) not war.

I don't think the sovereign can be a corporation, for this reason. The sovereign is a "legal entity," insofar as each new sovereign doesn't just spring from the ground and rule based completely on his own, spontaneously and unanimously recognized capacities. Like any role, the sovereign is defined by that role: a "shoemaker" is also a "legal entity," even if not in the same terms as a corporation. What makes the sovereign a legal entity is that he defines, recognizes and constrains all the other entities in the tradition of sovereignty over those entities. That's the "outside": being both the source and effect of the legal traditions.

That focus has remained because it is the original one—al though one finds in Jewish, and I would imagine Christian, theology, the notion that the tremendous creativity of God flows through those created in His image, I think that the far more consequential reading of the Moasic revelation has been to set God’s creativity in opposition to the creativity of the Alpha, to whittle the alpha down to size. Modern consumer society is the reign of Big Corporations that stay big by inciting our consumer resentment against all forms of bigness. Gans locates the separation of the esthetic from ritual in the emergence of the Big Man, upon which the artist to whom we willingly subordinate our attention is modeled: hence the masterpiece as the highest form of art, dependent upon a passive and awestruck audience.

If the alt-right finds coherence by insisting upon a strictly probabilistic reading of reality, i.e., a full acceptance of “human biodiversity,” then it might turn into the incarnation of the fully algorithmic social order that digital civilization points towards. As more and more safety features and feedback mechanisms are automated, the world will come to “read” each of us as a particular aggregate of probabilities, not only when it comes to insurance, health care and policing, but employment, investment decisions, environmental policies, perhaps even the selection of political representatives and judges can be left to finely tuned algorithms—and perhaps, as biotech advances, sophisticated algorithms will enable some form of eugenics.

Still, when leftists assert that American institutions and principles (the favoring of free enterprise, the insistence that “all men are created equal,” the expectation of minimal government interference in daily life, etc.) are really “white” institutions and principles, they have a point. We could get even more specific and say they are Anglo institutions and principles, dating back in their most explicit forms to Lockean liberal individualism but even much further back to medieval patterns of land ownership, family formation, and the relative weakness of the British monarchy. And, who knows, maybe even further back.

If we speak of the “interests” of a particular group, we imagine some political center that could address those interests, and favor or disfavor them in relation to other interests. New inventions only take place, are exploited, made profitable, and disseminated under conditions where factories and laboratories are not constantly attacked and raided, where there are schools producing literate and numerate individuals, where there is money that is not completely worthless, and much more. The inventor presupposes that he (whether it be the scientist himself or the company he works for) will be recognized as sovereign over his invention—even if we set aside copy rights and patents, even other inventors or manufacturers who take and benefit from his invention know what the source of that particular addition to the sum of human capacity is, or at the very least know that there had to be a source. They know that someone had to be sovereign over certain materials in a particular time and place, and other conditions, themselves guarded by some form of sovereignty, was necessary for that sovereignty to be exercised.

The question for companies like Google, in a time when rulers rule by undermining sovereignty, is whether it is best for them to support a mode of sovereignty that will let the company do what it does best (gather all of human knowledge, organize it and make it available according to increasingly powerful algorithms) while insisting upon (always yet to be determined) ultimate deference to the imperatives of a sovereignty that as much as possible wants to let Google be Google; or, to directly interfere with, participate in and further confuse sovereign powers by surrendering their own sovereignty as they curry favor with various interest groups, bribable politicians, demographic forecasts, and so on.

It’s very likely that many transnational corporations are more stable and certainly far better run than pretty much any state, and will have to enter the breach in preserving some form of order if social divisions and deterioration continue. But they will never be able to do so on their own, and will have to partner with whatever local and national authorities can establish themselves—but such partnerships, to be effective, must be asymmetrically tilted toward the sovereign.

He is not adhering to the “principle” of good workmanship—he is just clarifying and enhancing his mode of discipline. The extraction of some “principle” out of this is derivative of the real set of relations involved. His own discipline leads him to acknowledge the need for a sovereign, so that others will not steal his materials, provide him with adulterated materials with impunity, force him violently into subservience to criminal ends, and so on. The sovereignty of the craftsman over his conditions and means entails an imagination of sovereignty: a sovereign that ensures the level of social discipline is such as to support his own practice.

Sovereignty is absolute insofar as it is absolute all the way down the line—if companies and workers, teachers and students, husbands and wives, general, corporals and privates, and so on, all fulfill their duties to each other the sovereign will be absolute in having nothing to do; since that will never be completely the case, what the sovereign has to do, and is more absolute the more it does it, is enforce those duties where their abandonment is most egregious and evident.

The government doesn’t need wiretaps on specific people’s phones, and grizzled detectives sitting in a room across the street with headphones on eating pastrami sandwiches and drinking coffee all night—all you need is universal phone records and an algorithm to search for relevant patterns. The implications, to take one of many examples, for traditional notions of justice, are clear: if we once moved from barbaric means of determining guilt by “trial by ordeal” to the method we have now, the flaws of which are becoming increasing evident and intolerable, of collecting and weighing “evidence,” presenting that evidence before an ‘impartial” jury, with both “sides” represented by an attorney, we are now likely to move to the use of algorithms to search and analyze the official records of anyone you are considering hiring, selling a home to, letting into your place of business, etc.—who cares about such arcana as guilt and innocence if we can know, within “reasonable” limits, that the gentleman looking around the store is 8x more likely than average to commit some violent act?

The originary scene bequeaths to us not an ever more inclusive scene, but infinite scenes, overlapping and articulated in infinite and always provisional ways—moral advances, always fragile, come through new ways of mediating between scenes that were previously incommensurable. Even the free market presupposes a civilized order, and then becomes a marker of that order insofar as it represents a mode of exchange no Big Man could usurp. But defenses, in principle, of the free market that would undermine the basics of civilized order (like the demand for a free market in labor that would allow unlimited immigrants from less civilized countries, unvetted by the civilized order, to enter the country) must themselves be resisted, if not through centralized state power than by communities organized through schools, neighborhoods, businesses, main streets, hospitals, social services, etc.—i.e., by the bulwarks of a civilized order.

The only way to remain immune to leftism is to bind equality of treatment up with shared obligations within forms of cooperation serving specific purposes (which provide the measure in those spaces)—business, schools, trade associations, spaces of inquiry, neighborhood associations, and so on—within a pluralist frame in which no form of cooperation has authority over any other. In other words, a society with endlessly proliferating, non-hierarchical centers—garlic to the vampirism of the left. The state is a necessary precondition for the left, then—it is only possible to imagine endlessly reducing the entire population to sameness once a sovereign bureaucracy cataloguing and accounting for everyone is in place.

Even more, the post-humanist understanding of the self as constituted by a constitutive fantasy and violent imaginary demolishes the philosophical foundations of the liberal democratic order, which presupposes a kind of blank slate equality in all individuals. Liberalism and modern democracy wish to represent the individual as he or she enters the market, or the ballot box, with no relevant pre-existing characteristics that might qualify one’s status or right to enter either. But if we come to read any individual as marked by some distinct form of normalization and counter-normalization, as having a constitutive fantasy and violent imaginary that the therapeutic/corporate/consumerist order always already has designs on and, in fact, has to a great extent designed, we cannot help but assign and constantly revise probabilities of dangerous or costly action to each individual as they enter any institutions (nor will there be any way of reversing the obsolescence of any institution that doesn’t allow for a sufficiently thorough and expeditious risk-benefit analysis of any individual).

When it does collapse, I think that “not liking others talking about my habits” or something close to it (I wouldn’t quibble over the wording) will provide a “remnant” with a way of restoring normal speech to public and even private discourse. There is no better way of refreshing one’s relation to reality than committing oneself to recognize, work around, subtlely re-shape, occasionally comment on and refrain from too openly examining others’ habits. And this can only happen publicly when people join together by explicit agreement to accomplish something, where they all have something to gain and something to lose, where the success of the work depends on them alone, and where they therefore allot to everyone specific responsibilities and rights while developing an “oral law” or set of idioms (normal, infinitely ramifying speech, sedimenting tacit agreements in the explicit ones) that keeps the project open. And that can only happen when enough people accept, to quote Gertrude Stein again, that “the most important thing is knowing what is your business and what is not your business.”

A premium will be put on keeping people out, except under precisely defined circumstances—once someone is in, you need to deal with them, so a lot of intellectual energy will be invested in determining who can be let in. If governments don’t defend their borders, communities and businesses will do their job; and people will shape themselves so as to be acceptable members of the communities they wish to enter (as I suggested earlier, much business will be generated in helping them to do so). These strategies of avoidance might impoverish social interactions by ruling out a wide range of possibilities from the start; but it might enrich the relations that remain by making them more meaningful in the literal sense of causing all signs among those who have been properly vetted and therefore already give forth much information to contain layers of significance.

Trade itself develops modes of sacrality, and enterprise can be a mode of disciplinarity. At one extreme, economic innovation, as in the high tech firms in Silicon Valley, can be a thoroughly engaged intellectual and ethical enterprise; and economic exchange, especially when conducted at the margins of a given social order, can be so risky as to require explicit signs of trustworthiness on the part of the participants. Most often, though, economic activity conducted through private property is a kind of warfare on the existing social division of labor, and trade seeks and finds the protection of states and laws. I persist in calling the kinds of technological and organizational strategies and transformations we associate with firms like Microsoft and Wal-Mart “warfare” because their focus is not merely on providing a better and/or cheaper product, but upon undermining the competitor’s market position, for which purpose they will make use of any means available.

If entrepreneurs are essentially a predatory class, as I hypothesized in my “Hunters and Craftsmen” post, then the explanation is not that difficult. Indeed, Libertarians are well aware, going back to Adam Smith, that any time businessmen get a chance to receive some privilege or monopoly from the state they grab it, the free market be damned. Of course, entrepreneurs are a very peaceful predatory class, for the most part, and are themselves always vulnerable to expropriation—hence their alliance with the state is fruitful in many ways. But predation within the peaceful space created by stable state power is still predation, and we must distinguish the small marketplaces that spring up when the division of labor has expanded enough so as to make everyone dependent upon others (even allowing for merchants to mediate between communities, including distant ones) and the power of money within a system of trade and ultimately a fully developed market system.

George Gilder argued in Wealth and Poverty that far from being selfish, we should see the entrepreneur as remarkably altruistic, giving his time, energy and resources to help others. Ultimately, there may not be so much difference between this claim and Ayn Rand’s harangues on the virtues of selfishness. They are both the dispositions of the sovereign, who does favors for whom he will do favors and ill to whom he disfavors. With all the current talk about how much regulation we need and what kind, it seems obvious to me that regulation is almost always beside the point because any new innovation and the subsequent reorganization of the division of labor will render the existing rules obsolete.

Regulations are always attempts to fight the last war, and arguments in favor of more of them are almost invariable obscenely oblivious to the advantages of hindsight—everything that seems to us to be a cause of whatever crisis or scandal occupies us should, as all reasonable people can agree, have been outlawed. It might be more useful to think of entrepreneurship as—as I believe many of them, in fact, do—a kind of war-making, maybe in conventional terms, with large, well-stocked armies with a long-term battle plan; maybe a kind of guerilla warfare; at times even a kind of terrorism. The enemy varies—it may be those representing the existing division of labor, supported by state subsidies direct and indirect; or, it may be those instigating disruptions of the status quo—but I don’t see how one could deny that, in addition to producing, improving and disseminating their products, businesses spend quite a bit of time addressing the various fronts on which they fight: labor, the state, or this or that agency, and their competitors. (And even warriors, in the literal sense, must give quite a bit of attention to the production and distribution of goods, services, and the enforcement of the rights of various officials and “property” owners.)

Consumer sovereignty is a nice slogan but unsupportable as an empirical claim. The relation between consumers and companies is analogous to that between voters and political parties: the organizations propose, and the consumers and voters dispose. (Or, more provocatively, between occupied populations and their conquerors, taking into account the desire for an extremely gentle occupation regime, including one that realzies the benefits of recruiting its administrators from the population itself.) That is, the final purchase validates or invalidates a particular use of capital within a generally valid field; consumers regularly bring down empires, but the imperial system itself remains.

So, perhaps we can locate a new political economic lawfulness in the degree of faith we find in our society and ourselves that creative activity unsanctioned, unprotected and uncredentialed by the predatory alliance of Big Business and the State (they’ve earned their capital letters!) can thereby generate even more creative activity and social and cultural good. The less faith, the more government regulation, the more business takes on static, administrative, imperial roles; the more faith, the more sovereignty learns to embed itself in, rather than prey upon, freedom—and the more social health and prosperity. We might even develop an appreciation for the contribution to this lawfulness made by the disciplines organized around the praxical study of risk, like hedge funds, and other inquirers into the myriad ways the miracle of making money out of money takes place.

The continuance and constant adjustment on exposure to reality of our own habits depends upon the covenants among those who seek mutual insurance for the errors consequent upon their imperatives. And so the vast field of centrifugal, eccentric habits depends upon and flows back into those social sites based upon explicit, publicly shared habits.

The totalitarian eruptions of the 20th century, which have left as their residue (more deferral) White Guilt, perhaps the closest thing to an overarching theology in today’s world, suggest as much: by itself, the market cannot defend itself against the resentment it inevitably generates, which accumulates and takes shape as social and political movements before the means of deferring it through the market have developed. It might be, furthermore, that the kind of long term, supposedly permanent modes of deferral to which the liberal welfare state aspires (Social Security must never be questioned, because 19th century Dickensian workshops are ready to return at any moment, as soon as we let down our guard–this is itself part of the anti-totalitarian deferral, marked, as any deferral must be, by what it defers), now interferes with the kind of medium term forms of deferral we need to erect articulating the myriad short term forms on the marketplace; modes of deferral we might model on insurance, for example, where each one together with everyone else continually hedges, always improvising while gathering the best information available (and generating that very information in our gathering), against the catastrophes we know must be on the way, and will ultimately, in the really long run, overwhelm our best efforts (while–who knows–perhaps calling forth even better efforts of which we won’t be capable until we are capable); or on “intelligence,” listening to as much as we can, piecing together what we hear into plausible patterns (while remaining aware that we are probably blind to other, equally plausible patterns), finding ways of getting “inside” as many different institutions and communities as possible and finding ways to see beyond the way they self-consciously represent themselves to others and themselves.

Both “insurance” and “intelligence” are predicated upon the “imminence of imminence,” capable of memory and tradition while resistant to sclerosis and reactiveness, at least when submitted to the forms of transparency and accountability which correspond to the the structure of these modes of deferral (which is to say, when they aren’t mortgaged to “long term” projections which really aim at institutional self-protection). And these are also modes of deferral which rely upon firstness–anyone can set a mode of intelligence in motion (by simply asking the questions no one else is), anyone, along with a few others, can cobble together a way of pooling resources against some of the most obvious and inescapable dangers of life–as opposed to the “all together now” model of modern liberalism which believes it can marginalize risk so thoroughly that it simply ends up demonizing whoever appears as its bearer.

But of course we're not restricting our analysis to "capitalism" — capitalism precedes Anglo modernity (in Italy and the Netherlands, for example) but it's not separable from the Anglo credit system. Capitalism is just one way of thinking in terms of probability, and that's really the thread to follow. Thinking probabilistically is the most radical and the most normal way of processing reality — probabilistic thinking draws upon materials already provided in language but it also transforms language. It spreads and converts everything it touches but without going "viral." It does open everything up but without always veering towards deposing the tyrant — it stays tough-minded and weighs all claims in terms of the implications for institutions of deferral. The insurance company is still the best model. And this way of thinking, if pursued consistently, will still come across as inhuman to the vast majority of humanity.

If the story concerns a corporation or another institution—a sports team, a movie studio, a university—that institution is treated either as an adjunct of the state (the story regards compliance or non-compliance, or the serving of what is ultimately a state function) or as state-like itself (as issuing its own executive orders, making policy changes, as its charter and state law authorizes it to do).

In a sense, the analysis is still not significantly different if we bring in what seem to be the most powerful global forces, the giant corporations operating according to the logic of financialized capital. Capital and international banks can cripple most countries; they fund the aforementioned think tanks and the political parties that produce the candidates that authorize the grants of power to the bureaucrats. But capital must still operate through the state, which is why it spends all that money on political influence and intellectual weaponry. Certainly, banks and the larger conglomerates could bring even a medium sized state to its knees, but they couldn’t do that to the largest states and certainly not a coalition of states organized under a hegemon.

We as individuals are equally (desperately) dependent upon reliable data from power centers, whether they be governments, corporations, or other institutions like universities—or, for that matter, “rogue” sources we may trust more but themselves must claim some access to secure data banks. Data is becoming more currency than currency itself; indeed, isn’t one of the virtues attributed to money that it provides reliable and up-to-date information on the field of social desires and distribution of resources and labor capacities? As money becomes more malleable, it can perhaps be massaged so as to become more akin to data gathered elsewhere within what Benjamin Bratton calls the planetary scale computation that draws upon ubiquitous sensing, measuring, and calculating devices.

At the very least, for example, the sovereign wants all the means needed for maintaining armed and police forces (weapons, the science and technology needed to produce weapons, the raw materials—metals, sources of energy—information technology and so on) to remain at hand. And the corporate form, with deep roots in Western culture, which involves the chartering of enterprises (mostly but by no means only economic) by the sovereign, provides a structure for managing relations between economic units and the state.

Any act we could carry out, then, is some kind of continuation of the promise that has founded whatever imperative grounds the imperative exchange we’re currently a party to. Let’s say we want to be on the boundary between ensuring greater compliance and generating interrogative-into-declarative sequences. Choosing the spot located on that boundary constitutes a bet and a prediction or, in center study terms, a drawing and issuing of credit. The imperative to track and trace samples will spread and sprawl one way rather than another, and one is hedging and trying to arbitrage the various possible directions, insofar as they’re visible: this will mean identifying ways of both channeling other “streams” into greater compliance while eliciting from them more “nutritious” (to use a term of AI researcher Brian Roemelle) data.

Discourse and idioms are “assemblages” of declaratives which leave us always expectant of encountering new fields and which are built into scenes to the extent of being the components of scenes and stacks. The expectant scene is, for center study, the equivalent of “smartness,” as in the smart city, the smart institution, the smart phone, etc.—smartness seeks to optimize, but expectancy is more a set of affordances to fit a given scene in its ramifications and unfoldings. Optimization is doomed to fail precisely because it can’t account for investment because the relation between the outside spread and the spreads further inside can never be optimized—the entire financial order is dedicated, on one level, to ensuring such optimization and, on the other hand, to arbitraging all the differences in likelihood that optimization will actually be approximated.

Expectations of future earnings is a very generative concept because such expectations are self-confirming—if you expect future earnings to flow from ownership title of a particular asset then you will buy that asset thereby raising its price and increasing the expectation of future earnings. And, of course, it depends upon who is doing the expecting—the more the expectant can invest, the higher the expectations. But such expectations are always ranged across a field—one invests because it will provide a higher return than some other possible investment; or, rather, one portfolio of investments vs. some other portfolio, and this question can be re-asked at every moment.

And all these expectations come with an expiration date, an expectation date that is in turn affected by the inflow of expectations. The ideal is, again, arbitrage, which therefore becomes a model for thinking through the conversion of asset to data. If you can sell the same asset in one market at a higher price than you are buying it in another market simultaneously you have made a risk-free profit. But I’m not so sure about “simultaneity”: maybe in the instant between pushing the button on the sale and the sale being recorded the prices have changed. And maybe this happens because you are constantly laying the groundwork for arbitrage and thereby shifting the market around so that someone with more computing power than you or smarter quants gets the arbitraged profit ahead of you.

So, one instance of arbitrage doesn’t eliminate risk: you need to be big enough, i.e., to have sufficiently privileged access to the outside spread to arbitrage across the board, so that even your arbitraging in hedged. But this also means having your tendrils reaching out across the political arena, i.e., the nomos as mediated through the juridical, so as to create the surest possible conditions for your arbitraging spread—and this means bringing all the lines of succession into order with your arbitrage spread. This really means turning succession practices themselves into assets, subject to the same processes of arbitrage—e.g., investing in several politicians simultaneously so that the differences between them average out in your favor.

Now, one could argue that this is in fact the best possible way of allocating resources for future use because, despite the now familiar stereotype of financial institutions buying up functioning companies, breaking them apart, selling off the pieces for a quick profit and thereby leaving industries and communities devastated—a stereotype which I assume has some truth to it—it is probably also the case the companies vulnerable to such a practice had their own difficulties and may not have been capable of innovating in ways necessary without bringing in new loans and investment; but, even regardless of that, this is not all that financial systems do, and who knows how they might be reformable in ways that increase the benefits of free flows of capital while minimizing and mitigating the losses.

But I’d like to focus on a very singular, and I think currently impossible, kind of adjudication: one in which the lender of last resort cannot meet its own obligations to pay for the assets it has hedged itself with and must have all of its assets dismantled and sold off to pay its own debts. These assets would include money owed to it, so an exchange between its debtors and creditors would have to be mediated. Under such conditions, where the value of the store of value must be assessed, what criteria would there be? Everything would be up for grabs, and whichever court, backed by whichever sovereign, could pull it off, would institute a new regime of credit and credibility.

And I think part of the determination would have to go beyond the price for which the assets in question could be sold right now to the preservation of modes of possession and power that could be shared across companies, professions, kinship groups and, most importantly, generations. And then the assets start to become data as a new nomos is created out of the old.

Perfecting the imperative means deriving further imperatives from the center, precisely through the refinement of one’s own side of the imperative exchange and this is done by making cases that make the nomos more explicit in forms of coordination. The ever perfecting imperative, meanwhile, requires credit, i.e., resources held in reserve and readily available, from the center, and the drawing of credit involves questions thrown off by the extended imperative with positive answers required for the declarative completion of a new “accredited” scene in the stack. As Lyn Alden points out, money is also ledger, and this includes a technological component, which is to say, money is recorded in the perfected imperative—the creation and maintenance of currency is part of the perfection of the imperative.

The boundary, then, is where there are slightly more red particles on one side and slightly more blue particles on the other. We can think about horizontal and vertical (as opposed to successive) scenes in this way—obvious examples are boundaries between countries, physical and political, where we have, physically, towns on each side of the border speaking languages or dialects more closely related than either is to those further in the country; or, we can imagine every country has citizens with varying degrees of “particles” of other countries. So, each company along the supply chain is a scene or articulation of scenes with various overlaps with scenes in other companies, above, below and alongside it.

We started with a bifurcation within imperative exchange: the imperative exchange tends both to further the command to perfect the imperative (the imperfection of which is the source of the exchange) and to solicit the nomos. The nomos, let’s recall, is the originary division of property, originally land, in accord with services rendered to the central commander (the centerarch). But the nomos doesn’t remain static: the value of the different pieces of property change, in accord with both the fluctuations in loyalty and usefulness to the monarch and the “creditability” of each property, its capability of serving as collateral—and this latter property of property depends on the relative care and maintenance of and investment in that property, or its owner’s participation in the perfection of the imperative.

To accept that there are no natural or divinely granted rights to property or anything else that anyone is required to acknowledge outside of the power (perhaps just as natural or divinely granted if sought out and cultivated) to resist encroachments upon them is to see property as derivative of one’s position on a team that needs to allocate responsibility and therefore power in certain ways. As always, property, or one’s share, operates through petitions to the center.

The “solicitation of the center,” meanwhile, is a very recent coinage for the “patriation” of discourses of debt, money and financialization within center study. Credit and ledger involve the diversion of the resources on the scene toward certain parties and the registering of such diversions. Any credit is drawn on the center, a practice that is transparent enough under either archaic gift economies or monarchical regimes where the monarch is responsible for coining and authenticating money. No doubt over an extended period of time we would find kings increasingly reliant on external sources of money from international moneylenders and banks and external sources of accounting from middlemen minorities: such episodes get resolved through war and conquest, or the eventual loss of sovereignty.

In seeking a conceptual formulation for this epochal transformation that doesn’t confer upon it the privilege of inevitability and eternity, i.e., to make it possible to think outside of the terms of “liberal democracy” without reverting to one or another stereotyped archaism, I’ve designed the phrase “soliciting the center,” which involves an ongoing request, petition, even disturbing of the center for the purpose of channeling resources toward specific agents and projects—soliciting the center would happen under any regime, making it possible to think in terms of transitions from the oscillations between succession and the interference in succession by credit issuing agencies in the dialectic between debt enforcement and forgiveness toward the programming of futures that would ledger the field of succession itself.

But it also includes the sabotaging of perfections of the imperative outside of one’s control, which might in turn mean sabotaging that which is under one’s control as well, and the creation of various kinds of artificial scarcity so that the debasement of currency can be evaded and hedged, and interfering with succession so as to guarantee continued lines of credit by enabling lines of succession whose mode of governance coincides with the particular mode of sabotage in which one specializes. But it must also be added that modernity is also the series of spastic attempts to break with the central bank backed imperial order without finding any way to recreate the oscillations within governing and between governing (succession) and finance (soliciting the center) and technology (perfecting the imperative.

Someone close enough to power to be worth rating in this way is going to be embedded in some financial or technological enterprise able to collaborate on the level of sovereignty—or, some crossover between fin and tech. What we are looking for is where technology might become ledger, perhaps through electronic currency but more importantly through the collection of data that is juridically and disciplinarily relevant and becoming more so. We can hypothesize some boundary where fin becomes tech and tech becomes fin, with succession running through that boundary by bringing fin, the outside margin, within the juridical and aligning tech with high level pedagogy.

This can best be studied on terms derived from ritual, which is to say, those of petitioning, perhaps the typical form of imperative exchange (as it includes without being limited to prayer), but also poised to appropriate the idioms of data exchange itself, as our vocabulary becomes increasingly fintechy, as we come to speak in terms of “latent spaces,” “vectors,” “calls” and “puts,” “shorting,” “derivatives,” and so on. In finance all reduces to credit and the ledgering of credit, which is most directly transferable to petitioning, but the language of algorithms and machine learning also involves indirect petitioning, as one comes to behave in ways intended to move the needle one way or another on various accrediting scoring systems—here, one is simply petitioning an even more unseen agent of the center, a kind of virtual representative of the current terms of centered ordinality.

Now, let’s think of clothing ourselves in these linguistic shields and mirrors in our petitional relation to center—we will both be providing enormously useful and prolific data to the center, laying out samples indicating fracture lines and reparative healing across the entire centered ordinality and protecting ourselves from intrusive tracking and tracing precisely by anticipating any collateral that might be taken from our own practices and used to short us. Anything the center might think needs to be protected from any of us has been preemptively turned into a call on a future derivative that even those invested in a center that is shorting the system must see as necessary collateral.

Each ... Board member will oversee a defined portfolio critical to Gaza’s stabilization and long-term success, including, but not limited to, governance capacity-building, regional relations, reconstruction, investment attraction, large-scale funding, and capital mobilization.

This will be a short post. I think I have a simple way of addressing the issue of obedience and disobedience to the center more minimally than I have done so far. Both my recent incorporation of “credit” idiomatically and the consequent articulation of Colin Drumm’s concepts of the “outside spread” and the “outside option” allows for an elegant formulation: the degree and quality of your fulfillment of imperatives coming from the center (the “pointman”) constitutes a bet on the likelihood of the replacement of the pointman by an outside option. Complete and devoted obedience would indicate no possibility (whether it be desire for or fear of) an outside option; complete disobedience, meanwhile, indicates reliance upon and proactive obedience toward, some outside option.

In between these poles there will be some hedging of bets. Now, this is not a solely utilitarian decision—in general, obedience to the sovereign will decrease as that sovereign’s hold on power slips and his replacement seems increasingly likely; indeed, one could easily reverse the formulation—but there are questions of “sunk capital” here as well and how thoroughly identified with the existing regime you would be for a successor regime—in cases where one would almost certainly be treated as a traitor by the new regime, intensifying loyalty to the existing sovereign might be the only way of maintaining one’s dignity or honor, with “dignity” and “honor” here being a kind of credit that cannot be cashed in either under the present or successor regime, but only in the eyes of God or History, however one understands these forms of judgment.

But we’ve never actually gone over the precipice, even if large accumulations of assets have periodically been tossed in the abyss, and it may be that we can’t without the creation of a new order. This is the implication of Bichler and Nitzan’s “capital as power”: there is no endemic crisis, there is no “internal contradiction,” there is no transcendence internal to the dialectic of capital—individual firms can keep discounting against expected future earnings even if that’s done primarily through sabotaging productive activity rather than stimulating it. (In that case, the outside spread will always be made available to some borrowers, even if only after a vast culling of less credit-worthy ones.)

Or, how do we, to refer to that Peirce statement I often recur to, price into existing credit systems (the “outside spread”) the collapse of the existing lines of credit to that point where “all insurance companies go bankrupt” and we have no recourse other than that originary line of credit—hope, love and charity or, more minimally, deferral itself. One’s utterance, or samples, would elicit other like ones that in the end become a kind of planetary scale computation.

All of the regulatory and social service funding and agencies empowered by Congress can be transferred to local levels, through the repair of the legal system so that it can handle lawsuits regarding damages attributed to products, working conditions, the environmental effects of production, and fraud, on the one hand, and decrees requiring localities, companies and families (kinship networks) to provide aid for, confine, or engage in “useful occupations” those who would otherwise become burdens on or dangers to the community. We remove all incentive to donate money to Congressional campaigns, and much of the incentive to go into politics as a profession—no more lobbying, no more rent seeking, no more use of regulation against competitors, etc.

Wherever you are, then, you as a potential successor should be modeling actual and possible rulings on he whom you might succeed, and modeling them in turn for those who you are designating as your successors. You are always looking for possible mimetic conflicts along with possible deferments of them and converting these possible deferments into adjustments of the nomos in the present. This converges SSIP with the juridical and, to return to the opening of this post, the source value in constant confrontation with capitalist modes of valuation. This can coincide with full participation in capitalism, with the best way of doing so I can think of now is to make investments that won’t pay off until after you’re dead, so as to bound yourself up with your posterity.

Of course, some more short-term investments will be necessary to provide the capital for the longer-term ones. But in that case the academy itself needs to be such a long-term investment in pedagogical future, where the making of rulings within a space of reciprocal obligations so as to trace succession back and forward is the object of constant training. This is the form agency takes today: constant work to bring the central bank and central intelligence within the purview of the juridical by making the juridical part of the nomos and the grounding of the disciplines. Let every one of your utterances be a ruling—one of the most performative speech acts possible.

Asking for a more direct, affirmative command out of these ongoing conversations is tantamount to interrupting one of them midstream, which we are in fact free to do with any conversation and which Paul de Man once contended, cited Schelling (I think), is in fact constitutive of any conversation as free intercourse (for me, free intercourse=indefinite deferral). The learning machines we will share the scene, as props or addresses, with, will thereby hold anything worth calling “wealth,” as an ongoing central intelligence to which all are contributing but some more consequentially than others. Like with the endowments of some universities, you keep accumulating, while never touching the principal, only using it as collateral for loans for ongoing investments. That’s what the most supremely gathered and curated data will be once we no longer need money as a standard of value and unit of account.

All of our technology, our pedagogical platforms stacking up scenes, are nothing more than the creation of new ways of saying “this is the same” at different scales and different types of assembly because being able to continually say ‘this is the same” in new ways means offering guarantees or credit or insurance for succession because it confirms a commitment to maintaining presence against all “evil,” or attempts to short the present.

All of liberalisms most cherished principles presuppose unbridgeable asymmetries in power. Equal rights, human rights, free speech, voting rights, freedom of association—all of these “God-given” rights depend upon the Leviathan, because none of them could possibly exist if power receded below the level of the state’s “monopoly on legitimate force.” If differing authorities and powers, at different levels of the social order, were continually pressed to maintain and prove their governing capacity, what people say, how they associate with each other, how they provide input into governing decisions and all the rest would be very sharply limited—as has been, of course, the case for most of human history.

Other than the almost universally endorsed state monopoly on legitimate violence, private monopolies are almost universally reviled. Parts of the state monopoly, like the civil service, have their origins in private monopolies, but, of course, all private monopolies have had their origin in some state-granted charter. Hatred of monopoly is a natural part of slavishness towards the state power monopoly because that monopoly must always be ready to prove itself capable of breaking up any other—that’s why the argument against monopolies like Facebook and Google focusing on the political power this monopoly affords them is the more important and honest argument than the themselves transparently political, indeterminate and petty concerns about “market distortions” or “harm to the consumer.”

But the tendencies leading to monopoly under capitalism must be powerful if such powerful resentments are aligned against it. Companies deemed monopolies are usually charged with some kind of unfair practice, like using its advantageous position to undersell competitors until they go out of business, then buy them up and raise prices. But there has also been the concept of the “natural monopoly,” for instance utilities, which still seems to carry some weight, even if it’s been eroded with developments in telecommunications and services. There is also the question of whether there is ever a “real” monopoly—somewhere, on the horizon, is some company with a game-changing technology that will either overtake an existing monopoly or render it obsolete.

I remember Microsoft being the fearsome monopoly that needed to be taken down in the 90s, but wouldn’t Apple, Google, et al, have come along even without the sustained assault on the monopoly Microsoft by the federal government? And any American monopoly is no monopoly if we take into account its Chinese doppelganger—and China seems to free of anti-monopolist resentment. The argument for monopolies seems to be along lines of superiority regarding scaling up; while, of course, the free trade argument against them is that without competition monopolies become stagnant, rent-seeking obstacles to innovation.

Instead of starting with an abstraction like “the market,” it’s better to start with ongoing realities like supply chains and credit lines. In this way we’re beginning higher up, with the largest banks and corporations, who set credit terms and organize supply chains, respectively. The credit line is determined by what Colin Drumm calls the “outside spread,” i.e., the money lending and, really, money generating entity that serves as lender of last resort. How much credit is available, what kind, and at what price can be traced back to the credit borrowers confer upon the holder of the outside spread, even if very indirectly, and the credit of the outside spread relies, in turn upon the social orders, the modes of centered ordinality operating through the Stack, and whether succession is expected to continue as expected (yes, we get into tautologies or paradoxes at a certain point here).

Supply chains, meanwhile, are of course mediated monetarily and therefore through the credit lines but are also regularized and preserved as much as possible through negotiations. Maybe someone will correct me here, but I don’t think a large industrial or commercial firm switches suppliers lightly and maintaining reliable chains even at the expense of possible short-term bargains is the rule. A more monopolistic firm will even try to control the supply chains, as many links down the chain as possible, and this is itself only the next step from ensuring their regularity. The tendency to secure credit lines and supply chains, which are really only two components of data security, is then to establish deliberations over the circulation of goods and services.

This brings us up against the notorious pricing problem, which is taken to be the doom of non-capitalistic systems: the auto company requires X amount of steel, Y amount of rubber and so on to produce Z number of cars to be sold to (hopefully) Z consumers. The steel and rubber manufacturers in turn need machinery, and the makers of the machinery need… and at each point along the way there is an X, Y, or Z and how are we to know what that should be? Even if we know for certain how many people will need, want and be able to afford cars in the upcoming year, we can’t know whether some technological innovation somewhere along the supply chain will change the numbers or create some brand new desire that makes the existing one obsolete—especially since all of this involves long-term planning.

The only way of obtaining the needed information without prices is to close off the system, which is precisely what is deemed either impossible or terrifying (or impossible, with the very attempt being terrifying). How does this not bring us back to the failed planning system of the Soviet Union? My first counter here is to point out how close we already are to a planned global economy, due simply to the scale of credit lines and supply chains—the free market, represented in the fluctuation of prices, already only exists at the margins (and this even leaving aside how much control transnational corporations exercise over prices).

In other words, it was a counter-revolution against a soft form of communism, which would have been as destructive as the “hard” kind. Value was previously determined by the costs that went into creating a product or company; now, value is determined by expected future earnings—the difference is that determining value according to cost opens up disputes about the various contributions of all involved to the production, while determining value according to expected future earnings shifts the focus to the investors and seeing to their ability to make a profit (I have been reading Liliana Doganova’s _Discounting the Future_ )—all the traditional questions of the labor movement and other “social justice” movements like those regarding “exploitation,” “reparation,” “fairness,” and so on are simply taken off the table and presumably objective measurements determined by the financial markets decide.

The counter-revolution was necessary, even if one, retrospectively and at leisure, might prefer it to have taken another form, as it ultimately caused great destruction and created new channels for virulent forms of “social justice” to flow through—but, most importantly, determining value according to what a product or company will afford in the future is fundamentally correct once we have a stack of scenes. (A side note—Doganova gives no indication of any familiarity with Bichler and Nitzan’s _Capital as Power_.)

Now, assets are valued in accord with massive amounts of data gathering and analysis regarding market conditions, supply chains, political contingencies, financial decisions by banks and governments, etc., but beyond that they are sources of data regarding the acquisition, exercise and increase of power by the owners of those assets. Assets are the form taken by debt and are the site where oscillations of enforcement and forgiveness are played out. The shift toward the focus on investors noted by Doganova marks the entrance of virtually all money into investments—I don’t know the exact numbers here, but a generation or two back most people kept their savings in a bank, collecting interest, and kept their pensions out of investments—perhaps the memory of the depression was still too vivid and, of course, prior to, say, the 1920s, how many people would have had enough money to make meaningful investments?

Investment was restricted to a small class. Now, almost everyone is an investor, certainly through your pension funds at the very least. So, in class struggle terms, investors can be opposed to workers even though, of course, they are very often the same people. Hence the “social basis” of the counter-revolution. But all this means that how much a particular class of assets is worth at this moment in time provides a window into power relations, which is to say, who controls the various paths to the future, and how they do so. To turn your view toward this broader field of data is to set aside the question of how to make as much money as possible, which is the reason most people who study financial markets in depth do so.

The replacement of traditional corporations by agentic protocols assumes that AIs trained on financial data will be able to make more intelligent and therefore profitable investment decisions. It seems to me that most of this AI generated investing activity will be directed towards arbitrage, the mode of investment most closely associated with the counter-revolution: arbitrage makes money purely by exploiting different prices in different markets, precisely by collecting and analyzing the most comprehensive and rapid data regarding where such differences emerge. I’m not going to go into detail just yet regarding agentic protocols—I just want to look for that lever, or perhaps leverage, where this knowledge of the constantly fluctuating prices in all the different markets across the world is converted into data regarding the whole range of correlations that determine these differences is converted into data that teams could use to hierarchically organized supply chains amongst themselves.

Arbitrage is often, and understandably, seen as the most detestable part of the neoliberal counter-revolution—it involves making money without the production of anything useful to anyone. It’s the purest example of usury imaginable. The argument in favor of arbitrage being situated at the center of the financial system is that it provides knowledge of these different prices in different markets, which presumably indicate some “imbalance” that should lead to a reallocation of resources. Arbitrage would have this effect insofar as everyone in the field would follow those engaging in arbitrage most effectively, trying to pick up whatever arbitrage profits might be available in their wake.

This would work better insofar as the companies making the highest arbitrage profits consistently do so over time, so that others know whom to follow; this, in turn, requires a maintenance of superiority in computing power, algorithmic programming, and whatever political operations and intelligence makes it possible to keep that edge. Arbitrage profits are then a highly finite field which has the broader effect of “trickling” down into investment decisions that ultimately do involve producing “real” things, whose “realness” and value is in turn determined by their expected future earnings that in turn produces the spread that becomes the object of arbitrage.

Arbitrage essentially creates a new nomos, as it would be dominated by the financial companies that issue and hold the debt (and perhaps cryptos and bitcoin) that circulates as money through the system. It is, in the end, a more complicated and unstable command system. The reading of politics that would follow would focus on which industries are rising and falling across the field of expected future earnings as determined by investors as determined by the investment companies informed by computational power and the disciplines of economics, finance, business, computing, biochemistry, etc. We would expect occupants of the center at various levels of the stack of scenes to accelerate or retard the redistribution of resources from one industry or corporation to another in a way that could ultimately be traceable to the lord of arbitrage. The way a government does this is precisely through debt enforcement or forgiveness, with forgiveness often taking the form of a provision of new loans.

Our (anti)political expectations of creating singularized succession as the replacement of arbitrage, which is a kind of caricature of it, then, on this hypothesis, depend on computing power “pricing in” the distribution of political power (functional chains of command converging in intelligence/military effectivity) so as to displace both financial and political power. Computation would have to extend past the point where expected future earnings could be computed to the point where control over sufficient assets would make the question of expected future earnings irrelevant because replaced by data exchange among monopolized companies.

A certain amount of the economic system would have to come under the control of agentic protocols to get to a tipping point where other companies would seek to be bought out. All social and cultural activity would then be contributions to the agentic protocols, which would operate as the center, with the highest question being the security (chains of custody, preservation, transfer across disciplines) of the data fed into it. It seems to me that this is consistent with the Agentic Protocol projection of “post-sovereign AI” in an environment of “declining societal respect for property rights.” Agentic Protocols is betting on the increasing spread between human and computer capabilities, which is a pretty good bet, even while remaining vague and aspirational regarding “where the train is going.”

They just want to prevent everyone else from doing the same. Singularized succession in perpetuity, as a mode of breeding and, therefore, perhaps the construction of kinship networks that would enhance the production of qualified candidates, is not at odds with an ethnicized or racialized mode of governance, but it doesn’t guarantee the superiority of such modes either because we are really only at the beginning of understanding what humans might be capable of. And, having incorporated the articulated concepts of the “outside option” and the “outside spread” (thanks to Colin Drumm), I can say more precisely that closing off the outside option (by “internalizing” all the options) is the only, and a very good, way of replacing the outside spread with another way of investing in futurity.

So, SSIP runs counter to capitalism within the same future directed framework: within SSIP, what is worth doing today is also determined by some future conditions that will have made that action the preferred one, but in this case determined otherwise than by the confidence the investor class, or some portion of it has in maintaining control over the reins required to make future earnings sufficiently predictable.

I’ve worked through this question in terms of “pedagogical derivatives” here: [https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-exchange?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fdata%2520exchange&utm_medium=reader2](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-exchange?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fdata%2520exchange&utm_medium=reader2). In that post I set aside the question of SSIP, and the maintenance of the imperative of the center, only slightly touching on prediction markets, so now it’s possible to tie it altogether. Each team wants to replenish itself, because each team aims at singularized succession and in therefore laying the groundwork for producing new candidates.

This only takes us a generation, maybe two, ahead, which is hardly perpetuity, but we have nevertheless broken the link between futurity and discounting, and in the pedagogical practices one examines in order to replenish one’s team, one not only penetrates beyond the higher level of education (“college students”) down to the elementary levels and even systems of childrearing, kinship networks, neighborhoods and so on as preliminaries of the kind of pedagogies capable of providing the needed candidates, but one comes to see future versions of oneself in these pedagogical practices, albeit versions that are simultaneously utterly and unimaginably different. And this in terms means aesthetic investments, in the creation of imaginaries, of ways of being one could promise to contribute to, even if in ways one couldn’t specify at the moment. The entire present is therefore spread out as signs of SSIP.

The bet here is that judging the future effects of pedagogy is uncertain, and discredit would accrue, perhaps to devastating effect, from choosing poorly. We could imagine that some new pedagogical approach drawing upon new technological affordances might be either a game-changing investment or the equivalent of the Dutch tulip bubble—but even in the latter case we wouldn’t be looking at fraud or a Ponzi scheme but an experiment that is successful insofar as we will have learned from it.

The teams deciding which pedagogical institution to invest in would themselves be learning and taking up the mimological impressments in some way, and those that are most transferable to their own practices are more “valuable.” In this way those most adept at data circuit and thereby home of the occupant of the center will generate a pool of candidates that will be able to generate a pool of candidates, that will… Until we have deferral all the way up and down.

The same sentence is then continually making such referrals, registering the demands placed upon us by various modes of training for entrance onto teams. The same sentence, really, inscribes the possibility of making such referrals, by countering the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center. The kind of “politics,” or exercise of power, implicit here is the occupation of strategic nodes in the stack of scenes, juridical order, and knowledge producing scenes. Through the occupation of such nodes and the creation of networks mapping out these scenes into a meta-scene always concerned with data security everything can be made meaningful—in the precise sense of being semiotically operational.

Only the officer class can see the data exchanges between “addresses” and not only “users” (to recall Benjamin Bratton’s terms from _The Stack_ ) as a site of intervention, construction and decision making rather than threat and violation. I’ll take this opportunity to remind readers that one can make great use of many “leftist” analyses of the new media and modes of data circulation if one simply subtracts or filters out all liberal and democratic assumptions and thinks in terms of more deliberate and transparent data exchanges between teams of subscribers. The same is true regarding those on the republican or populist right: I read fairly recently an account by the pro-Trump conservative blogger Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse about how the supposedly environmentalist legislation being proposed in Congress has been written up by BlackRock because it has invested in Chinese companies producing the very electric vehicles whose sales would be boosted by this legislation.

In any case, charging the occupant of the center involves intervention in the nomos, so it can be no ordinary case. Regarding thequestion of establishing justice and proper cases in the new “postneoliberal” nomos, that will likely need to be done through substantial revisions of fraud statutes so as to determine how the expectations regarding future earnings have been determined in such a way as to value assets for the purposes of selling them and using them as collateral: what kinds of promises get made, what kinds of claims get affirmed, what kind of data analysis, etc., is employed in such determinations? The conflicts are then internal to those engaged in currency exchanges—investors, lenders, regulatory and taxing agencies, CEOs, etc., rather than between “classes.”

One addresses “abuses” by treating them as imperatives that pose difficulties of fulfillment because they’re at cross purposes with other imperatives and you work to build spaces within the imperative spectrum so as to make the stream of imperatives more consistent and, indeed, sustain that full spectrum. And this will always come down to data security, which can now be formulated as the commensuration (the reduction to a common, albeit always adjusted, measure) of data (everything collected through screens, texts, and other sensory mechanisms) and the treatable cases they can or cannot be made part of. In this way we can issue actionable imperatives to the future even, if only in the traces we can with increasing deliberation lay out, the distant future—continue this work of commensuration, continue the work of data collection, differentiation and security (the way someone “felt” at a given, “unique” moment, is also data and can and has found its way into “storage” through memoirs, literature, film, and so on—all also data, requiring specific reading protocols).

The centrality of data and data security to governance means not a “totalitarian” surveillance state or, more ridiculously, an exacerbation of “biases” that, coincidentally, DEI bureaucrats have been worried about for the past half century but, rather, the most heightened forms of responsibility imaginable. Take all the spheres of human life from which we would want data from: public safety, health, education, etc. Such data is only as good as the institutions charged with attending to those public functions and the institutions dependent upon the functioning of those institutions. We would expect schools, hospitals and police forces to provide us with data on education, health and crime, but we would also depend on institutions that depend upon people being able to read and do math, carry out strenuous tasks over long periods of time and storekeepers and people who go out in the evening to confirm the data provided by the primary institutions.

So, AI in the broadest sentence is translation machinery: from input to output is translation, next word prediction is translation because each new word reconfigures the discourse into a different one, imitation of human language is translation, from possible to actual. All of the arguments about AI Ethics, AI alignment, AI safety, etc., are all about translating the mass of data we now have collected, tagged and assorted in ways that are “better” rather than “worse,” with no one being able to say exactly what’s better or worse without resorting to liberal bromides. We’ll be able to say, and in a way that takes in the entire supply chain of data organization and processing: better is more performative, better is more useful in settling cases, better is placing winning bets on pedagogical futures, better is widening, deepening and expanding the nomos by making more namespaces—and this “better” is determined within the pedagogical institutions serving as a pipeline for the leading companies in data security.

Finance provides the best idioms for weighing pedagogical futures, with the “futures” of course itself a derivative of financial terminology. Finance is completely future oriented, organized around exchanges to take place some time in the future, with the contract to engage in such an exchange then itself becoming an asset that can be bought or sold, and then used as collateral or included with a batch of other assets that serves as a hedge for some other investment. Of course, anyone with financial knowledge knows all this, and where I’m getting things wrong or putting them too simplistically. I will try to keep learning and improving, Money, according to Samuel Chambers, is credit, and nothing but credit, which I embrace since it’s entirely consistent with the concept of originary debt and makes it clear how the entire world runs on exchanges of confidence that change constantly.

This means that the critical financial devices of derivatives and arbitrage are solely measures of power: not everyone can be in a position to scour the markets looking for assets priced differently in different markets and scoop them up at the lower price and to be sold instantaneously at the higher prices. Chamber makes a very powerful case that there has never been a non-financialized capitalism and never could be, and that finance shapes the underlying commodities speculated on in constitutive ways—it’s not a distortion of some real economy. All this is completely consistent with Colin Drumm’s dissertation (which Chambers cites, very favorably) and Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power (which he doesn’t).

We should want the world to be predictable in certain respects and unpredictable in others—we want to build forms of exchange that will be recognizable as precedents to forms of exchange to take place in the distant future without us, now, being able to tell what those future forms of exchange will look like. The things historians can recognize in the past, such as a small, backward province having what were then unrecognizable capacities to eventually become an empire, to be visible to us in the present, regarding the future. Then we could issue credits to some marginal sector or technology, seeding it for skunkworks and channeling promising students in that direction, but that is only possible insofar as the value of that sector or technology is not discounted against expected future earnings so that, for example, there are incentives to invest, hype, sell high and then let crash.

The best way to counter capitalism, it seems to me, is to be able to predict the value of a particular investment decades or more into the future so that even the most narrowly profit oriented will have the incentive to stick it out. Then, considerable social energies can be directed toward reinforcing that prediction, thereby improving the odds of the prediction, and building in other directions that depend upon the long-term viability of that project. And this would to some extent depend upon and to some extent help create, new kinship networks that would make all classes want to provide for future generations.

This may seem like a digression, but this is the kind of thing the universal translation machine should be for only not only and not even primarily to predict investments but to predict, given various hypothetical conditions depending upon the state of the juridical and the disciplinary, the prevalence and distribution of specific dispositions which can themselves only be located upon pedagogical scenes. This where the work of approximating discourse to performativity and the donation of resentment to the center leads—this is the path to the conversion of assets into data. I am writing this portion of this post the day Trump announced that, if he wins, he will establish an online American university, free to all, free of wokeness, and dedicated to making available the highest forms of knowledge.

Idioms like “perfection of the imperative” and “bringing the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative into alignment” point to a trajectory that is both driven and stifled by distribution at the center. Under desecrating forms of power, Instrumentality of power is centralized while occupancy of the center is “desecured,” introducing divisions within the governing class and making the power of the central bank on one side and intelligence agencies on the other side more overt. One of the founding insights of the progressives, and the reason for their now generations long attempt to undermine and rework through subterfuge the US Constitution is that once technology reaches the point of quasi-monopolization dependent upon extended supply chains and technological coherence and continuity there are all kinds of things we can no longer productively argue about.

The task here is to speak of all this as the stack of scenes—scenes within scenes, scenes simulating other scenes, fake scenes and real scenes, scenes behind the scenes, etc. We can’t name all of the trillions of events taking place daily throughout the world but we can keep tokenizing those that best serve as proxies for others in the ways that juridical orders (which include economic exchanges) make visible. I stay focused on the juridical because, as I’ve explained before, even events that seem outside of the juridical like scientific discoveries and technological innovations ultimately appear in juridical forms by relying upon property rights, investments, liabilities, insurance, sales, and so on: a new invention created by some lone individual in their garage only becomes an event once it enters that arena.

I’m working through the implications for center study of Samuel Chamber’s analysis showing, convincingly and, for me, “pleasingly,” that all money is credit—any token refers to a creditor and debtor. What those tokens entitle you to will, then, depend on the quality of your debtor or, probably more precisely the assessment, on the part of those who would have to grant you the entitlement, of the quality of the debtor. Having the US Treasury as your debtor when you hold dollars is having a very solid debtor, until it’s not. The state goes into debt so that it can be indebted to you so that you will in turn draw upon that credit to encourage others to provide you with things, for which others have to provide them with things, and so a chain of credit ultimately winds its way back to the state—which therefore must maintain a monopoly on that line of credit, at least in part by outlawing by force either the use of other lines of credit or refusal to take tokens issued from this one.

Money is a particular kind of data, an especially important kind under capitalism, and the only way to transcend capitalism is to create investments that only pay off long after we are all dead—for that matter, that never pay off and are indefinitely deferred, while perhaps allowing a living on the interest and subsidiary investments whose yield is to be funneled back into the deferred one. And that long term investment would have to be in “human capital,” because even if, say, you wanted to invest in growing a new forest whose trees will only be usable for lumber in 150 years, you must also want the human “gardeners” (biologists, chemists, etc.) needed to ensure the growth of that forest.

This would in turn redirect significant flows of capital towards investments in institutional maintenance, as these proto-sovereign organizations would need to make inroads in educational and related institutions (this redirection would require and stimulate inroads within finance). This means all the disciplines, however they might be re-organized—a translation of Homer might be as pertinent as the development of advanced AI-controlled surveillance. No one needs to tell me how difficult this would be, but I also don’t think anyone can propose a plausible alternative in taking on systematic capitalist-liberal sabotage.

The counters I have been suggesting across ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes provide us with the thresholds that serve as analytical units of analysis and re-scening. Assets are always already data, and the more we treat them as such the more data we can solicit regarding the articulation of scenes comprising the totality of the infrastructure and supply chains—we could translate the price of a given asset into the entire distribution of agents across institutions better or worse placed so as to ensure data security, i.e., the regime of ostensivity. Technology, the realm of scenic design, is always already peopled by pedagogical platforms built into the technology itself, simply to ensure its functioning and the continuing supply of skilled personnel to man it, and we can always be on the look-out for an as yet unexploited platform, some prop around which a new scene can be constructed.

Now, try thinking of yourself less like a “soul” and more like a derivative, a collection of assets that can be exchanged at some point in the future as if they were being exchanged now. One could self-dismantle, assess all of one’s possessions and capabilities, imagine their possible uses in such ways as that making them available, honing and enhancing them, and having them commandeered now might enable the extraction of some expected future earnings. This would involve representing oneself as an inscription and archive, but according to means of listing and recording not given in advance—what counts as an “ability,” other than some future imagined employment of it?

If markets are made, they can be made in more deliberate and constrained ways; if they can be made increasingly constrained and purposeful, they will in effect be replaced. Money is already data, insofar as it provides us with information regarding relations of dependency and the capacity to mobilize resources; so, that data can be made increasingly explicit in non-monetary forms, in which case money can also be replaced by exchanges of data. The cutting edge of the replacement of markets and money is the already existing data exchanges that are increasingly prevalent. We all know how it works: all of our activities are monitored in one way or another, with the online activities most obviously so; this monitoring leads to massive amounts of data collection; this data it put through machine learning algorithms so that our habits can be analyzed and our behavior predicted by governments and companies for surveillance and advertising purposes.

Right now, governments take our data and offer us, in theory at least, security in exchange; companies either give us nothing or allow us free use of apps and free access to sites. The exchanges with government are already non-monetary, so all that would need to be done here is make the provision of security real and commensurate to the data taken. If someone thinks that’s impossible, they can keep coming up with ideas for preserving privacy and concealing yourself from governing agencies. That seems to me impossible, so I will stick with the insistence that we must make government, or at least governance, good, and assume that we can have security agencies that focus on deferring the vendetta from below and avoid getting caught up in vendettas from above; health care bodies that can honestly look at data and keep providing us with knowledge of and access to the best conditions regarding our health care possibilities; environmental governing bodies that can seek to preserve our natural environment, keep pollution at the lowest possible levels, maybe even enhance our “communications” with nature, and so on.

And there will be someone, the outside spread, whom he will go to for money if he falls short, after a particularly long period in which he has difficulty finding or keeping or transporting or selling seed. And that outside spread must rely upon the occupant of the center, who will enable, for example, the expropriations that might be necessary to maintain the holder of the outside spread when things get rough for him. And, finally, the holder of the outside spread is always hedging by looking towards possible outside options that might reroute succession towards someone better able to protect the spread, and in the meantime “discipline” the occupant of the center.

You are always referencing, as best you can, the present intersection or conjuncture of the outside option and the outside spread: at every moment, the outside option conditions a regime of debt enforcement that will ensure people have to work, manage their households, save, spend, invest, borrow, repay, etc., in certain proportions, and that means those controlling the outside spread are always weighing the current occupant of the center against some possible replacement who might enforce debts more according to the desired proportions. And it’s possible, perhaps in some historical periods even the default, for the occupant of the center to ensure his own succession in such a way as to impose a “haircut” on those managing the outside spread—the extreme difficulty of even imagining that today is an indication of its centrality to any serious political project. The power of current states comes from the necessity of debt enforcement, currently undertaken in the form of the authorized currency, and they, or at least the largest ones, would have to find some other source of power.

You need to maintain these forms of credit, which means taking out further credit from governing institutions that ensure the markets upon which you promote yourself, hedging on alternatives (e.g., getting married and investing in family life before your good looks fade) and insuring yourself against unexpected hits to your valuation, which also means indebting yourself to the insurers who will insist on certain conditions. And you will then find yourself in situations where you either want someone to use their monopoly power to pump up your valuation or to ensure that it remains continuous with the conditions under which you contracted various debts and took out various hedges and forms of insurance.

This helps with pricing within the system, which must presuppose some continuity in governance in order to determine the expected future earnings from ownership of an asset. The question of succession then gets transferred to the field of possibilities one determines, ultimately, the price of money itself as an asset, against. This really does reduce governance to debt enforcement—that’s what those holding the outside spread need to know in order to price their derivatives and determine arbitrage opportunities: which debts will be enforced, how and when. This must be engaged—this is the form of political power in the modern world.

If you are betting on whether X number of people will repay their mortgages, you are also betting on whether they will keep their jobs, on whether the rate of inflation will make it worthwhile for “enough” of them to keep paying their mortgages, on the housing market, on whether enough people will acquire the credentials needed to purchase and keep such homes, on whether those credentials will maintain their value on the job market, on whether some war or other catastrophe will upend the entire system, etc.—but, then, you can also hedge your bet by betting in favor of all the conditions that might undermine the mortgage paying system, making the adjustments along the way that enable you extract arbitrage winnings from all those who are slightly behind you in making similar adjustments.

If our starting point is the center, it would make sense to speak of the capitalist, not in liberal bottom-up terms as a agent of private initiative regulated after the fact, but more as a kind of state ordered contractor. This is most directly the case with industries most closely linked to state imperatives, above all military but also health, internal policing, infrastructural, etc., imperatives—but even those industries and businesses that are not directly state sponsored or funded are so indirectly, as they are contracted by those business more directly connected with the state, or agents of the state at different levels.

The state, in this case, is primarily a debt enforcement agency, and the politics of the state of indebtedness involves attempts on the part of one sector or another (demographic sector, state sector, regional sector, business sector, etc.) to shift the load of debt onto another. The intelligence agencies, then, serve primarily to ensure that the scheduled rotations in occupancy of the center do not, let’s say, threaten to institute a “jubilee,” however potentially or indirectly. Thus, the highest levels of transnational sovereignty and largest banks supply each other and hold each other in check, through an entire order of contractors, sub-contractors, state subsidiaries, displaceable and replaceable populations, and so on.

There’s no reason for such ad hoc and mindless combat to be expected to maintain conditions under which a major state, with domestic and international obligations, could maintain itself as a center. Hence the rule by intelligence agencies, operated for a while and still to a considerable extent through the media and universities but increasingly through the social media and data organizing and searching companies. Private initiative is a kind of pilot, fledged into being by the intelligence agencies, more or less directly, and put through a series of tests by the finance system. Everything that appears to us in juridical forms (the only way things really can appear), whether in the form of legitimated government or private actors, is a point on a string held together to a certain degree of tension by someone in the finance system on one end and someone in the intelligence agencies on the other end.

When they don’t need to hold so tight at their respective ends, there is enough slack in the system that there is no interference with the necessary illusion of freedom of action on the part of visible, explicit agents. But in the end, even the banks and intelligence agencies are betting on future options and derivatives, and the exchanges—discharges of debt—that need to take place at. Certain intervals fail to come off, the string needs to be pulled tight, debts, monetary and otherwise, get called in, certain key imperatives must be traced more closely to their felicitous conclusion, and things start to look a bit “crazy”—politicians, media personalities, business executives and others who seemed to be known quantities suddenly act in ways that are “out of character.”

Rivalries need to be conducted ruthlessly, but by establishing trustworthy “brokerage” wherever possible, not through sabotage and subversion. There’s nothing impossible here since sometimes humans do act justly in their dealings with each other, so nothing prevents the more influential among us from scaling that up. Brokering disputes can be, has been, indeed sometimes still is a business—business do hire professional arbiters rather than taking their disputes to court sometimes. People are more likely to do so when both sides consider themselves in the right and want a responsible decision based on a examination of the facts of the case in accord with the strongest juridical experiences—when one or both sides knows their case is bogus is when we see influence peddling, venue shopping, propagandistic poisoning of jury pools, etc.

Those medieval kings had to decide, in determining how to value currency, whom they could most afford to make pay: the nobility or the merchants (and there were limits to pressing down upon the peasants as well). The problem of distributing costs among various constituencies is no less necessary today, and as long as sovereignty is bound up with central banks no decision regarding the creation or valuation of currency can go too far in constraining the power of banks to acquire assets in cases of default, or of corporations to maximize their profits.

Unless, as I have been hypothesizing in other posts, sufficient data security to ensure that options can be called in requires crossing the Rubicon of converting assets into data. Those hoping to retain some connection (some option) with the rhetoric of the left will be thinking in terms of counterpowers coming from labor, or anticolonial (no more “antiglobalist” movements, interestingly) or whatever rapidly fading agency can produce the aura of resistance. If we discard all that, we can simply say that power depends upon knowledge (even a rejuvenated labor movement would require massive data collection and analysis), and we want power to be informed by knowledge so that those in power can know whether and within what constraints their imperatives can be and are carried out.

So, whether we’re speaking of “economics” or “politics,” which is to say, distribution from the center, which is to say centered ordinality, we’re targeting what we can call the furtherest future perfect option. We want to be all hedged up and with a data hedge that allows for continual arbitrage regarding whether a particular scene will have been the same (i.e, could trammel up the consequence, and with its surcease, success). I’ve been speaking of singularized succession in perpetuity in terms of selecting your successor such that he will be best able to select his and so on, but I’ve also been making it explicit that this involves having a range of candidates, which is to say options, constantly generated by institutions which are designed, then, precisely to produce the options.

These systems set their own criteria and standards, but how do we assess those criteria and standards—they would have to be compared with radically different ways of organizing these activities, and this is unimaginable within the institution. Privatizing them, or subjecting them to the rigors of private measures, at least provides a measure: if an educational, health, transportation or other institution can’t attract investment or turn a profit or, the equivalent, being able to run at costs low enough so as to create a business-friendly environment, then we can at least insist they be organized in some way that they can. We can point to the intrinsically public or immeasurable dimensions of certain human activities, but that doesn’t change the fact that decisions need to be made regarding the amount and kind of resources to be allocated to them.

In the end, assetizing doesn’t improve things because what makes a set of assets a profitable investment (perhaps for a very short time) or reliable collateral has no necessary correlation with the effectiveness with which it serves its function. An idealized market in which parents pay tuition to schools of their choice rather than taxes that are then distributed through the educational bureaucracy may make sense; but once those private schools must take out loans, turn their property and expected tuition into collateral, agree to cost-cutting in exchange for lower interest rates, and the school becomes an asset bundled with millions of other assets for investment by pension funds subject to state regulation, etc., we are far from that idyllic model. Maybe a lousy school would hit its limits sooner or later, but plenty of good ones would be shut down. The same would go for more privatized doctors and hospitals, even if excellent ones for the wealthy could be created this way.

The way we hedge, leverage and arbitrage along the way is by insisting and demonstrating that everyone else is doing what we are but in indirect, underhanded, unknowing and therefore destructive ways. No one does anything without trying to see it through and, seeing it through, seeing to the possibility of others seeing its consequences and implications. Everyone is selecting successors, and taking out options on the future and you in fact do them a favor by pointing out how. We work in the tradition of “modernist” aesthetic, linguistic and theoretical “options” of the 20th century by directly posing the question of the scenic terms of meaning.

An imperative has to work its way through a series of subsidiary imperatives, with debts and exchanges at each point along the way. Power is “confidence in obedience,” as Nitzan and Bichler put it in _Capital as Power_ , and this confidence is confidence in one’s debtors continuing to pay. What accounts for the degree of confidence? Whatever auxiliaries of power we were to point to, such as loyal subordinates, would just raise the same question at a different level. I think that line of succession provides the best way of accounting for this confidence—the more one’s rule follows most “consistently” from predecessors and seems likely to be transmitted to successors the more that confidence is justified.

We “speculate” on the imperative from the center in the sense of working to prolong it into the future—the creation of “derivatives.” There can’t be anything more important than de-monetizing debt and converting it into pedagogical platforms for performing succession rituals. I would be very happy to see the bitcoin maximalists turn out to be right and having El Salvador serve as a test case for both that and the prioritizing of public order is extremely important. It is good that it will be very difficult for US imperial agencies to come up with a rationale for intervention, and Bukele is presumably aware of the various “civil society” vehicles used for subversion.

Instead of paying people for past productions you would convert them into more effective producers now making contributions to institutions reduced to the problem of data security. Hypothetical trails would lead to ways of constructing and creating present trains of data; we provide not, primarily, information or knowledge, but language, which precedes and includes both. We would want to learn how to design rather surreal, or perhaps pataphysical prompts, asking, for example, to compose a story in a mock documentary style regarding a case that produces a differend (i.e., in which any decision produces an injustice) and that starts small but comes to involve powerful social actors.

But who is this “we”? It is the Big Scenic Imaginary that imagines all of humanity as an agent acting (with whom?) on a single scene. “We” certainly don’t all predict the same way (or all at one time), with equal resources and skills, or shared intentions. There is no “we,” other than when it comes to imagining disastrous consequences (if the planet really becomes unlivable, there will be a “we” that can no longer live). There are “insurance companies” at various scales, of varying efficiencies, in various relations of collaboration and antagonism (translatability and commensurability) with each other. (Insofar as the whole world becomes a single insurance company, that “we” might materialize, but it would be a highly differentiated and distributed one.)

All of these are “insurance companies,” indemnifications against originary debt coming due at times and in ways one is not yet ready to pay. The originary hypothesis has not been indemnified—it is unprepared even for a flawed, careless critique like van der Roest’s, much less the much more sustained questioning that would come from theorists in the tradition of critiquing all that exists or, for that matter, the tradition of anti-critique; GA purports to welcome all challenges and constantly bemoans and muses over their failure to materialize, but would in fact wither quickly under sustained examination of the doxa of GA and even some carefully applied pressure on the originary hypothesis itself. The originary hypothesis can be indemnified, and be brought into the general system of indemnification; but not by or in GA.

I want to follow up on a suggestion made by Joseph Vogl in his _Capital and Resentment_ to the effect that the earliest modern print media emerged to provide precisely such information to investors to argue that herein lies a broader theory of the functioning of the media in the broadest sense, that is, to include the various sources of the media, which reach into all governing and disciplinary institutions.

So, what are all those cultural, mediating, disciplinary institutions (universities, media companies and platforms, NGOs, etc.) doing within this framework? They are, most immediately and formally, providing knowledge and information pertinent to risk-assessment by financial institutions. Everything considered worthy of reporting on or studying, and the way in which it is reported on or studied, can be clarified in these terms—as identifying possible areas of risk that the central banks can draw upon in making decisions. This may sound cynical, but it’s actually the best-case scenario, and one in which all individuals could acquire information that might help them in their own risk assessments.

There is no firm boundary, though, between scouting out events (keeping in touch with major players within various institutions, watching for signs of disturbance, etc.) and actively intervening in events and generating risk—and “news” organizations must have figured this out simultaneously with the discovery of the usefulness of their information to financiers, that is, along with the creation of such organizations. In accord with the logic of capital as power, new agencies directly, but the workers in the human sciences more indirectly, disable, defame, blackmail, inform on, threaten, etc., one set of actors in the interests of others.

What money as investment in assets valued in accord with expected future earnings does is coordinate the tributary order in accord with who is best able to ensure a predictable rate of future earnings, which also means ensuring that others will not be able to procure that rate. This, I am going to say here, involves speculating on the correlation between the centralization of the means of power, on the one hand, and the fluctuations in who controls what part of that power. If you have the advantage of the largest store of capital, you would want power to be increasingly centralized, which makes it easy to cut out potential competitors and pummel the subjects into obedience, while at the same time wanting to be able to pull the particular string that elevates one and degrades another in the power structure whenever desired.

So, the power to set in place overarching legal measures is always in place, while you can determine exactly when and how that power is deployed. This is “value.” Moreover, this, as I suggested in my previous post, inclines us to a certain kind of subjectivity or agency, one that can deploy centralizing political mechanisms to test out various possible valuations—the woke entrepreneur, which can be scaled up or down and produced through various educational and media institutions. What is especially important to me here is that, while this correlation between centralized power and fluctuations in occupancy in power gets measured in money—it _is_ what gets measured in money—it can be effectively translated into discourse. And if it can be translated into discourse that discourse can be translated back into currency as the ongoing effort to create commensuration between power and occupancy at the center.

David Olson finds a kind of originary grammar (certainly not his term) in that inscription of “3 oxen,” or whatever. We have the subject-predicate relation of the declarative sentence in embryo here. That basic structure prepares writing to represent speech acts, and once writing starts to represent speech acts, we are on the way to alphabetical writing. At that point we are already at quite a distance from a ledger entry, and it’s easy to see why one might assume the two forms of inscription, currency and writing, simply went their separate ways here. Which speech act would have been the earliest to have been recorded, though?

So, writing can’t really do anything other than draw up ledgers. Let’s now push back beyond the speech/writing distinction that Olson works with (and that I accept as giving us the most precise account of writing and the declarative sentence) towards Derrida’s “arche-writing,” inscription prior to the speech writing distinction itself and really, prior to anything we would recognize as language. Arche-writing was a starting point for Bernard Stiegler in his inquiry into writing as technics and the way he uses inscription to mark the transition from animal to human is completely consistent with the originary hypothesis—it is only with the origin of language that memory can be transmitted generationally, rather than either genetically or through the learning experiences of individual organisms.

There is always that which doesn’t fit into the ledger, which doesn’t balance out and our inscriptions capture that as well. That which doesn’t fit is what happens to the indebted, so as to place them in debt, or make the debt exceed their means of repayment, and to some extent this is the case for all of us—who has not left things undone? The corresponding agency of a creator who has given us more than we can ever repay, hence cancelling all human sacrifice and calling for the complete devotion of the self, an invention shared by Judaism and Christianity, is registered in all those idioms in which someone does something without there being any way of specifying any “mechanism” by which he did it.

For this simultaneity of debt cancellation to imply that the modern exchange system represents a rupture with the originary scene the kind of transaction described here would have to be the normal or definitive form of exchange in a market society. But this simultaneity of gifting only exists on the most “everyday” level of exchange, like, say, buying a cup of coffee in a diner (although the increasingly universal use of credit cards delays even this debt repayment somewhat). At least as normal are exchanges where there is in fact some delay, whether in the loans (student, car, home) many if not most citizens in a modern market society take out at some point in their lives, the payment of wages which generally takes place after one has completed the agreed upon service, pensions, inheritance, the lines of credit businesses generally rely upon, insurance and, perhaps, above all, the lending central banks stand ready to do when as a last resort the continuance of the exchange system depends (or at least is perceived to depend) on them doing so.

> In anthropological money, the accounting follows the logic of kinship and religion, of the circulation of reproductive power (women) and justice (divine grace). Units of Account are taken from nature in the form of stable quantities of valuable material private possessions that represent wealth—heads of cattle (or people), units of shell or gems, bracelets or ingots of silver. These are prized and accumulated for their essentially religious value. But they do not necessarily become generalized media of exchange, used to lubricate markets. Rather, they are used to denominate payment in a certain circuit of social obligations by virtue of their prestige—their ability to store value. (“Origins: Reproducing Families and States”)

> In fact, money was reinvented under much the same conditions as it was invented. A public imperative in a time of exigency catalyzed an arrangement to produce and to spend in units of value that governing authorities soon recognized in satisfaction of (an expanding) tax liability and endorsed as a medium in interim exchange between individuals. In the modern moment, the units were created by borrowing long-term from a bank in the form of its short-term liabilities—its promises to pay or bank notes. The government paid up front for its “borrowing” in note form: interest went to the investors for their provision of the specie security. (812)

> Ultimately, the insistence institutionalized in the early 19[th] century that money be understood as private was the strange and selective answer to the constitutional quandary posed when the government decided to make a collective medium—money—according to a method that prioritized individual interests. According to the architects of the Gold Standard, public authority to make money was legitimate only insofar as it furthered the end of that medium, now understood as commercial. That approach prioritized the agency of entrepreneurs and the business community. If the public purposes of money seemed to disappear, the could be brought back into view by understanding the polity as, itself, a stage for the aggregate of private activity that made the economy. An argument developed as an escape from politics thus returned to colonize the politics at its core.

The modern individual is expected to worship at the shrine of the economy (or the “market”). But we make this description more concrete by keeping in mind our previous discussion of money as an extension of the faith that the ultimate payment of a debt will be as if instantaneous, regardless of the interval between provision of the gift and the repayment. The faith in this instantaneity, and the entire system of practices taking subjects along life courses (education, employment, consumption habits, borrowing, saving, investing, retiring, etc.) aimed at conjuring this instantaneity is as ritual as any order. The first ritual following the originary scene itself would have aimed at eliminating the unevenness necessary to that scene (the staggered procession in which the sign would have been issued) by having everyone enact the originary event in sync.

> Both the capitalist and the proletarian theorized by Marx are examples of what Jack Treynor, in “Economics of the Dealer Function” calls “time-motivated investors.” Both, that is, have inflexible needs to transact in a particular direction and at a particular time. The worker needs to sell their labor and also needs to acquire consumption goods and cannot wait to do either. The capitalist, on the other hand, not only needs to purchase circulating capital and to sell consumption goods, but also requires the ability to sell fixed capital itself (at least potentially). (77)

> [i]n the system of market exchange . . . these “time investors” are complemented by another actor who accommodates their demand to transact: one who is flexible about both time and direction of transaction but who is, by contrast, inflexible about price. The dealer is willing to be either buyer or seller, and at any time, depending on the price that their counterparty is willing to pay. The dealer . . . in fact makes itself inflexible by quoting a price, thereby constituting what is called the “inside spread.” (78)

If there’s no spread there is no reason for anyone to make the market because the market is not made by the individual with an apple and the individual with cash encountering each other, but by the dealer who supplies either party with the money they need to make their deal under inflexible conditions. But now Drumm introduces another actor, between whom and the “time investors” the dealer is intermediate: the “value investor”

> who is defined by being in possession of a very large balance sheet capacity or the ability to take and hold asset positions over a long time horizon . . . the value investor never needs to demand liquidity as a demand upon their survival and therefore always has time to wait for a better price. (104)

> The dealer has gone from selling liquidity to the time investor to demanding it from the value investor, who is, in virtue of their strong negotiating position, able to charge a substantially higher premium than that which the dealer could command themselves. This second, larger price of liquidity, which lies hidden in the darkness beyond what appears in the light of the market itself, is called the “outside spread.” (107)

> The modern corporate owner does not view capital as comprising tangible and intangible artefacts such as machines, structures, raw materials, knowledge and goodwill. Instead, he or she is habituated to think of capital as equivalent to the corporation’s equity and debt. The universal creed of capitalism defines the magnitude of this equity and debt as capitalization: it is equal to the corporation’s expected future profit and interest payments, adjusted for risk and discounted to their present value. (8)

This is, intentionally, we think, an extremely open-ended definition: expected future profits and interest payments at what point? For as long as the “value investor” can wait, which is a matter of both faith and power: conceivably, the system might last forever, or it might crash tomorrow, but capitalism is a mode of power because the capitalist doesn’t leave this to chance:

Bichler and Nitzan argue that a precondition of capitalism is the “spread of bourgeois accounting and the development of probability and statistics” that enabled the process of capitalism to “assum[e] the forward looking form of discounted future income” (158):

Once this “equation” is in place, any institution can be, and due to the sheer power of measuring and discounting risk, eventually will be brought under its sway. Increasingly all institutions, including public ones, are assessed in terms of the way present investments can be measured in terms of expected future earnings to result from them. So, for example,

Still, technological development has taken place rather spectacularly, at least measured against previous eras, under capitalism (driven, in large part, by those very mathematical innovations Bichler and Nitzan see at the origin of capitalism), and Bichler and Nitzan’s model can account for that as well, as what they call “external breadth,” or “green field investment,” in which a “firm can achieve differential accumulation by building new capacity and hiring new employees faster than the average” (329-30), which seems to correlate with more conventional understandings of capitalist based growth. However, such external breadth is then sabotaged by “internal breadth,” or verticalization, “internal depth,” or cost-cutting, and “external depth,” or stagnation, all of which involve getting hold of the assets created by green field investment and guaranteeing higher future earnings than other firms by restricting access to those assets and using legal and political maneuvering to prevent those other firms from creating competitive sources of income.

The history of capitalism suggests that some green field investment will eventually break through, so that at least some economic progress can be expected under capitalism, making it possible to defend or acquiesce in it on “the devil you know” grounds. Second, though, the reliance of capitalization upon the outside option, that is, control into the forseeable future of the political order and its legal structures that will ensure that expected future earnings are indeed justly expected, which is to say, that the sale of those assets at that future point will be as if instantaneous with the present pricing of that asset, does place at least a conceptual time limit of that “expected future.” Capitalists, and those staffing their states, by definition cannot see beyond or outside of the continued operation of the machinery of power in those ways most pertinent to ensuring or enforcing the virtual instantaneity of that exchange.

At the same time, the development of what has come to be called “neo-liberalism” has made the capitalist order explicit enough that it may be possible to at least think outside of it. We could think of neo-liberalism as the shift from thinking about markets as already existing naturally in the world of human exchanges to thinking about markets as an abstract model to be applied to all human relationships, assetizing the previously unassetizable and subjecting all human activities to the discipline of risk-minimization so as to maximize future earnings. This takes us into the world of derivatives and arbitrage—a world that was already implicit in the monetary relation itself insofar as once money is generalized, the only way that you know that you really own something and that it has value is if you can use it as collateral to borrow against.

The construction of the derivative leverages all of the power the entity constructing it has at its disposal: computing power that makes it possible to calculate the likely future price of the asset in question in the midst of millions of other assets, many of which will be purchased as hedges against that future exchange failing to come off as planned; financial power (the outside spread) that makes it possible to buy and hold these assets at a scale and at prices one’s competitors could not match; social and political power over regulators and rating agencies that ensure freedom of action and the kinds of legal certification required to provide one with an advantage. Ideally, the space or interval of the arbitrage profit would be infinitesimal and vanishing, so that whoever locates it has an almost infinite advantage over those even slightly behind.

LiPuma, along with the other contributors, critiques the narrowly economic analysis of financial derivatives along the lines of the Black-Scholes equation for calculating risk that helped transform finance in the 70s and 80s and situates it within a much broader social and anthropological framework which enables us to see it as ritualistic behavior—in the terms we’ve laid out here, this means activity aimed at ensuring the community remains the same over time. Here is the way LiPuma puts it:

> Now it also turns out that religion is an unexpectedly apt metaphor: for the modern American circulation of faith is an unregulated market where all commitments are over the counter bets on salvation. Critically, it declares what anthropologists steeped in gift-based exchange have known since the pioneering work of their ancestors (esp. Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss): that totalities, including the market, are social fictions made real by collective belief and sustained through the name that we have canonized for the power and persistence of belief—namely, faith. A financial market is a social imaginary; a deeply institutionalized imaginary to be sure endowed with a name, ratified participants, bodies of received knowledge, registered firms, a codified history, and so on; but it is an imaginary nonetheless. A market objectifies itself institutionally much in the manner that a nation institutionalizes itself through the creation of a state (such as the institutionalization of US nationness in the Treasury Department or Federal Reserve Bank). From our standpoint, it is neither an accident nor some opportune metaphor that a crisis-torn market began to speak in prayers, its commentators drawn to formulations that suture the health of the market to inscriptions of faith and belief normally attributed to religion. Even more, in calling for the restoration of faith and belief, these commentators are, without intending to, invoking a performativity which attends religion’s celebrated accompanist: ritual. Indeed, I take the financial community’s self-assessment seriously. I see its references to religion not as a mistake but as a crisis induced moment of self-reflexivity. And thus a sign of where to look analytically. I will not suggest the argument that religions in a capitalist society fetishize ritual to conceal its economic dimension (though this is so, there being a real economy to ritual performance), rather, that the structuring and reproduction of derivative markets turns on their rituality. Our reading and theorization of the evidence leads to the argument that rituality underwrites the collective vision that founds the creation of socially imagined totalities. This is anything but straightforward; for a market when viewed (and conceptualized) from the standpoint of the agents appears as an aggregation of individuals (maximizing self-interested competitors); whereas these same agents, when viewed from the standpoint of the totality which allows that market to exist as such, appear as a network of dividuals. Moreover, it is the connectivity between the partible dimensions of the agents involved, that is, their dividuality or elements of their personhood used to create the totality, that, presupposed in the act of trading, grounds the possibility of their self-interested maximizing competition as individuals. The appearance of the person/trader as a singular individual—that is culturally, as a “thinking object” endowed with the capacity to self-commoditize its own labor—is the necessary appearance of a market that is necessarily constituted on other terms. (206-7)

While LiPuma (and his colleagues) are highly critical of the transformations wrought by the new form of financialization initiated in the 1970s this invoking of ritual and religion is not merely critical, not merely an indictment of the derivative as “irrational.” This analysis forces us to ask what, in the end, can be, outside of faith, some projection of a future state where we will share an “at once-ness” with our present state, that will articulate in some potentially imaginable way our current desires and fears, redeem our sins (debts) and validate our hopes (debt forgiveness); a future state, moreover, that we realize and bring, tenuously, into being by our present actions, which are themselves prescribed by some founding ethos?

It takes a very specific kind of person to engage in the perpetual struggle to create and acquire derivatives, a kind of complete devotion to the flow of speculative life, to risk-taking, to the camaraderie even with one’s opponents, to the mobilization of all of one’s faculties in an endeavor that could end disastrously at any moment and a conviction that such activity sets one apart from the mediocre norm. Such subjects need to be produced, through communities, educational institutions, media and a company ethos. LiPuma goes onto to argue that this ethos does not remain confined to the financial industry but becomes a broader social ethos with the “derivative” vocabulary permeating discussions of subject formation across the board as we are encouraged to see our homes, careers, abilities, and attainments as assets to be maximized, put strategically at risk, and collateralized.

The “value” of the derivative is that it produces possible futures with a reach that can be continually extended with the increase in our calculative capacities, and any “faith” depends upon the projection of futures; the limit, as we suggested earlier, lies in the derivative’s inability to project beyond or outside of the social and political machinery that is necessary to construct the derivative ritual. But the intensification and acceleration of trade involved in the derivatives market, in which any asset can serve as collateral and hence as at least a store and measure of value, suggests that virtually anything can function as currency.

The way to hedge, politically, against the all eggs in one basket political economy of financialization (and dollarization), then, might be to return to the historical norm of plural currencies. There are many ways in which currencies are already being pluralized, as Lana Swartz points out in her New Money: How Payment Became Social Media, and there is perennial, if not yet particularly confident, talk of Chinese or BRIC challenges to dollar preeminence, but the most highly publicized and actualized alternative currencies are the cryptocurrencies, and first of all Bitcoin. Bitcoin promises the kind of monetary stability imagined once to have been provided by the gold standard, as the value of money is placed outside of political control.

It seems to us that so far, Bitcoin serves as a store of value, but must rely upon the measure of value established by other currencies (ultimately the dollar) and only very minimally serves as a medium of exchange. Could Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies fuel investment, or serve as the “outside spread”? It may be that proximity to political connectedness, for example access to the defense industry (again, first of all in the US), might be necessary to ensure steady flows of investment, and strategic allotments of the easier money only state-sponsored currency can provide.

This is a very obvious conclusion to arrive at once we jettison the distinction between state and market, private and public—all of the things that even the most orthodox economists must assume as preconditions of the “market economy” are sites of intervention by the participants in that economy. Once we acknowledge that, we must also acknowledge that the creation of profit by producing goods and services that a sufficient portion of the consuming public will buy at a price higher than went into producing them is necessarily subordinate to the struggles over the legal and political conditions that give one capitalist, or one sector of capital, an advantage over others.

A firm that can render itself relatively exempt from the rolling war crimes trial by anticipating expected future charges and immunizing itself against them through preferential hiring, an active HR division, properly vetted diversity training, etc., increases its own value significantly relative to firms incapable of establishing such a regime. Hence, “woke capital”—but we still have another piece to add.

England is the origin of capital, of the multi-party system and, of course, the distinctly modern form of imperialism. Here, I would agree with those (I’ll mention the twitter feed “scientism”) who see “liberal democracy” as a conquering creed: if you can open other countries to markets, first of all, you allow the competition between your own capitalists to extend onto a larger field, and if you impose liberal institutions, whether they be the multiparty system, private enterprise, an “independent media,” and so on, you create an open field for intervention in and control of the country you dominate—without having to expend much in the way of military force.

Anything you can invest in is an asset—a lot of the public-private ventures replacing public services from the 90s on were means of generating assets. You invest in a private prison, or a health insurance company that contracts with the state to provide certain services: insofar as that contract with the state is maintained, the expected future earnings of your investment remain high, and you have an interest in intervening politically or supporting others who do to maintain the political conditions of such contracts. There are limits, presumably to what can be assetized, but I doubt we’ve gotten anywhere near them.

In a recent case that I noticed left-wingers on Twitter flipping out about, a conservative court ruled against the SEC being able to directly punish firms and individuals that violate regulations—they must, as the constitution demands, be given fair trials. The left complains that this is in effect the dismantling of the administrative state, and they are obviously right—the administrative state is a way of farming out state functions to “prosecutorial” extra-state agents who draw upon disciplinary knowledge to infiltrate the bureaucracy and blackmail those who concentrate wealth. Of course, though, the immediate effect of such a ruling will be to more directly empower capital, which won’t have to operate through elaborate protection rackets anymore.

The mode of exchange with the center of disciplinarity is that of data security, which includes the creation and archiving of knowledge that would, say, both inform a speech regime organized around a robust enforcement of laws against slander, libel and defamation while remaining invulnerable to that regime. The current dementia regarding “misinformation” is completely wrong, but so completely that it points to what would the right approach: a juridical order that makes everyone liable for lying about others while giving expanded forms of standing to bring the liars into court and make them accountable—all this assumes a “knowledge base” that is reliable and shared—that is, a knowledge base full of claims upon which accusations of interested lying would leave no mark.

“Idiomatic intelligence” commemorates the way all knowledge comes out of commemoration, and the commemoration of commemoration, through iteration, variation, and “sampling”—again, the practices constitutive of the scene of writing placed at the center here. Just as the ancient scribes created the collective identities into which rulers, occupants of the center, can step as always already having stepped into, by stitching together, revising, editing and ensuring the transmission of inherited traditions, so our spaces of writing, programming of programmers, will seed the institutions concerned with data security in all its forms (ultimately, all institutions, but not with equal weight) with intelligence programs that provide imperative transmission belts for those who can select their successors in perpetuity.

In fact, if we get good enough at this kind of thing, maybe it becomes possible to bypass the pathological and dysfunctional political institutions and processes altogether and build sovereignty directly into these idiomatically intelligent pathways. Tactics for disabling sabotage from state and capitalist institutions alike can be built into the reciprocal regulation. All this is under the umbrella of data security as an operational cybernetic system between ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives. Declaratives are just studies in the fulfillment of imperatives, within a world of competing imperatives (which finds voice in interrogatives), and the fulfillment of any imperative is in a new ostensive, which redeems the ostensive of which the imperative was first of all a prolongation.

And what you donate in return—what the media companies receive—is also far more explicit and precise. Ford Motor Company broadcasting a commercial on CBS in 1955 was taking a shot in the dark, hoping this publicity will marginally increase sales and ephemera like “public good will.” Today Facebook, Google, Twitter et al know exactly what they want from you: data. And this data is highly useful to them even if you don’t buy the products advertised on their sites—indeed, your refusal to buy commodities provides them with data. Indeed, “wokeness” is essentially the synthesis of the figure of the victim derived the Auschwitz theology created through the Nuremberg Trials and the figure of the consumer branded by and providing branding for the financing of turnover at the center.

Every new ritual (which, again, also means “economic”) order is to some extent predicated upon disowning and incorporating elements of the preceding ritual order—here, as elsewhere, the Hebrew Bible provides us with an enormously rich model. A ritual order replacing one that places the figure of the consumer and her marginal utility at its center (the consumer is the target of the advertising that all the data collection feeds into, the consumer must be prepped, the consumer is processed—at times sacrificed—through the financial system) would best put the prospective team member who will reveal the previously unseen hole in your team at the center.

This is the source of my insistence of something like “data security” as the “slogan” going forward: if we simply accept, as a starting proposition, that in any shared activity there is what I call “centered ordinality”—someone going first, taking some initiative and then being joined by/initiating others—and we must accept it because the other alternative is simultaneous action by everyone—then the only real “value” we need concern ourselves with is ascertaining the materials required by each “ordinalized” member of the team. Whoever goes first speaks for the center, at least until he doesn’t, and you follow him and try to determine with what he needs to be supplied in accordance with what he asks; if you are him, you are deriving your actions from whomever you’ve inherited the path and sizing up your team for possible successors.

On this model, we no longer need to imagine ourselves to be crusading muckrakers, exposing the truths that will presumably make the walls of Jericho crumble and the people rise up, with the guilty exposed and led away in handcuffs, etc. (not that there would be anything wrong with that); rather, we’re privy to the conversation of the world, no doubt filled with all the boasting, misfires, stupidities, attempts at manipulation, failed attempts to make one’s discourse real, and so on, as any conversation. And one advantage of developing a style that can join this conversation is that one can address the scribal actors within these agencies, those who can themselves come to see their own program in terms of data security, in ensuring and ascertaining that those appointed to do certain things are in fact doing those things, and determining whether those things have turned out to be worth doing (have they made the provenance and chain of custody of vital data more secure?).

Entities like the WEF, and the various mostly Anglo-originated projects for global governance going back to the late 19th century that preceded them are right to envision a mode of global governance that transfers military based to knowledge-based power. The real problem is that they want the governance before they have the knowledge and must therefore manipulate the knowledge to fit the particular mode of governance they consider themselves most likely to secure in the nearest imaginable future. The style by which this disastrous approach can be countered is not by positing the exact “opposite” values to those of global governance, but by participating in and spreading the program of data security, which is to say, positions from which ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative-ostensive chains can be authenticated and confirmed. And the strongest frame for doing so in going to be Everybody Says what Everybody Else Says So that We Don’t All Do the Same Thing at the Same Time—what is at once a stylistic, political, moral and aesthetic mantra.)

As a marking, writing is self-commemorating, creating pedagogical platforms, as every time the same words (now ascertainable because written) are repeated they are different and we are always trying to catch up to the difference in our next inscription. These successive differences are data and creating disciplinary collectives that can identify a range of ways of making new oscillations of same and other out of them is data security because this is how names, designations, contracts, agreements, records and recordings are archived. Agency is producing data by collecting it and collecting it by recording it and becoming data by producing it and becoming it as the only way to reliably record it.

But the broader distribution of resources and, firstly, positions, is essential to such scenic design. Money is a result of scenic expansion and the articulation of scenes within scenes and once unmoored from a publicly sacralized center money is used to secure assets that can guarantee greater revenue flows better than competing assets. Such a guarantee of revenue flow requires metrics of performance, and these metrics of performance involve cutting costs and increasingly profits within the time that the asset is held, or the introduction of standards that are taken within some administrative or legal frame to indicate the cutting of costs and increase of profits, which has no necessary correspondence with the conditions ensuring the pedagogical continuity of any particular scene.

There is a space for innovation here insofar as the relative monopoly provided for by innovation can provide for enhanced relative revenue streams but the legal and political means used to exploit and preserve the monopoly depress innovation past a certain point.

One is speaking in layers of the paradoxicality of ritual, of exchanges with the center, of intelligence gathered through interference or noted disruptions in either of the above, all of which have infinitely various forms. Idioms can only be known by participating in them, which means simultaneously speaking in the discourse of a rite, the language of justice, and the idiom of inquiry. What this has to do with money is that only idiomatization can replace it—what money tells us about the likely results of projected enterprises, which now means everyone using money to predict the predictions of everyone else regarding those likely results, and the reduction of likely results the securing of future revenue streams, which means what others will pay to secure as their own revenue streams, all as a way of coordinating the tributary economy at the expense of the constant rotation of occupants of the center, can only otherwise be told by counting on a future spread of individuals holding responsible posts of which one’s counting on them doing so is a critical component.

To say that a specific practice of language can replace money is not exactly intuitive, so I’ll have to keep coming back to that. (I’ll point out, though, that notions of money as media and sign system have been around for quite a while, so why couldn’t one media or sign system be replaced by another? The standard argument is that only prices can provide the information needed to coordinate the activities of producers, distributors and consumers—no wholesaler could just know that he needs an agricultural firm to provide him with 300,000 chickens over the next year because he doesn’t know what the retailers, who don’t know what the customers will be willing and able to buy, etc.

Finance continually seeks to shorten the time span within which expected future earnings can be bet on—if most people think that the future expected earnings of a particular company will go up 100% over the next decade but you have good reason to believe that the company will in fact go bankrupt in a couple of years you can, if doing so will further elevate the profile of the company, buy it at its valuation, increase momentarily its valuation by virtue of having bought it, quickly, let’s say simultaneously, or as close as possible, and make an arbitrage profit produced solely by the interference in the market your purchase of the company introduced.

The further the less powerful and less knowledgeable (in great part because less powerful) look ahead to value possible investments the more arbitrage style thinking on the part of the more powerful and knowledgeable is advantageous. The institutionalization of such thinking and practice will further install such power and make such knowledge accessible—control of politicians, media, and therefore laws and courts, as well as the financial institutions and people trained so as to staff them that determine that a particular mode of austerity will increase value rapidly. The regularized flipping of occupants of the center is indispensable to this process.

To answer such questions we need to cut through all the standardizing idioms posing as metalanguages for the purpose of stabilizing valuations and which have been constructed by the disciplines. The most effective way to sell the kind of service I’m speaking of, in today’s world, would, I imagine, to be able to present a Power Point display of a checklist of qualities or capabilities, implicitly measurable quantitatively, that can predict or be manipulated so as to attain a promised outcome. This is good for the standardizing agencies and consulting companies and bad for everyone else. You can get investors if you have been vetted by some consulting firm, but the entire point of doing so is to have that consulting firm get paid for telling you what to do so as to attract the very investors who will make a great deal of money arbitraging the expected future earnings confirmed by the consulting company, whose own value is in turn confirmed by the profits of the investors.

So, our intelligencers are simultaneously minding tributary chains and continuity at the center, the boundary between the asymmetrical reciprocity of the honor system and the juridical, and the conversion of elements of the scenic infrastructure into new scenes. Assets into data, vendetta into justice, prop into scene. The most immediate data provided by the valuation of assets regards continuity of occupancy of the center in reproducing tributary systems. Here the problem posed is the irreducibility of capitalism to juridical categories and the consequent need for an account of chains of command over supply chains brought to a head in data security.

So, “teaming as breeding” seems to be a generative way of fleshing out the relations between the held center and the holding Center. There’s a very literal breeding going on when, for example, parents interfere in their children’s dating and mating; a somewhat less literal one in choosing to live in a neighborhood made up exclusively or primarily of co-ethnics; a somewhat more metaphorical breeding involved in creating, say, a company dealing in information (how literal or metaphorical is the breeding if one is drawn to work with or hire people who went to a small cluster of universities?), where we start to tilt towards teaming.

And it is the elimination of the center as the site of a distribution that is explicitly ritual in the complete sense (that is, including the “economic”) that makes contenders for the occupancy of the center tokens and guarantors of the extension and riskiness of circulation, committed to defending whichever section of capital can most forcefully order the whole by ensuring the return of its own investments. To create a new mode of distribution, a tributarianism, would also be to create a mode of scenic design devoted to making each scene a pedagogical translation of the infrastructures.

You perpetually rebalance all the hedges while investing the same amount on the asset at that moment differentially priced across the two markets. But no firm could approximate such a condition, if for no other reason than the existence of all the other firms. The market resists such control because the knowledge needed to approximate it would require the very stable succession at the center the market has been invented to disrupt. All of the supply chains, though, are priced, and therefore knowable, as their prices tell us how secure the future earning expected from ownership of it is but also, I think, the scenic and pedagogical conditions of the continued maintenance of those chains.

This would include reliable knowledge of people and the institutions producing people just as much as knowledge of underwater cables or fluctuations in asset valuations or fragilities in governing institutions, all of which counts as data security. Even secrecy might become less important as more refined information will be temporally and spatially tagged information, thereby losing its usefulness quickly or not having any at all for those outside of the disciplinary space. As a result, we might find ourselves with restored juridical institutions, as such intelligent governance would return the juridical to its original function of delegating the resolution of disputes in which the higher levels of authority need not intervene.

There is no “economy.” There is only, as there always has been, ritual distribution from the center. I’m a little embarrassed that it took me so long, even after replacing the vocabularies of liberalism and democracy, to get to this conclusion—such is the power of propaganda. _Mea culpas_ aside, though, I was able to get to that conclusion by getting interested in the question of derivatives, coming across some excellent work on it, like Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin’s 2016 edited volume _Derivatives and the Wealth of Society_ (and Martin’s 2015 _Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative_ ), to just mention a couple; work, moreover, I could make productive sense of in the context of Nitzan and Bichler’s _Capital as Power_.

These thinkers have been drawing upon anthropological understandings of ritual and gift in order to make sense of the derivative against the narrow economism of market models and calculations based on the Black-Scholes equation. Two intertwined concepts that I have been insisting upon for years enable me to incorporate the derivative into an anthropology far more powerful than is dreamt of by any of these thinkers: first, my “derivation” from Gans’s notion of “linguistic presence” in _The Origin of Language_ of the assumption that all human sign use aims at establishing presence; and, second, what is really the same thing, with a more grounded (in the semantic primes) and expansive cover, that we are always showing things (some things, on some scene) to be the same.

The abovementioned thinkers, while as leftist as you’d expect academic humanist auto-didacts in economics to be, are all profoundly impressed by the social logic of the derivative—the fact that it involves a vast, cooperative, uncertain constitution of social reality which in times of crisis happens to draw upon the language of hope, prayer, the miraculous and so on. I also have little difficulty in acknowledging this logic, or their also held view that making more explicit the social logic of the derivative will transform that logic decisively.

The derivative is constituted by the attempt at arbitrage within a system of exchange that is theoretically predicated upon the impossibility of arbitrage and practically predicated on the volatility that makes achieving an arbitrage situation extremely difficult. Arbitrage, of course, is the opportunity for profit created by the differing valuations of the same asset in different markets, so that if one can buy it on the market where it sells cheaper and sell it (“simultaneously”) on the market where it is more expensive, one makes an entirely risk-free profit. I will here just point out the similarity between this scenario and my analysis of hearing the voice of God [some posts back](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/writing-as-the-programming-of-scenes).

I will return to this. A quick analysis will reveal that the two trades, though, can never be exactly simultaneous (can not an entire market turn bad in a milli-second?), so risk cannot be completely eliminated. But given the desire for arbitrage, the closest thing possible to simultaneity can be constructed, precisely through the examination of every possibility that would interfere with the two exchanges of the same asset, and the hedging against those possibilities. Here is where knowledge, or the disciplinary, becomes paramount—the study of risk, of all the things that can interfere with presence, with something being the same thing on two different scenes, involves an eventually all-encompassing study into all the institutional positions, rules and movements of the entire order.

One of the many virtues of this new thinking on derivatives (although there is a little unevenness here) is the liberation from the notion (common to Marxist and liberal economics alike) that there is some “real” value from which financialized values are a “deviation.” Like Nitzan and Bichler (to whom there is, I believe, a single, unelaborated upon reference in Lee and Martin’s volume), these thinkers accept (one senses it was a hard pill to swallow, but once it's down…) that capitalism _is_ financialization, which is to say that value is nothing more than price which is the discounting of the asset’s expected future earnings.

As Christine Desan, in _Making Money,_ points out, this shift from the monarch as creating and selling the currency used to pay taxes to the monarch to the financing of the state out of the general social income generated through the capacity to monetize assets is the beginning of capitalism. The political parties can jointly participate in centralizing the state apparatus while taking turns occupying the center and becoming one more set of assets for the central bankers (and their subsidiaries within the financial, insurance, etc., industries) to gamble on and intervene in. Continuous occupancy of the center would make this entire system impossible—the more deliberate the process of succession, the less there is to gamble on. Financialization is thus thoroughly social and political from the beginning, and the measures of value which gave the impression of some real, underlying value, whether it be labor or gold, were financialized from the beginning.

The social logic of the derivative, then, is that of the future perfect (a tense much beloved of Jacques Derrida): this value of the given asset will have been the same as itself. I have returned many times to the question of what, beginning on the originary scene, is needed for something to be the same—the same object or the same sign. Establishing sameness requires the sustained and energetically maintained and insured participation of everyone in the social order: what makes a country, a community, a law, any institution, words, etc., the same over the period of a day, a month, a year, centuries? In governance more specifically, this is the problem of succession: a political order is the same insofar as succession in power iterates the terms of succession.

The derivative situates the problem of sameness within the financial system, but, as these new thinkers of the derivative make clear (their new thinking has its origins in the 2008 financial crisis), in times of crisis the entire social order is mobilized by the “financial.” I can return here, as these thinkers cannot (they are welcome to, though), to the distribution on the originary scene, and its successions in the distribution by the Big Man, and the sacred and then divine kings. Money has its origins in the distance of the congregants from the scene of sacrifice, and the need to provide them with (lend them) tokens to buy a sacrificial animal at the scene—it is very telling that, as we see in Richard Seaford’s study of _Money and the Early Greek Mind_ , that philosophy emerges in the first thoroughly monetized societies of the Greek city-states and that these city states is where we also see the emergence of desacralized governance in the form of “tyrants” and democracy.

The derivative represents our gift of ourselves to the center: we, on whatever scene we are on, guarantee (redeem) the signs proffered on that scene as the same as signs proffered on other scenes. (Think about the conversions and displacements needed to see, say, your child, as the same, despite all the growth and changes, at birth, 2 years old, 10 years old, 30 years old, etc.) We guarantee that following our use and recirculation of the signs they will have been the same as when we ourselves encountered them on the scene. This involves the equivalent (the likeness) of hedging, as we implicitly or explicitly pledge to step into the breach of any number of imperative gaps that might open into chasms in front of us.

But all of this means we have been providing for making such pledges—our homes, our jobs, often our education, our health care, everything—has been mortgaged to the financial system through the ongoing assetization. This is a problem I have been addressing under the concept of converting assets into data, and now we can add more precision and breadth to this concept. Under capitalism, we can contribute to and receive from the center only under the condition that we submit to the process of having ourselves broken up into assets that can in turn be packaged into derivatives that in turn serve as collateral for further assetization and financialization.

That (not yet) sign, then, is the same, has the same “value,” as the sign that marks the crossing of the threshold into the human community. So, there is the derivative on the originary scene. And whatever the not-yet signer is doing to enhance the likelihood of the sign being transmitted through the group (maybe he has to exaggerate his non-threatening posture in a way that latecomers won’t have to) is him hedging against the sign not being taken up; but one might also say that holding a threatening or retaliatory response in reserve is also a kind of hedging, and this maps out the scene in the same way as the contemporary market where risk reduction and risk intensification proceed in tandem.

The derivative order heightens our mutual interdependencies and indebtedness and even reveals that at the foundation of any social order there is nothing but the exchange of faith in one another that constitutes sociality. But if the goal is arbitrage opportunities, there’s no reason why investment should flow towards any enterprise that serves any socially useful purpose. That also means, though, that if you want to get something productive done, you need to pitch it as a potential arbitrage opportunity—at the very least, some investor can get in first and make rapid profits before the field is saturated with investment and a few firms monopolize the field and proceed to sabotage competitors.

Nothing that would benefit everyone, or that would not necessarily, in a pre-calculated fashion, benefit specific people, could possibly attract investment. This makes it pretty easy to understand why nothing much is done about our “crumbling infrastructure.” And which investor, in particular, would benefit from controlling the southern border? During the 90s, that is, during the launch of the fully derivative order, public-private partnerships were much touted, precisely in order to deal with such problems, but I’m guessing that never worked out to anyone’s satisfaction because since Tony Blair and Bill Clinton left office we haven’t heard much about it. (Although the whole “green credits” scheme seems alive and well.)

Now, this is where good government progressive types start saying, “see, we told you that the government serves an indispensable purpose and should not have been dismantled and it’s time to set the old New Deal state back in place”—but what is the government if not another site of speculation, in which proposals for public investment would work their way through banks, campaign donors and monopolies? And privately funded philanthropies and NGOs, staffed by graduates of elite universities on their way to careers on Wall St., McKinsey, etc.? What are the scenes upon which other scenes are coordinated? Somewhere along the way the nostalgic progressive will resort to metaphysical concepts like the ”will” with which government action needs to be infused, or the “popular energy” by which it needs to be guided, and then anyone can know they can be safely disregarded.

Now, if we bring in the other sciences—environmental, biological and medical, engineering, and so on—all this obviously gets far more complex, while the superfluity of data currently at our disposal makes it possible to have a data-driven order that is far more participatory than what we have now. As I suggested a couple of posts back, this means that ultimately the most important form of security in any order is data security, or intelligence. The integrity with which data is identified, collected, labelled, curated, employed, distributed and organized is paramount. Nothing we do can mean anything outside of that.

Those who point out that if a service is free, the user is the product, already recognize that this is the reality; and so do those arguing that the giant tech companies should pay us for our data. But let’s imagine how all this might work if we were to eliminate the main economic engine of data collection: advertising. From an economic standpoint, the entire system would collapse without advertising; from a technological standpoint, nothing would change, so we would all have to be “plugged in” in a different way—political thinking could do worse than on spending its time studying ways to abolish advertising and imagining the structure of “Big Tech” that might result.

Converting assets into data also requires intervention in and control of existing forms of currency. Any political party that might be turned into a vehicle for exiting the order which produced it must not only have inscribed in its logic the destruction of all other parties but must, as much as possible, contain with itself a total order in itself—a total order including the use of all available means to protect, defend and struggle alongside its members and supporters—everything from innovative use of defamation, anti-monopoly and other laws, to extensive patronage, to self-defense units should be used unapologetically.

But they always are predicated upon a fantasy of a disinterested press serving a general public sharing the same perspectives and interests. The more media companies and institutions are independent centers of power, the less they can be anything other than information laundering extortion rackets whose sole purpose is to wield power over and on behalf of selected enemies and friends. Direct mouthpieces, whether of the government or specific institutions, would be more reliable, because at least you could imagine why that source wants to provide you with this information. But there’s little point to simply saying thi s, either—it doesn’t really help in filtering the vast swarm of information and disinformation swirling around us.

Lots of glass and mirrors, the functional parts of buildings and streets (pipes, wires, poles, etc.) made visible and interesting, information displays like the financial ticker for all kinds of activities, explicit recognition of our enhanced visibility and audibility, and therefore more awareness of the performative nature of our activities. If hiding information becomes more difficult, for corporations, institutions and individuals, then secrecy and privacy will have to be replaced by the shaping of the information we can’t help but give off: data is infinite but its processing in real time is finite and we can control the patterns that are going to be read off of us and the ones we read off of others. This all comes back to making our practices explicitly pedagogical, and instances of originary satire.

The capitalist mode of power is counted in prices, and capitalization, working through the ever more encompassing price system, is the algorithm that constantly restructures and reshapes this order. Capitalization discounts a particular trajectory of expected future earnings. For any group of capitalists—typically a corporation—the relative level and pattern of earnings denote differential power: the higher and more predictable these earnings are relative to other groups of companies, the greater the differential power of the corporation’s owners. (9)

That might include access to governing powers that allow the land to be used in certain ways, and it might include preventing others from using surrounding properties in certain ways. Securing the obedience of members of the city council is necessary for the land to be capitalized in this way, but this doesn’t mean that the capitalization is an economic activity that depends upon an autonomous, political power—it means that the members of the city council are themselves capitalized, and, say, donating to their campaigns or establishing a local media to exalt them and demonize their rivals are part of the same process of capitalization, as investing in the media outlet or the politician is also part of the discounting of a particular trajectory of expected future earnings. The fact that everything in the world and every human activity can be capitalized in this way is the source of capital’s unique and very flexible and effective mode of power.

Capital is articulated with industry, but in an essentially parasitical way—capitalists achieve their differential power relative to other capitalists primarily through sabotage—that is, by preventing industry from performing to its full potential. There are many means of accomplishing this—patent and copyright, price fixing, control of the regulation process and so on. Bichler and Nitzan acknowledge that industry does need to perform—an auto company does need to draw upon a part of the broader hologrammic industry and produce millions of cars—but if industry is given too much free reign, the source of capital’s profit and therefore power will evaporate, so what is ultimately more important is preventing others from producing cars, or better cars, or means of transportation other than cars.

They also implicitly acknowledge that some forms of capitalist power are less dysfunctional, that is less destructive of industry than others—there are times when capital needs to invest, expand production and hire workers, and other times when they focus primarily on mergers that serve no one other than capital’s power, or price manipulation (inflation), which always threatens to bring about social disorder or even disaster. This would be true of any form of power. Now, Bichler and Nitzan acknowledge that “industry” is not self-determining and involves choices that can only be made by humans and, therefore, as part of the entire complex of human activity and interaction, must be subject to some broader vision of human good.

Was Peirce, unknowingly, a kind of proto-capitalist, or, to use Marxist phraseology, “objectively” pro-capitalist? Is seeing oneself as an insurance company the most abject self-capitalization or a transformation of oneself into a mode of inquiry, inspired by the highest instinct of workmanship?

Nitzan and Bichler seem to me unconvincing in one area—their discussion of the state. Their insistence that capital is power—not dependent on power, not an influence on power, not even just powerful, but a specific mode of power—means that the state cannot be conceptually separated from capital. Nitzan and Bichler make this case by contending that the state is capitalized through the national debt, and we could even push this further by pointing out how the logic of capitalization comes to pervade all manner of state activity, from welfare policy, to crime, to foreign policy and education. Everywhere there is talk of “investment,” and “return” on it; policy alternatives are framed in cost-benefit terms.

There is a kind of trap here which reactionaries and revolutionaries alike have fallen into, of seeking out supposedly non-commodifiable and therefore non-capitalizable forms of life. All that can do is paint targets on the backs of those forms of life, serving as a kind of advance guard for capital. There is no alternative to entering the algorithm of capital and power and separating out the competing and entwined modes of algorithmic order. Peirce concludes his discussion of the self as an insurance company by pointing out that, in the long run (the same long run in which we would all have to agree on reality, I suppose) all insurance companies must go bankrupt—all the calculations, all the precautions, all the hedging, will ultimately come up against the black swan which could not have been anticipated.

In both cases, states are set up so that they must respond to the same “market” incentives as the corporations and migrants themselves. This is the case even if globalization is an imperialist strategy advanced by one or more leading powers—in that case, the new powers ceded to subordinates end up compromising and colonizing the home government itself. That government (or those governments) might even become more powerful in terms the effects they can have globally, while still becoming less powerful in terms of their ability to control or even predict those effects. We could imagine a point at which the paradox of power would take on an inverted form, in which it becomes explicit that central authorities would not be issuing “operational” commands at all—commands would just be one more incentive (or disincentive) agents further down in the chain of command would have to take into account by assessing the likelihood of any penalty for disobedience. Of course, this is already regularly the case, as corporations weigh the costs and benefits of possibly paying a fine for breaking some law or regulation as opposed to losing whatever advantage on the market the transgression provides them.

Meanwhile, most insidious corporate activity can be eliminated in two simple ways (simple, at least if we assume a coherent regime): first, abolish anti-discrimination laws, which is what, through a predictable, even inexorable, process has led most major corporations to adopt the cultural left’s agenda unconditionally; and, second, combine few, clear safety rules with a robust legal regime that can identify cause and effect and responsibility when it comes to harmful impact alleged to corporate activity—this is something we already know how to do quite well. At any rate, I am not suggesting that the current lines of political antagonism are completely unconnected with the pedagogical “expectancy” my discussion envisages.

A demand that I be left alone entails a whole series of assumptions about my relations with others. Even more, it assumes the existence of projects I am or could be engaged in with others, either directly or by proxy. Imagine stripping from our discussion all references to “rights,” on the one hand, and notions of “checks and balances,” or “public and private,” on the other hand, and consider what discussions of the relationship between individuals, communities, corporations and governments would then look like. The only way we could get our bearings without those familiar legal and political markers is by isolating another, also familiar one: the notion of “chartering,” central to Western culture, at least, since the Middle Ages, and in a way Roman antiquity.

The fact that corporations need to be chartered by the state, which could in principle revoke any charter once the corporation ceases to serve its declared primary function means that the primacy of the state over economic agencies is already conceded, even in liberal societies. Indeed, the prodigious technological developments of modern Western societies owes far more to its enduring corporate structure than to more recent inventions like liberalism and democracy.

The community would be converted into a mass of competitive enterprises. Some would do better in the competition, and would put the less successful out of business, buy up the pieces and equipment of failed companies, hire the former owners, and so on. The trend would be toward a hierarchy of monopolies, in which case supply chains could be agreed upon by the companies themselves. The real purpose of establishing a market is to break up one system of distribution and create another. The market would essentially cancel itself, and we would end up with what is essentially a single company supplying all of the society’s needs, unless the more powerful monopolies undertook to introduce competition at the lower levels in order to provide themselves with a wider range of available products and workers.

All social conflicts can’t be reduced to this fluctuation, but all social conflicts are “processed” through it. This is most obviously the case for everything grouped under the concept of globalization, most especially movements of capital (at the “high” end), especially financial, and migration (at the “low” end). Globalization represents a raising of the threshold at which the paradox of power is made explicit: global corporations have been released from obligations to any central authority and construct their own command chains, which include governments as subordinate partners; advocates of increased migration exercise power across borders that national states find it difficult to counter.

In both cases, states are set up so that they must respond to the same “market” incentives as the corporations and migrants themselves. This is the case even if globalization is an imperialist strategy advanced by one or more leading powers—in that case, the new powers ceded to subordinates end up compromising and colonizing the home government itself. That government (or those governments) might even become more powerful in terms the effects they can have globally, while still becoming less powerful in terms of their ability to control or even predict those effects. We could imagine a point at which the paradox of power would take on an inverted form, in which it becomes explicit that central authorities would not be issuing “operational” commands at all—commands would just be one more incentive (or disincentive) agents further down in the chain of command would have to take into account by assessing the likelihood of any penalty for disobedience. Of course, this is already regularly the case, as corporations weigh the costs and benefits of possibly paying a fine for breaking some law or regulation as opposed to losing whatever advantage on the market the transgression provides them.

In large part this book is a critique of (strategy for entering and transforming) the secular disciplines. The project, or imperative, implicit here is to roll back the power circulation that takes the form of equalizing abstractions (whether of money or votes) into abstractions conducted by formalized and explicit power hierarchies. I’ve been suggesting that rolling back money and votes is conceivable—if one considers, for example, how much of market activity is mediated by informal networks among agents who have been authorized by some form of power, it is easy to imagine minimizing the effects of market signals on economic activity—indeed, it’s possible to imagine abolishing economic activity in itself, and “incorporating” corporations as one kind of institution among many others within a well governed social order.

Meanwhile, most insidious corporate activity can be eliminated in two simple ways (simple, at least if we assume a coherent regime): first, abolish anti-discrimination laws, which is what, through a predictable, even inexorable, process has led most major corporations to adopt the cultural left’s agenda unconditionally; and, second, combine few, clear safety rules with a robust legal regime that can identify cause and effect and responsibility when it comes to harmful impact alleged to corporate activity—this is something we already know how to do quite well. At any rate, I am not suggesting that the current lines of political antagonism are completely unconnected with the pedagogical “expectancy” my discussion envisages.

A demand that I be left alone entails a whole series of assumptions about my relations with others. Even more, it assumes the existence of projects I am or could be engaged in with others, either directly or by proxy. Imagine stripping from our discussion all references to “rights,” on the one hand, and notions of “checks and balances,” or “public and private,” on the other hand, and consider what discussions of the relationship between individuals, communities, corporations and governments would then look like. The only way we could get our bearings without those familiar legal and political markers is by isolating another, also familiar one: the notion of “chartering,” central to Western culture, at least, since the Middle Ages, and in a way Roman antiquity.

If everything is chartered—corporations, profit and non-profit, subordinate units of government—as, in fact, is already the case, then as individuals we are always already all chartered up. Questions of social order then come down to clarifying the terms of the charters issued at all levels, and the only agency capable of doing that is the sovereign, and sovereign agents. Charters bind all agencies to the imperatives of the center. To the extent that we’re all agents of the sovereign, even if not to the same degree of officiality, our main contribution to public discourse is clarifying the operations of the institutions we participate in in terms of their charters and our own competencies.

Here, though, developments are decentering as well as centering, as a kind of cooperative competition over control of the process between the (decreasingly) absolute monarchs and the emergent capitalist class drives events. I see a dialectic of initiative and sabotage at work here, unlike the exclusive emphasis on sabotage insisted upon by Capital as Power , simply because I know of no instance, and can think of no hypothetical reconstruction, of the development of technology (that ultimately includes energy exploitation, communication across vast distances, and automation) outside of the spurring of capital (which, even on Bichler and Nitzan’s account, often sabotages other uses of technology precisely in order to maximize the profitability of its own investment).

It would replace capitalism by being more consistently algorithmic. Industry, run according to its own scientific and technological imperatives, would still involve deciding whether to carry out one project or another, allocate resources in one way or another, based on anticipated outcomes, which would be projected further into the future and more expansively in space the more the logic of this order (let’s say, to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities) becomes its exclusive logic and knowledge becomes more precise and therefore the consequences of transformation more predictable. You might not fire a bunch of people because doing so would raise the value of the firm as discounted against expected earnings, but whoever is in charge would decide that these specific people are no longer necessary for the continuation of the project because he knows exactly how much energy, time and labor are necessary for its completion.

We can already see some hedging here. It is the derogation from competence represented by debt and money that encourages fantasies of a complete abolition of debt, obligation, and servitude in an apocalyptic revelation. We can see two tendencies here: on the one side, a more orderly sacrificial process, integrated into a more complex economic and social order, regulated by an increasingly conceptually sophisticated justice system; on the other side, an all-against-one recrudescence of scapegoating. The scapegoating would emerge more readily among the poor, who have less interest in preserving the imperial system, but such tendencies would be encouraged by sections of the elite—perhaps in the name of restoring competence, perhaps in the name of resisting such restoration.

This morality holds both for those who are capable of much and those who are capable of little, however much it will be manifested differently in each case. Judgments regarding money and debt will therefore be moral, in this sense: they might, immorally, be used to inflate the hedge against the deposition of the incompetent by expanding indebtedness and dispossession; or, they can be used to make visible, measure and minimize the hedges already there, by privileging competence over further hedging wherever possible.

When I go to the store to buy a loaf of bread, I have to pay the supermarket because I am not performing any equivalent service for them, or because, as is the case in David Graeber’s “communism,” we are not part of a community in which it is a matter of course that each takes what he needs and contributes what he can. So, how does the supermarket know how much to charge me? They buy the bread from a baker, and they have to charge enough beyond what they pay the baker to cover the costs of the building, the store technology, salaries and wages, etc., and still make a profit. The baker, meanwhile, needs ingredients, equipment, a building, employees, etc., so that determine how much he has to charge for the bread.

The standard argument for markets against planning is that no one can know how many people over, say the next month, will want how many loafs of bread, and, then, how much the operating costs of the supermarket, the ingredients and equipment of the baker, the machines that make the equipment for the baker, the machines that make those machines, etc., will cost over the next month. The only way to find out is to let supermarkets sell as much bread as they can, then have the bakers buy the ingredients they need to meet the demands of the supermarket, and so on, until we end up oscillating around an average amount of bread sold per month—sometimes the store will be out for a little while, sometimes it will have to throw away some extra, but that then gets worked into the cost. And, of course, with some products (probably not bread, though), the fluctuations can get really dramatic, to the point of forcing retailers and manufacturers out of business.

Obviously, I’m trying to imagine an advanced economy without prices and therefore without money, but also without central planning, and if that’s utopian, so be it, but I at least want to think it through in absolutist terms, and maybe someone else could incorporate these reflections into more sustainable ones. The question is whether the more advanced form of coordination that the elimination of liberalism, democracy, which is to say, “politics,” might make possible, would in turn make cooperation through a vast network of agreements between directors of enterprises possible.

It is already the case that much, if not most, economic activity is organized through networking: if you’re starting a new company, you look for customers and suppliers through established channels, including friendships and other informal associations; also, you will prefer to work with more stable companies with good reputations, in communities with reasonably favorable and predictable government, etc. You will prefer customers and suppliers you expect to be around for years over those who might leave or go under next month. None of this is directly priced. But all this means that the most basic value is an institution in which the high, the middle, and the low, cooperate rather than struggle against each other, in an area where other institutions are not trying to subvert the ones you want to work with.

Two big problems arise (at least that I can think of now). First, wouldn’t this be a very static system? How would innovation be possible—how could anyone break into the existing networks, and why should the top-tier companies feel any need to improve their products and services? Second, within this vast network of agreements that all depend on each other within an enormously complex system (the baker can promise x amount of loaves because the farmer has promised y amount of wheat, which he can do because the manufacturer has promised z amount of replacement tractor parts, within everyone bought in all the way across the social order), how can self-interested defections (cheating, strikes, adulterations of materials, side deals, black markets, etc.) be prevented?

Innovation is really the bigger problem, since any innovation would have to, it seems, disrupt an extremely complexly integrated set of networks. How would R&D be conducted, and by whom? Here, I would follow up on some of my earlier “social market” posts and emphasize the centrality of the state to economic activity. This has always been the case, and is certainly so today—research is overwhelmingly shaped by state investment and subsidies, starting with the state’s monopoly on military equipment (which, of course, involves myriad spin-offs), but including quite a bit of investment in medicine, environmental technology, computing, communications, infrastructure, space exploration and so on.

In both cases, states are set up so that they must respond to the same “market” incentives as the corporations and migrants themselves. We could imagine a point at which the paradox of power would have to reach such a threshold to become explicit that central authorities would not be issuing “operational” commands at all—commands would just be one more incentive (or disincentive) agents further down in the chain of command would have to take into account by assessing the likelihood of any penalty for disobedience.

But the way you speak about it here fits what I'm trying to think through: the ruler might set up a market for a certain purpose, or allow for a circumscribed market for certain sectors where it has proved beneficial. Exactly how much calculation must be done in money--can we calculate *that*? What other "variables" are held constant as we do? And, of course, we'd have to talk about monopolies. We need a consistent way of speaking about economics, and I hope what I have here is a step toward it,, even if through some "falsification." I don't want to take anything for granted.

At some point power at higher levels must support and incorporate these congregations—that is ultimately the only way they could actually be “universalized.” But this also seems to be the starting point of all those conflicts between higher and secular law. The solution must lie in the incorporation of the congregation of inquiry into the very form of sovereignty. In universalism, the individual is imagined as potential victim of overweening power, and the solution is for that individual to be ever further abstracted so as to be acted upon by an even overweenier power. By contrast, the individual within the corporate congregation is imagined in his service to the sovereign, in exemplifying and further perfecting the sovereign’s identification with the higher law.

The only reason to worry about being called a racist is because you can lose your job, get kicked off social media, be targeted by on and off-line mobs, and be permanently ostracized. And obviously the BLM people themselves have no means to do all that; the Left as a whole has not the means to do all that. Only corporations, foundations and other institutions (universities, media companies) have the power. So, the real question is, why does a corporation like Kellogg’s fund an organization like Black Lives Matter? And the answer is simple: anti-discrimination law.

Now, it is because of anti-discrimination laws that Kellogg’s funds BLM. Corporations can be sued for discrimination, and the lawsuits can be very damaging in monetary terms and also in terms of reputation. There is no real defense against them, and the inevitable extension of anti-discrimination laws to cover women, gays, etc. renders institutions even more defenseless. How do you prove you haven’t created a “hostile workplace”? Well, the courts will tell you what to do, which means the attorneys for the “victims” will tell you, and what they will tell is, first of all, give us and the institutions sponsoring us lots of money.

But they will also tell you to restructure your internal corporate relations in such a way as to provide yourself with a prophylaxis against further lawsuits: quotas, beefed-up human relations, diversity officers, employee workshops, community outreach, the works. In short, the entire victimary movement comes down to the government as a shakedown racket. (The Obama Administration cut out some middle men and perfected it as an art form, but there’s really no other way anti-discrimination law can work.) In the end, the people who really believe in this stuff and will implement it enthusiastically take over the positions of power—after all, they’ll be better at it than anyone else.

The problem with implementing and sustaining such policies, though, lies in the other two obstacles to sovereignty. The vast majority of Republicans still oppose Trump on “free trade” grounds, and those Republicans are amply rewarded by corporate interests within the revolving door system of moving from elected official to lobbyist—the implication of which is that the more established political figures, at least, need not fear losing elections, since plush jobs await them in the “private” sector. So, somehow, this system needs to be broken. It does not seem to me that Trump has a plan to do so directly, which would indeed be difficult: even campaign finance reform, which couldn’t get past these very Republicans couldn’t do anything about the revolving door, and past a certain point would be invalidated by the supreme Court, wouldn’t really work anyway (instead of giving money to politicians or political parties you give money to lobbying groups who groom and completely control candidates); while term limits might give lobbyists and their clients even more power over inexperienced and easily intimidated and bribed legislators. But the President doesn’t need much Congressional support to withdraw from existing trade agreements and make new ones—Trump’s relation to the GOP congress so far seems to be to just get as much as he can out of them.

More important to me here than the political prospects here is the mediumistic claim, i.e., the claim to be able to see through capital and not fall prey to its machinations. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” here trains its vision on the way everything presented as a “value” by the capitalist order is in fact a stratagem for disciplining, confining, controlling social labor. As Deleuze pointed out in his “Society of Control,” all this has also been autonomized, an argument that the algorithms of Google, Facebook and Twitter make very visible. There has been much news lately about how these companies have been manipulating these algorithms to suppress right wing perspectives; while obviously true, from the “autonomista” approach, this is beside the point and not really necessary. Once these companies overcome this momentary panic, the argument will go, they will see that letting the algorithms work on their own will provide all the social control necessary for capital.

The algorithm is the best way of doing this right now. But rather than some temporary, subjectivizing distortion of the algorithmic medium, the jiggering of algorithms by the big tech companies demonstrates that the setting of the algorithms is never automatic or neutral. That good ruler would have to determine, or have determined, what counts as “information.” Within the algorithmic medium each individual is thinking about how one action or even thought serves as an indicator of the relative probabilities of other actions and thoughts. The main source of income for the social media corporations is advertising, and what advertisers want is knowledge of how likely someone interested in one thing is to buy another thing—a detailed profile of consumer habits is immensely valuable.

The same thing is true if you want to start a new supermarket, or a new anything. You know how to do something, you’ve been around people who do the same kind of thing, they know about people with money who like people who do that kind of thing, and they know about the kinds of people who buy the kind of product you’re planning to make. You can figure out what kind of person you need to present yourself as so as to be trusted with the money and support of the people in the networks you’re proximate to, you can shape your product and your persona to their inclinations. Again, it’s never you, with an “idea,” “shopping” that idea around to an endless list of people with enough money to invest what you need in your “idea,” and then trying to arrange meetings where you “pitch” it to them.

I would keep in mind that the first process, in particular, was set in motion by the conditions created in the late 60s and into the 70s by the welfare state and widespread unionization, which created costs for capital beyond any gains in efficiency. (The second process is more endemic, even constitutive.) Still, the process continued and even accelerated and became more systematic once the unions were broken and taxes dramatically lowered. The reason is simple—politicians on both ideological wings became completely dependent on the support of transnational corporations, even while this dependency was inflected along different ideological lines—neither party, in the US at least, even refers to working conditions or workers at all, other than the completely anomalous Trump. If you listen closely, it’s easy to get the sense both parties hate wage workers. The solution is not to bring back unions, especially if a de-politicized order is based upon disallowing organizations predicated on perpetual conflict. But the government can certainly constrain these known propensities of capital.

The odds are much better if the town has a long tradition of prestigious structures, its own style, and if those traditions are respected. The best construction company will want to build the building, and it will want to use the best bricks, mortar, cement, wood, etc. Less important buildings, built by those with less resources, will be designed and built by the second, third, fourth, and so on best architects and construction companies, using correspondingly inferior materials. They will be modeled on the more prestigious buildings though, and will try to borrow their glamor and charisma.

“The market” is also really government by skunkworks, to the extent that it exists. A social order with no potential skunkworkers, with no executives willing to shake up organizations and no disciplinary networks they could draw upon to do so, would be an utterly stagnant and parasitic one. Markets are fields of overlapping disciplinary spaces. My hypothesis here is that we can measure the economic efficiency and long term viability of a socio-economic order (or any company or institution) by the qualitative presence of skunkworkers. This couldn’t be measured, in part because you can’t know it exists until you try to mobilize it.

The spending doesn't need to be exorbitant or overly "conspicuous." Just steady and purposeful. In a deflationary economy, having a lot of cash socked away is good, because it keeps going up in value. So, if the ruler has the biggest savings account, he can spend so as to essentially keep breaking even, I would think. But, of course, if we're not talking about a traditional monarch we'd have to think about the ruler's income, state property, and the ruler's relation to state property. If there's a lot of state property, and the ruler has access to it, then there's always revenue coming in.

Writing began in the monarchal bureaucracies, recoding genealogies, myths and decisions of the sovereign. Central social power will be a model for central power elsewhere: patriarchy in the family, generalship in the military, and craftsmanship in the practical arts. In each case a kind of sovereignty is involved insofar as the practitioner or leader wants to maintain the threads of control from the beginning to the end of a particular sequence. Such sovereignty promotes monopoly, both formal and informal: once a measurable and replicable “skill” involving sustained attention emerges, some will simply be so much better at it than others so as to make competition futile; in turn, such informal monopolies will seek public recognition, which the central power will grant because little models of sovereignty throughout the social order embody the absolutist ontology.

Once we step outside of the frame forcing us to see “modernity” as a single, inevitable, beneficial package, the connection is not obvious at all. (It’s interesting that there’s never been much of a push to democratize or liberalize the structure of corporations. The continued existence of such a creature as a CEO doesn’t seem to trouble our moral model. Even the left has learned to love the CEO.) Every form of cooperation has an end and a logic to it, an end and logic that we can always surface from the language we find ourselves using in discussing that form. Schools are for learning, commerce is for mutually beneficial exchange, militaries are for fighting other militaries, families are for channeling sexual desire into the raising of new generations, conversations are for creating solidarities, exchanging information, trying out new roles, etc.

That means all information purveyors are named by the sovereign. Moving beyond this specific example, we can see that sovereign naming prevents the abstraction of individuals in a way that conforms to a dynamic social order. Something new—a new enterprise, an invention—comes out of something existing, something with a name, and is itself named as soon as it comes to the attention of the sovereign (and the sovereign keeps getting better at noticing and assessing novel phenomena).

The two hypotheses converge insofar as this minimal hierarchy is repeated, discovered, and resisted until one individual is capable of taking over the center, in place of (almost invariably) the animal “ancestor” and divinity that had occupied it. This, then, is the model for all human action and institution building: there is a founder, a priest-king, and there are “seconds” who order the founding so as to incorporate those to be initiated into and organized within it: managers, bureaucrats and ideologues, to put it cynically. And there are the rest, who operate within frames constructed for them, and from among whom a few are recruited for staffing the seconds.

A partial summary of David Graeber on markets and money, with some additions: Markets are created and maintained by sovereigns. Money is used first of all for internal bureaucratic accounting in the ancient empires. Money is then used to pay soldiers in the imperial army, and markets are created in order to enable soldiers to spend that money. The accepted currency is whatever is accepted by the sovereign for the payment of taxes. Debt is monetized (beyond the gift economy) when standardized payments for injuries are necessary in order to prevent violence—the sovereign as judge establishes standardized penalties and settlements.

And also because there are enough people doing enough building who need a steady supply of bricks. It also means that if the building industry slackens, the state might step in and carry out some “internal improvements” to help the brick business through the rough patch. What absolutist ontology adds to this is that all this depends upon a certain “amount” of order, and therefore hierarchy, which can be qualified if not precisely quantified. It should not be taken for granted that the owner of the brick business applies for a permit, has it approved, has that approval acted upon (it’s not ignored, for example, by some lower level bureaucrat), that this owner orders a certain amount of bricks to be sent out and his employee carries out the order (and if the employee doesn’t, the employer will be able to fire that employee and count on hiring someone who will), that the employee tasked with receiving the bricks does not abscond with them and sell them on the black market, etc.

Buckminster Fuller asserted that it was worth it to provide free education to 1,000 children because one of those children will end up invented something that pays for the education of the other 999. Massive investment focused on generating singularities will in the end take care of the masses as well. Of course, investment might be focused more precisely on those segments of the population most like to be the source of singularities, but this kind of decision will itself be a marker of the wealth and risk-aversion of the center. Under conditions of extreme scarcity, investment might be focused on those communities likely to produce one singularity out of 400 students, and those where you could reasonably expect only 1 out of 1,500 would be left aside.

In this way, the articulation of centering and de-convergence, which I have posited as the logic of post-sacral kingship sovereignty, can be turned into an economic concept, a measurable proportion between singularity and the recirculation of the products of singularity into the production of further singularities. We could define singularity in terms of both monopolization and models of “centered ordinality.” How singular an innovation is (and, therefore, ultimately, how singular the innovator) depends, first, upon how long the implementation can maintain a monopoly position, first of all for the sovereign himself, as prime customer; and, second, whether it models a form of social relation that is both center-oriented and productive of hierarchy.

Ciepley’s argument regarding the US founding is a complex one. He rejects the notion that founders like Madison and Hamilton had “social contract” theories, whether those positing a covenant among a people or those positing one between the people and a ruler, in mind in theorizing the new order they were establishing. They knew how preposterous such theories were. They were trying to establish a charter for a government, a corporate “person,” that, like a corporation, would have powers limited to those enumerated in the charter. They modeled this new government on the state governments, all of which had, in fact, been corporations chartered by the British government.

Like the shareholders of a corporation, the people could vote for officials filling the positions established by the charter, but would have no role in governing—and, if they were to make demands that violated the terms of the charter, those demands should be ignored. He even shows how the practice of judicial review evolved not out of some pure constitutional logic but the role of the sovereign in rejecting policies of the corporation that violate its charter. But this is where the problem for the founders lay—if the government was a chartered corporation, who chartered it? Corporations are chartered by the sovereign—but the sovereign, the British Parliament, had just been overthrown.

Americans still participate in government, but as individuals voting, promoting candidates, arguing about ideas and policies, etc.—not as the sovereign. They can resume their sovereignty in a way accounted for by the Constitution itself—the amendment process—but is that really sovereignty? If the charter of a corporation contains a provision allowing the shareholders to modify some element of the charter, do the shareholders thereby become sovereign? Well, maybe, because if they can modify one element, they can modify two, and if two, three, and ultimately the entire charter. Eventually they would have to finish the “amending” process and become passive sovereigns once more.

This is quite different, though, from a sovereign who has chartered the corporation from the outside, and who has chartered many other corporations besides this one. The shareholders or citizens all benefit, or perceive themselves as benefiting, in different ways and degrees from the operation of the corporation. To get to the point of a constitutional convention or some other mechanism by which the charter is to be overhauled the divisions must be running very deep among the community—indeed, since everyone knows it can get to this point, the very possibility would be a source of division that many within the corporation would have an interest in inflaming.

Ciepley in fact agrees with the left (and, in fact, some—especially pro-Trump, interestingly—sections of the right as well) in condemning the Citizens United decision. He thinks that, as entities chartered by the states, corporations should not have the rights given to natural persons. But perhaps the problem is that we still think in terms of “natural persons”—Ciepley doesn’t see any problem with the public-private distinction as such, he just thinks that corporations straddle the divide. He also thinks that corporations can be liberalized and democratized—for example, the free speech rights granted to citizens could be extended to employees of corporations.

As chartered corporations, shouldn’t towns be allowed to prevent their public spaces from being taken over and defaced by “protesters”? If these public corporations need public input into their decision making, they can solicit it in their own way. Now, the interesting thing about Citizens United was that it wasn’t a business, but, rather, a corporation formed for the purpose of making a movie criticizing Hillary Clinton. Ciepley answers the question of why corporations like the New York Times should have free speech by noting that the Constitution explicitly establishes freedom of the press, but what is the press?

So he's really questioning me here. Obviously we don't have to squeeze every situation into HLvM in order to make the concept work--things can happen in the corner grocery store that don't fit the model. Perhaps I'm overreaching in trying to see how the concept might work. But I do think that eventually even in the neutral company the company will eventually take the new rules on board enthusiastically--and when they do, even if the company was not directly an obstacle to any government plan previously, it will certainly be more compliant to government plans in the future. A lot of attacks on the 'middle" are just smoothing the path, not attacking that part of the middle in particular.

You are right about the problem I am trying to solve there. This is obviously something we'll be discussing quite a bit--the entire discipline of economics needs to be revised, but that obviously can't be done arbitrarily. My preliminary thinking is that we should think about value as value for the sovereign, just like Achilles's prowess ultimately finds its value in service to Agamemnon's enterprise. Achilles, of course, can withhold his services (as he in fact does), or offer them to another sovereign--but they have to be of value to some sovereign. The same is true in less obvious ways of all forms of work. The sovereign, then, is responsible for establishing institutional forms in which limited competition with a determinate goal is embedded. This would probably prioritize the military and harness production for those ends. And then, yes, there would be rules, a more or less fair playing field, and all the rest.

I don't think so, but I do try to keep the number of proposals I am "hostile" to down to a minimum. I'm not that interested in the nuts and bolts of these things right now--you end up with irrelevant arguments about the composition of the "board" and the rules governing it, etc., and it's all a distraction. I suspect you are pointing to a larger, anthropological, issue, though--the implicit liberalism of this proposal. I think that RF's comment on "cameralism" on another thread gets at some of the problems with seeing government as a business (and citizens as consumers, etc.). I think that rejection of government as business would apply to the "sovereign board" as well, since it's obviously conceived on that model, but maybe I'm missing something.

So, if I ask "how autonomous does the market have to be" I suppose the answer would be "how big a price are you willing to pay?" You are pointing to choices the state would have to make if its preferences extend beyond the object of consumption--if it doesn't, say, just want the fighter planes, but also wants more workers to be hired in high tech industries and is therefore willing to slow the development of automation so that there will be more workers willing to keep up with the process of automation. Is it not possible that in some fields of the economy competition is wasteful and monopolization would be more efficient, while sometimes you would want to introduce competition?

The autonomy of the market is encroached upon to some extent, usually a considerable extent, by all states--does that only involve costs, i.e., trade-offs between economic cost and some perceived social or political gain? If the state says that not only does it want the fighter jets, but it also wants the workers to be paid x amount and it wants only materials from a particular region to be used and it wants the company making the jets to contract out to a specific tech lab and pay enough to support x number of workers and the plane must manufacture the planes in a particular city--ok, that's obviously bit much and it will probably be impossible to meet all these criteria.

All forms of bigness today—corporations, the political parties, the state, the media, the educational system and academy—all function according to the same logic of the disavowal and denunciation of the producer’s desire that nevertheless is increasingly monopolized and calcified within those very institutions.

That seems to me a transparent anti-Big Man platitude. There will be no single unified “people” once the “corporate state” has been disabled or marginalized—there will be war, which we can aim at making more virtual than material, but which we will not be able to avoid. Everyone is now positioning themselves for that war, which might be a many-sided affair, Balkanizing us while polarizing us globally. The producer’s desire can be an implacable one, demanding and rigorous, not easily pacified and diverted like the consumer’s desire. But the Empty Big Men cannot be propped up anymore—even the most recently established giants, like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter, seem to be approaching senility, as they invest in traditional ideologies and ally with existing forms of political power.

Businesses and corporations that do business in China, India, Ghana and Chile must take an interest in the internal politics within those sometimes unstable polities; and, insofar as these businesses and corporations are fortunate enough to originate in countries powerful enough to take an interest as well, they will endeavor to ensure that that is the case. It is easy to see why the President and Congress of the United States might take a greater interest in the domestic stability of some faraway country than in the suffering of some relatively marginal domestic constituency. And it is also easy to see how easily they will convince themselves that this set of priorities will ultimately benefit those domestic constituencies as well. And sometimes, according to some measures, they will be right.

Once the Soviet Union fell, though, the imperial architecture became pointless. The U.S. should really have dissolved NATO, withdrawn all troops from Europe and Southeast Asia, and renormalized itself as a nation. But what national leadership could possibly give up all that power and influence, especially given all the private interests invested in the global U.S. protectorate, and the linking of the U.S. economy to the advantages accruing to the role of the dollar as global currency? Only a crisis could precipitate such a change of course. In the meantime, profits for US multinationals, cheap goods for U.S. consumers, and cheap labor for domestic American employers are intertwined with the gradual liberalization of China and maintaining the stability of Mexico as purposes of U.S. policy.

Those who subvert the nation from above will do it from below, as well. There are good reasons, beyond a fear of bad publicity, why most major corporations participate vigorously in victimary politics. It’s easy to think of victimary politics in very local terms, but ultimately victimary politics is, in Carl Schmitt’s terms, “planetary”: international human rights, rules for a global social justice convergence, demolish democracy, privacy, property and all forms of local autonomy. Failure to convincingly repudiate your whiteness makes you an enemy of humanity, anytime, anywhere: the very model of the unprotected class, or what Agamben calls homo sacer, upon whom it is always open season.

The installation of this new mode of holiness requires that producer’s desire, even in its earliest emergence, be unanimously resented and thoroughly proscribed. There is no place for it: God provides, humans are grateful recipients. The desire to see oneself as a creator, as a God-maker, must be extirpated. Monotheism is utterly hostile to producer’s desire, and replaces it with an all-encompassing and more realistic hope for consumer’s satisfaction. We can see how the modern market system ultimately inherits this valuation, while finding a way to incorporate the rather titanic producer’s desires required to bring capitalism into being: producer’s desire can be sanctioned as long as, and only to the extent that, it serves consumer’s satisfaction.

Modern politics, then, is about what concessions must be extracted from the more propertied in order to persuade the lesser propertied to buy in. These categories don’t remain static—it is in the nature of the private property system to generate wealth, and hence more property, so that the lesser propertied often become more propertied and the more even more, sometimes much more. These changes affect the negotiations over the buy in of the less propertied. The state mediates these negotiations, and brokers compromises that erode property in various ways: employers, for example, can be forced to pay their employees specified amounts; employees, on the other hand, are forced to allow the state to extract a portion of their wages for broader social insurance purposes.

The anti-discrimination regime, which in turn led to the opening of borders, along with the opening of the world to trade from the 1980s on created unprecedented opportunities for imperial actors to liberate themselves from the nations they originated in. How could one blame corporations for preferring the entire world, rather than just a single country, as a source of workers and consumers? Now that resistance to these imperial projects is underway, it is helpful to consider the magnitude of that project—destroying the SJWs is a necessary, but ultimately only small part. Indeed, the problem is to take on the most immediate problem—the SJW wars—with an eye toward the larger ones. We can talk about ending free trade, negotiating tougher trade deals, instituting tariffs, devising methods for encouraging or compelling corporations to keep or increase operations here, and so on—at the very least, these would be fresh conversations—but in the end the only solution is for enough Americans to become the kind of people who wouldn’t have allowed this to happen to them in the first place.

The data Amazon gathers from my searches and purchases might seem trivial, but we all know by now that such data is unprotected and ultimately available to other companies, the government, perhaps potential employers, or, via the evil works of some hacker, everyone. And there’s no way of anticipating all the uses that data might be put to. The only way to counter this is to become a producer of selves, to create new patterns by involving possible observers into one’s own patterns of activities. Each one of us, in order to survive in digital civilization, will have to be able to convert those who notice and say something about us into those we notice and say things about.

The reactionary project is ultimately the only coherent one, and the one that can assess and contain whatever is valuable in the others, but singularizing sovereignty can only realize that coherence by clarifying the relations between the nomos and the formal and informal powers. Very little thought has gone into this, and the alt-right and resurgent nationalism fall into victimary stances themselves when they rail against the informal powers (from Wall St. firms to Facebook and Google, to the EU and UN) as excrescences upon an otherwise healthy nomos—what kind of power, exactly, exercised by whom, will be brought to bear on global corporations closing down plants in the US, moving them overseas, cutting wages at home, etc.?

That the relatively autonomous power centers are competing with each other is the key to the solution of the problem—the power center (the progressive billionaire, the media conglomerate, the corporation) that is furthest in advance of generating disorder is also the one most likely to present itself as the most credible candidate to lead the reordering. The highs, then, are recruiting foot soldiers from among the lows to gain an edge against their rivals. To that extent, the “middle” is incidental. But the middle is a problem because the middle is comprised of the participants of the originary nomos, or land apportionment, their descendants, and those who have bought into later reapportionments.

Again, we have the same question I raised in my previous post: who rules, or, in this case, who is doing all this? The measures proposed here would require an extraordinarily powerful and tightly organized state: indeed, we could reduce all of these demands to the single demand for a state powerful enough to serve as an intelligent filter between the rest of the world and the national territory. This would be a state an insignificant number of whose officials benefit from international corporate trade; a state that competently distinguishes between fair and beneficial trade, on the one hand, and harmful, “oppressive” trade on the other hand; a state strong enough to resist the pressures of all the other states in the world to open its borders and markets; a state strong enough to resist the importunities of the most power domestic economic actors, who would surely be pressing for access to global markets.

Hoppe makes it clear that the largest property owners in a given territory will be, effectively, sovereigns in that territory, and they will govern in a manner far closer to medieval monarchs than liberal democrats: you will certainly need his permission to enter, much less do business within, his territory. The same will be true if all the inhabitants of that territory own that territory as a kind of joint stock company (which would also involve highly undemocratic differential voting power), al though in that case governance might be more “racist” (strict rules regarding what type of people can enter and reside) rather than “fascist.” Absolute sovereignty can be seen as the logical conclusion of anarchist libertarianism, its perfect inversion: just assume all property owner by a single property owner, whoever is actually capable of controlling and defending it, and there you are.

Land sets up the question properly, I think. There are three possibilities: first, and perhaps most likely, at least for a while, the continual out of control spiraling of technological and political disruptions of existing forms of techno-power; second the establishment of technologically impregnable forms of private property that will allow that least some to escape the first possibility (why should those driving and controlling automation even bother with victimary claims—why not just build businesses, residences and modes of exchange invulnerable to them?); third, the recovery of sovereignty, i.e., power that says what it does, does what it says, and does and says no more and no less than is necessary to ensure that saying and doing remain thus commensurable.

All these “local” forms of sovereignty (which multiply with the advance of civilization) either account for the totality of their sovereignty by themselves (the inventor is also guardian of his laboratory and factory, protector of supply chains and distribution networks, etc.) or defer the maintenance of such external conditions of sovereignty to someone who must, therefore, be sovereign over those conditions. The less we speak directly of this sovereignty over the condition of my own sovereignty, the more unquestioningly we presuppose it. (Microsoft’s refusal to lobby indicated, really, a highly admirable if incredibly naïve belief that if the US didn’t yet have undivided, certain sovereignty, interested in nothing more than sustaining civilizational advances that would redound to the reputation of the sovereign, the example of new companies like Microsoft that showed without question the benefits of providing a space for innovators to be sovereign in their one thing would move us closer to such a mode of sovereignty.)

In exchange for such curtailment, the sovereign would allow the disciplines to pursue their own disinterested ends, which, of course, greatly benefit the sovereign as well. And, finally, the sovereign would have to draw upon the most trustworthy elements of the discipline to staff itself—after all, how else could it know what they are up to? The sovereign, in other words, would have to see to its own intelligence being greater than that of any possible rival. But the only way to avoid extraordinary violence and the possible disabling of the disciplines in accomplishing this is to save the disciplines, especially in their more concentrated corporate forms, from political pressures they are coming to find intolerable.

Within this market, the sovereign must be both primary “producer” and ultimate “consumer.” The sovereign produces, not simply “order” (which only he can provide, the demand for which is universal, but which is only experienced as a need when it may be already too late to supply it), but central power—and both Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault were right to insist that power doesn’t repress but produces, creates and articulates social relations that did not exist previously. Central power sends forth to the margins the obligation to return to the center the full measure of honor, duty and investment conferred by the center.

Since global media corporations like Twitter, Google and Facebook have shown themselves subservient to foreign governments and choose political leftism over fair dealing with their customers at every point, there need be no hesitation in subordinating them directly to centralized political control. Trump’s much derided threat to sue the media for lying about him adumbrates this possibility, and the breathtaking pace of change advanced by the victimocracy allows us to, take a leftist slogan, “imagine the impossible”: just as people can in an instant be expected to accept that they must allow teenage boys in their daughter’s locker room and Syrian refugees in their neighborhood, they will tomorrow accept that, of course, Google must tailor its search parameters, Twitter must undertake to slow the spread of certain tweets, and Facebook must deliver information as requested by the sovereign.

We should, then, assess all contemporary practices, norms and institutions in terms of the reciprocities they entail, and criticize them in terms of the obstacles erected to the binding up of those reciprocities. A company’s obligations to its workers, its customers, its community; the workers’ obligation to their employer—the market should be framed as a means of ensuring these reciprocities be maintained. Media organizations’ obligation to their audience and the loyalties of audiences to media outlets should frame discussions of free speech. But what if a leftist president were to appoint FCC officials who would shut down Breitbart as a “fake news site”?

What we might call the “cereal wars” has the Breitbart website pitted against the Kelloggs corporation, which has piously announced that it will no longer advertise on the honey badger website since it doesn’t “share our values.” Breitbart’s counter-attack involves both a boycott of Kelloggs (easy for me—no more Eggos, and the kids are off Frosted Flakes) and a series of exposures of Kelloggs’ donations to far left political causes like Black Lives Matters and Soros’s Tides Foundation, thereby vindicating Reactionary Future ’s Moldbuggian focus on the corporate-funded foundations as the source of “social justice” style resentments. Another similarly vindicating item: John Derbyshire answers his own question, “Exactly Who in America has this Insatiable Appetite for Somali Immigration” as follows:

Now, these are somewhat different rackets—Kelloggs, I would guess, like many corporations, is a victim of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome probably going back to the trustbusting of the early 20 th century (in general, not with Kelloggs in particular) whereby the pincer movements of the labor movement, the yellow press and Progressives squeezed corporations into paying ransom in the form of charitable (and political) giving most likely to appease those governments most inclined to interfere with your business. In the end, you come to believe what you have to support in order to stay in business. The (Catholic) “Voluntary Agencies,” meanwhile worms its way into reciprocal relations with government bureaucracies, wherein the growth of each is the growth of the other.

One of the sponsors on Glenn Beck’s radio show (a show filled with fascinating, idiosyncratic sponsors) is in the “food insurance” business. You can imagine what that is, and you can also grasp the absurdity of it—if we get to a point where food is not readily available through supermarkets, delis, diners, etc., where will the people insuring us against such an eventuality be getting their food? It’s akin to an attempt to sell “social collapse” insurance, or “money insurance,” as if the insurance company will survive the social collapse that leaves us all reliant on it, or the dollars with which our money insurer indemnifies us will not have suffered the same fate as the now worthless dollars we have in the bank.

The self can inhabit the marvels and pathologies of the surrounding world without claiming to have any substance outside of those marvels and pathologies; the self can process the normalizing discourses and institutions that average out while reproducing those marvels and pathologies; and the self can replicate or clone itself in novel forms that elicit and display the fantasies and imaginaries those discourses and institutions and the selves inhabiting them seek to manage. At any rate the hierarchies are not going anywhere for the forseeable future, even though both left and right have their respective fantasies regarding how they might be mitigated or even abolished; the best we can do, and perhaps the basis of a kind of left-right alliance broached by both Glen Beck and Rand Paul, is to force the corporate order off its dependence on state largesse and for the absorption of its socialized costs, so it has to stand on its own, without exceptional legal protections or economic subsidies (what the state should be doing, once its umbilical cord to the corporate order is cut, reopens the right-left abyss). The self as brand/anti-brand/re-brand is probably the most productive assumption for now.

Who, for that matter, defends property rights, if we can no longer count on the state to do that either? On the one hand, each property owner defends his own property; but without any shared respect for one another’s property, reified in recognized legal titles, this would just be Hobbes’s war of all against all. The real answer must be that the various property owners respect one another’s property and have recourse to agreed upon judicial or other mediating institutions in settling disputes. These institutions, along with the private security and insurance companies individuals would surely hire would simply be other uses of property, services offered on the market.

In this way, the government grows in power by capitulating to public demands, while the public can remain in an infantile state of rebellion, with “grass roots” partisans on each side exposing the dirty deals of the other, as the government becomes more powerful. The most binding long-term explicit agreements are more and more made by government bureaucrats amongst themselves and with their clients, with mere, and increasingly formulaic, ratification by the people; and these explicit agreements are more and more distant from the tacit agreements formed in companies, institutions and communities, which remain much closer to their traditional character: each is responsible for self and family, individuals who can be relied upon are trusted and rewarded, breaches in trust are scandals, good will is presupposed in most interactions, etc.

The libertarian answer, to privatize medicine and insurance and render them sets of voluntary exchanges, is good as far as it goes. Libertarians rightly argue that what we call health insurance today is not really insurance in any meaningful sense—it is simply a way of pooling costs in government mandated ways, and in ways that makes the real costs of medical procedures inscrutable. Health insurance should be like car or home insurance: a premium in exchange for coverage for specified health care needs. But this analogy is limited—the sum total of bad things that can happen to your car or house is known in advance: if your house is worth 300,000$, then the insurance company knows that no catastrophe can exceed that.

But there is no such ceiling when it comes to your body—if your insurance company agrees to cover “cancer treatments,” must that include a decade of increasingly expensive treatments with ever diminishing effect? Who decides? A court—according to what criteria? The doctor—which one? It seems that at some point, some irreconcilable disagreement between the parties is very likely, generating enormous resentment and terror as our media-saturated society is flooded with images of beloved parents and grandparents cut off from their treatments either by evil insurance companies or daughters and sons afraid of going broke. Politics is sure to channel such resentments, compromising the independence of independent arbiters of insurance contracts.

There will be more and more things government and insurance companies will have to and can’t pay for—but, at least, it’s possible to imagine the emergence of insurance companies which cater to the eccentric and desperate. So, as government presence recedes, health care decisions will devolve to the individual, producing more flexible norms of expertise. Does someone really need 6 years of medical school, 10 years of internship and residency, to help me with my aching back or cough? I doubt it and, more importantly, more and more people will come to doubt it, especially when they are the ones weighing costs. In the end it will be obvious that our health care needs are better met in this more differentiated manner, and on the open market, with practitioners, inventers of medical technologies and promoters of new methods engaged in competition with a close eye on the actual costs of skills and procedures.

There is an ambiguity in the platformed scene itself, where, from the very beginning, there is both a performance and a product. This would also go back to the very beginning: the better hunter brings back more prey, more food for the community, but he also probably puts on a better show, is a better source of stories, a more sought after pedagogue and mate, etc. We can see this split in the development of the market, showing the common root of warriors and entrepreneurs, and also the common origin of celebrity and consumer culture. We could hypothesize that in the gift economy and the honor/shame moral economy that goes along with it, it is competition among the performers, whose reliability is at stake at every instant, that is the issue; in a fully fledged market economy, it is competition among objects, and we don’t even have to see the performers.

All cultivated or occupied land, any established institution, actual or virtual, is owned by someone—even if ownership is shared and informal, in the end some will be let in and others kept out. Within any such space, there’s no point to speaking about free speech: I can throw someone out of my house or fire from or refuse entrance to my business because I don’t like what they say. They are free to speak on the street, but that’s because the street is owned by the government, which has committed itself to the defense of certain rights within spaces it owns. The same goes for, say, voting rights, which are granted on the agreed upon terms of the establishment of the community and its political institutions: a corporation can establish voting rights based on the number of shares you own. But the principle that I can’t force any person to stay in my house or business or country can be universally defended.

I think this critique of the market and privatization can be turned back by saying that the concerns adduced are less the result of the generalization of the market economy and more the result of the efforts made by the state to, on a generous reading, cushion the effects of that economy on all, and especially the most vulnerable, members of society. By introducing social security, universal education, socialized medicine, environmental, safety and labor regulation and so on, the state pre-empted efforts, already under way, to address these needs within civil society. If the citizens of a market society had to establish their own mutual aid societies, buy into private companies ascertaining the safety of consumer objects, deal with pollution as a property violation to be adjudicated in local courts, determine what form of education would best prepare their children to grow up and do all this themselves—well, then, it seems to me that we would have a great deal to do with each other and would be very far from isolated in impermeable private worlds.

Why not lay out an agreement in advance: this is what we want you to do, and this is what we will let you do in order to accomplish it? So, there would be property rights in the ability and responsibility to protect property rights and in the expectation of receiving such protection, and such property and the predictability it results in could serve as a kind of capital drawing people and businesses into a community.

I’m not making a moral point, in other words, just trying to develop the best description—and the tactics of the enemies and competitors of these firms, such as union organizing drives, “living wage” policies and anti-trust lawsuits are no less modes of warfare than any used by these firms themselves. Those who cannot develop their property within the existing division of labor will directly target weak links in that division of labor; those whose profits are tied to that division of labor will try to reinforce it and treat innovations as usurpation. The free market libertarian theorists are right to point to the monopolistic and rent seeking character of those who profit from the existing division of labor, and breaking up monopolies so that new connections can be places new practices beyond existing state control.

The conclusion, I think, is that we cannot effectively address this emergent anti-semitism without addressing the pathologies surrounding the global market. On the one hand, the form taken on the marketplace by what Gans calls Jewish “firstness” is that of the centrality of the entrepreneur, who organizes capital, introduces a new division of labor and creates new desires. Despite claims of consumer supremacy, one source of the mysteriousness of the market’s workings is precisely that new products enter the market before anyone has been asking for, or has even thought of them—tales of consumer manipulation take on their plausibility from this fact.

Similarly, the solicitation of investment capital, from the outside, inevitably looks conspiratorial, especially when heavily regulated markets require political maneuvering before new projects can get off the ground. We can see exploitative and deceptive entrepreneurial practices as exceptions to the rule in a fundamentally beneficial market process; or we can see the honest worker and consumer as, a priori, the victims of malevolent and unaccountable market players: which perspective we adopt will determine the way we think about regulating economic institutions, and only a fundamentally benevolent view will make it possible to accept the basic asymmetry between producers and consumers, capital and labor, and resist the search for scapegoats for our disappointments in the market.

The “Big Man” is, for that matter, still and always will be, with us, and the return to the more primary, “authentic” and “rational” strict division or allocation by need, along with the central bureaucratic authority needed to make that happen, are, in the market context, resentful parodies of the more genuine firstness finally created in the form of the entrepreneur, who creates new desires and thereby transforms the social division of labor, but does so by submitting himself to consumer “sovereignty.” I think we can assume that this resentful counter-firstness, or secondness, will be a permanent feature of free societies.

And for those who fear the parceling off and selling of the public space and the consequent dystopian nightmare of corporate rule portrayed in every third Hollywood movie, it is well to keep in mind that the collected economic power of middle class Americans, especially in a far more free economy with very low taxes, would overwhelm the power of corporations and all the billionaires in the world (without even taking into account that all those middle class Americans are the consumers and workers those companies depend upon)—that power would just need to be harnessed toward the “redemption” of the poor, the polluted, the corrupt, the unsafe and so on.

That’s the way things we work—after it’s over, speaking about what “we” have decided may serve as a useful shorthand. Biological innovation, if left to private initiative alone, might lead to… weapons for rogue states and terrorists—after all, companies will sell to the highest bidder, regardless of morality, won’t they? Well, not if they want to sell to others—but, just as important, why don’t those concerned buy out those weapons themselves or pay even more for antidotes or defenses against those weapons or, even better, redeem the countries ruled by rogue regimes or controlled by terrorists—endow organizations and institutions that will defend rights and provide sanctuary, and exploit corruption in those governments so as to protect what has been established.

The real threats to the market system are the desperate attempts to avoid its breakdown—I would go so far as to assert that no such thing would have happened if the government just stayed out of the financial meltdown in September 2008. Enormous amounts of wealth would have been lost, but before too long people would have been buying and selling, lending and borrowing, saving and investing again, perhaps first of all on the margins of the current system dominated by the alliances between the government regulators and the huge financial institutions. Accepting our originary mistakenness will eliminate the terror of contagion, contamination and defilement, in its contemporary form of various "domino theories," which tell us if one crucial piece goes down it will bring everything else down with it. Even if it does, something will get up again, and we can put our energies into that inevitably risky something.

Because I suspect what they really mean is that only people with genuine reserves will be able to lend, and only to people with proven track records of making money and paying back loans; and, who knows, maybe only to those people with a reasonable business plan or documentable source of income. No one, it seems, to me, can prove that such activity won’t continue, and in that case the real “crisis” is that things can’t go on the way they have. To put it bluntly, people will no longer be able to lend money they don’t have to people who won’t be abel to pay it back and people won’t be able to buy, again with money they don’t have, “assets” that represent only possibilities based on speculative accounts of future economic developments. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a blessing, not a crisis.

So, who is willing to bet that if unemployment goes up to 10, to 15% or higher, if most of us have to give back our second cars and not buy that third TV set or PC, if many families will have to live on one income for a while, etc., we will, nevertheless, not start slitting each others’ throats or forming militias and laying siege to the capital or the home office of Citibank? Who is willing to bet, indeed, that local lending institutions, mutual assistance organizations, patronage of local businesses, charities, and other spontaneous forms of self and other help, will fill in the gap? This would be a version of the market as well, if a more embedded one. Indeed, could it be that that possibility is just as frightening to our rulers as the nightmarish visions of social collapse?

It may be that the standard modern Western political narrative, the people liberating themselves from benighted, tyrannical rule, has been monopolized by the Left. For the narrative to work at this late date, you need a monomaniacal victimary focus–specific, universally recognizable victim-types you can keep in the public eye constantly. Defenders of free markets and individual rights and liberty can’t compete, because you can’t represent the entrepeneur who never was because of hostile regulation, and even if you could, how sympathetic would he/she be? The market doesn’t lend itself to scenic representation–the only people on the right who can make the effort to compete with the Left, in formal terms, are the ones who construct a symmetrical relation with the privileged groups on the Left–i.e., white supremacists, claiming to be oppressed by the Zionist Occupied Government.

The actually existing market itself has no such unanimous support, though—everyone has some particular interest in manipulations of the market in their favor, in rent-seeking. At a certain point, we could imagine, the competition to achieve rents through government granted privileges, explicit or implicit (say, in the way in which regulations favor larger businesses capable of paying the costs of compliance), would choke off the market altogether. What blocks this outcome, we can further assume, is expansion and innovation—through the 19 th century, the creation and discovery of new markets, in the US West and for European countries imperialism, and increasingly important, technological transformation and the creation of new needs and desires. The rent-seekers obstruct innovation, but could never anticipate all the possible channels it might take, and the innovators will defend their place on the market until competitors emerge and they become rent-seekers in turn.

At any particular moment, then, even while one producer may use free market rhetoric to chip away at the privileges of another, the consistent and at least partially conscious defenders of the market will be few and not coordinated with each other: some small businesses, innovators with a head start on potential competitors, risk-takers who would like rewards to match risk, migrant or in some way “sub-standard” labor that relies upon enterprises where minimum wage, unions and other labor regulations are overlooked. There is one other “class” with an interest in preserving the market—the consumers. The availability of choices on the marketplace, or the decrease in the number of choices, is an unmistakable marker of the quality of life.

This is worth mentioning here because the values of the imperative order shape attitudes more generally—whatever the economic effects of the loyalty of some to American car companies, or the insistence that no immigrant be allowed in until all Americans have jobs, these are not economic attitudes . And it is also true that one of the most formidable obstacles to the establishment of market relations and its normative supports is the persistence of social relations based on honor and kinship, or residual forms of the “big man”—whether in slums in Western countries or the Muslim world.

Labor is still problematic, insofar as it is driven, for most people, by overwhelming imperatives with limited opportunities for ostentation. For the most part, people have much less choice of the kind of work they do than in their consumption practices. Labor is, literally, “meaningless”: it is rarely set up so as to put forth signs. Hopefully this will change, but only slowly, I suspect—the ideal, probably never to be reached, would be that everyone be entrepreneurial, self-employed, and creative. The abolition of wage labor is an admirable goal, even if making everyone employees of the state won’t get us there. In other words, the more the desire for one job or line of work or another enters into one’s imperative space on other than sheer financial grounds, the better.

Whatever one thinks of any particular cause, one can’t deny that the boycott is a completely voluntary and non-coercive form of political action—it may be experienced as coercive by its targets, but that just means that a new set of imperative have been introduced into your “table.” If you wish to sacrifice sales in order to continue with practices you consider necessary and justified, that’s up to you. (You can market yourself as a company willing to stand up to unwarranted intimidation—buy our products and stand alongside us!) My point here, though, is that advertising, that practice wherein the seller presents potential buyers with a model of what it would mean to possess the commodity or, to put it another way, where the producer or seller thinks about how its products and organization take shape in others’ self-representations, is where boycotts would show their results.

More commons and skillful uses of boycotts might lead to all kinds of economic “irrationalities” (according to what model of rationality, though?) but it might be that a richer sense of the assemblage of imperatives one articulates with each new sale and purchase would create a more rational system overall. When some powerful activist group targets a corporation, there appears to be a conflict between the company’s duties to its shareholders and to some notion of social responsibility, but if ignoring the demands of that group ends up reducing sales, those duties are no longer competing. Nor need things end there—other groups are free to weigh down on the other side, and the company itself is free to make its case to the public; others can propose boycotts of companies that cave into the noxious activist group, etc.

For me, the analysis gets interesting when Veblen associates players on the market, or those driven by “pecuniary” interests, with the class of “predators,” and hence “archaic” by the standards of a “modern industrial” society. He thereby places the entrepreneur, banker, broker, etc., at odds with those driven by the instinct of workmanship, who are interested in working out and applying causal relations: scientists, engineers, etc. The economic figures driven by pecuniary interests are, then, simply hunters and warriors in a new, quasi-peaceful guise. As, of course, are “administrators,” i.e., bureaucrats and the government.

I suspect that a quick look at a transcript of some casual conversation among Wall Street brokers would confirm the plausibility of this classification, as is our use of terms like “robber barons” to describe the great corporate founders of the nineteenth century, idioms like “make a killing,” etc. For Veblen, exchanges on the market are indistinguishable from fraud, an essentially predatory relation to others—all lines separating fraudulent form legitimate exchange are essentially contingent and pragmatic. Are we so sure we could we say he is wrong about that? He also associates gambling with the predatory disposition, and it is easy to wonder how much of our current economic crisis, especially that part attributable to the mysterious “derivatives,” is a result of nothing more than very high stakes gambling (with other people’s money, of course).

I’m not going to argue for the impossibility of such a development here—I’ll just say that the invention of the Big Man as an occasionally necessary medium of social deferral (albeit elected and subject to recall and liable to criticism and disobedience, or subject to the discipline of the market and the threat of and bankruptcy) can no more be revoked than the invention of nuclear weapons. I’m more interested in the implications of Veblen’s classification of entrepreneurial and financial activity for the mode of economic theory I’m most interested in now, the Austrian theory of Mises and Hayek. I assume that these thinkers, and those of their “school,” would vigorously repudiate Veblen’s claim: for these free market thinkers and advocates, there is nothing more peaceful then the activity of exchange: indeed, exchange is the antithesis of violence, it is what we do once we have successfully suppressed violence as a factor in human relations.

I want to explore the possibility that Veblen is right, and they are wrong—and the plausibility of this hypothesis lies not only in the very structure of competition, in which you can win just as easily by disabling your opponent as by improving yourself, and not only in the enormous destruction which can be deliberately wrought in the financial arena, but also in the very evident attitude of those who operate there, which seems to be one of obligatory triumphalism, machismo, threat, bluff, swagger, etc. (Here, we would have to distinguish between those entrepreneurs who are closer to the workmanlike aspects of the job and those closer to the financial dimension—but no entrepreneur could indefinitely avoid the latter aspect.)

(In a similar vein, the Austrians like to believe that private property rights derive from occupancy and/or use of territory or object—but doesn’t it make more sense to say the property was first of all what one could take, defend, and persuade others to accept as a fait accompli—and that rights then emerged to mediate between property owners?) I also reject Veblen’s assumption that this position is obsolete. So, if the pecuniary/predatory is here to stay, and is inseparable from a proper understanding of freedom, how do we incorporate that into our economic, ethical and cultural analyses?

But, of course, the government’s role will also be established through events—for example, through its protection of some “fair dealer” in danger of being scapegoated within the commercial community. The relationship between business norms and the legal system, then, is an index of the moral health of the economy; and the moral health of the economy is itself an economic “factor”: certainly, much wealth is lost to corruption and fraud, and gained by fair dealing.

Humbly demanding that the center, the iterable source of rules, or the “central intelligence,” come through with a clear imperative at such moments is the heart of the proper creed of our commercial civilization. If we recognize that our entrepreneurial class is comprised, not of pacific servants of others unreasonably harassed by the predatory state but, with all the good they do, of actual and budding Big Men (who, of course, seek commerce with Big Men in other realms), thereby adding a political component to the economy, then we can find the economic value in the prayerful state that seeks a middle between haughtiness and debasement. This middle would also turn out to exist between other poles inevitable in an increasingly sophisticated rule-based culture: between the “letter” and “spirit” of the law; between the rules’ tacit and explicit dimensions; between preservation and innovation, and so on. Such prayer is itself a kind of thinking, and I’m even thinking of considering prayer as the origin of the declarative sentence. In another post.

The far Left and the Libertarian Right converge on the same enemy: the unholy alliance of the State and Big Business. On what victory in the struggle would mean they diverge: the Left, of course, ultimately wants Big Business swallowed up in the rational and humanitarian State, while the Libertarians want the state abolished (they distinguish “state” from “government,” supporting a minimal version of the latter—there seems to be small anarchist contingent, though), in which case businesses might become big but not Big—they would assume their own risks and receive no protection, direct or indirect, from their competitors.

Marx had an explanation for this increasingly intricate and essential alliance: the state never was anything other than a “general committee of the ruling class,” which under capitalism meant the protection of bourgeois private property; so, when capitalism moves into its more advanced stage, and must confront deadly new resentments (the proletariat) and dangers (the threat—and promise—of military competition between capitalist states) the state must itself expand so as to take on these tasks—and the “monopoly capitalists” will be happy to let them do so, even if they grouse occasionally. And the libertarian explanation is… well, other than some vague references to our having forgotten our principles, it doesn’t seem to me they really have one—which would be why someone like Ron Paul exceeds even the most fevered Leftists in his conspiracy-mongering. Someone must have made a dirty deal behind closed doors.

I hope I don’t need to, but just in case I hasten to add that there is no critique of capitalism or the market, or the entrepreneur here, neither explicit nor implicit. “Predator” is just another way of speaking about the “Big Man”; without the Big Man, there would have been no way of centralizing resources needed to move humanity beyond the level of egalitarian hunter-gather tribes; civilization itself is predicated upon turning this predatory figure away from preying upon the weak of his own group toward defending that group against external predators (and this shift is predicated upon a truce between all the contending Big Men within the group); all I am adding is that the Big Man “function” continues to this day and that—this in my view reveals the Libertarian mindset, in all its provocative brilliance, to be utopian—we can’t imagine civilization without it.

So, an originary political economy would study the intersection of freedom and sovereignty in the way each of us articulates the imperatives sent our way by every other one of us. I think of the kind of simple account of the workings of the free market as both the best means of satisfying needs and as discovery procedure: I have a certain amount of money, and I invest it in the raw materials and technology I need to produce a certain number of a particular kind of good, continually adjusting the price I ask until I have sold as many of them as I can within the period of time I can allow myself before I must reinvest or, perhaps, repay my creditors.

If I don’t manage to sell enough to recoup my original investment, or come close enough to reinvest, then I fail, we learn that there is insufficient demand for the product I was selling (there are enough of them out there already, or enough of a sufficiently close version, or it’s simply unneeded and unwanted), and someone else will invest in the technology I had used, ultimately putting it to better use. There is no other way to find out what people want, or how resources should be allocated, than this one.

The tension between the entrepreneur and the “craftsman” so evident in Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class lies, I think, in the way outlays of capital continually upend—indeed, have their very significance in upending—the existing division of labor. Veblen associates the instinct for workmanship with knowledge of causal relations in nature (as opposed to the superstitious nature of the “predatory” classes), which makes sense, but equally important here are traditional methods and guild-style relations and an esthetic sense. The most virulent opposition to capitalism has often come from those pushed out of their artisan status by mass production—much of the rhetoric, if not the reality, of anti-capitalist politics derives from this kind of complaint, with which it is easy enough to sympathize.

A good way to start to tie all these issues together is by reflecting upon another issue where the far Left and Libertarian right converge (and where I have come, conveniently, to agree with both)—the illegitimacy and need for abolition of intellectual property. Intellectual property is a state granted monopoly over the uses others can make of their private property—the state can prohibit me from using my own printer and paper to copy something and distribute it, or to use my own raw materials of any kind to replicate a physical or chemical structure. The argument against intellectual property is most potent in dealing with patents, I think, given how arbitrary the distinction between a real invention and some tweak of a method or process that is already well known is; it is most problematic, even distressing, in dealing with copyright, when we know very well who authored, painted or composed that original and irreplaceable novel, painting or symphony and it seems only just that they benefit financially from it.

Inventions for use follow this logic, but are ultimately incidental to disciplinary habits and desires. If authors and creators are denied the monopoly on the right to use their work for profit (a right more often exploited by entertainment and other corporations anyway, often at the expense of their hired creators), they might use their talents to invite people into unique disciplinary spaces that transcend the reproduction of an object. That is, creation will become more pedagogical, organized around websites, public appearances, and other mediated events that take the created object as a changing center, one which the audience pays for the right to help change and witness in its successive metamorphoses.

New drugs might come to be invented in hospitals and other health care sites, and be administered as part of a total care experience; new technological innovations in other fields might also become embedded in a holistic set of service relations, as already seems to be happening with computers. This denial of a state monopoly to the giant companies best able to exploit it might, in turn, lead to a push for the government to stay outside of the company-consumer relationship, which would now require constant and far more subtle fine-tuning and communication between the parties, irreducible to external regulation. And the instinct for workmanship might revive as well in such integrated work environments, and the marginalist political activities like civil disobedience and boycotts take on more precise objects—supporting loved and needed “customized” institutions from state depredations. (The laws against fraud, though, might get some creative workouts if more people think they can get away with claiming to be the producer or author of another’s work, as opposed to just using or disseminating it.)

Of course, the one who brings the new product to market can’t know whether it will, in fact, create the corresponding desire nor, therefore, whether the breach in the division of labor has indeed been effected—that too is part of the asymmetry, but also the basis for converting the asymmetry into a new symmetry, wherein producer and consumer recognize each other. Entrepreneurship is a mode of firstness.

According to the Austrian school of economics founded by Ludwig von Mises, the creation of money by the state (“fiat money”) benefits those who get it first, while disadvantaging those who receive it later on down the line. This seems to me a very important insight. Obviously, the people who get the money first are the ones the government gives it to, very much like those first in on a Ponzi scheme, who get their money back and can therefore testify to the bona fides of the system to later entrants. The same would hold true for any government intervention in the economy that benefits, intentionally or not, some players over others—for example, an environmental regulation that requires a conversion from a cheaper to a more expensive technology and thereby puts the smaller businessman out of business.

The introduction of fiat money and regulatory regimes are responses to the asymmetry of exchange, felt above all in the disruptions of the existing social division of labor. These responses are modes of secondness, aimed at restoring symmetry by drawing upon the resentments neglected by the primary entrepreneurial gesture. They are not the only possible forms of secondness—the establishment of contractual regimes and legislation aimed at interpreting contractual language and guiding judicial traditions can even out the scales when resentments start to threaten social order. Either way, though, this secondness must itself be considered an economic fact, and any economic “laws” would have to include these secondary operations.

Insofar as money is the result of a form of deferral—a certain commodity, which originally has other uses, is set aside to serve as a means of exchange, and must therefore be removed from industrial use—and itself makes deferral possible (one accumulates money rather than consuming something now and hence gambles on or, if one like, displays faith in, the future), we could see money as the medium within which these contending tendencies take on a definite shape. When I save or invest money, I am positioning myself within the evolving social division of labor; but I am also betting on the extent to which the government, and the resentments it channels and inflames, will use money for more immediate deferral purposes.

I think that these more egalitarian and hierarchical modes of property will always contend with each other in civilized societies, and one can’t simply privilege the egalitarian version: when a new corporation comes to a small town and buys up a company that employs much of the population and goes on to lay half of them off in the name of modernization, it looks a lot like conquest and devastation, but it may be absolutely necessary and ultimately the right thing even for the town itself. But the people of the town might also most effectively see to their own future by fighting against attempts by their local or state government to help the predatory corporation along—such a fight would display cognizance of the consequences of economic decline (the setting in of all kinds of addictions) and in doing so help to defer those consequences, even if they lose the immediate battle.

So, originary political economy can help us to distinguish addictions from enthusiasms; the firstness of entrepreneurial initiative from the anti-firstness of fiat money and granting through regulation property rights in the existing social division of labor; the exhaustion of an economic model from its illusory inexhaustibility; the spontaneous cooperation undergirding property rights from the right of conquest—and, in this case, we can acknowledge that the latter will ultimately depend upon the former, since even the most arrogant conqueror must depend on his officers and enlisted personnel to divide and share duties and rewards, and even upon the conquered to cooperate in the sustaining of life.

Habits won't cease, though, and just as we can raise the threshold above which we notice difference, we can lower the threshold—more likely than government finding a way to restore corporate health or put people to work is people establishing new economic and social networks on the margins of their intersecting habits. And we will thereby rediscover the laws of complementarity: if the market crashes, maybe that is just a return to the true value of the commodities circulating through it; if official money ceases to measure anything reliably people will find other measures; if the rules seeking to prevent in advance insecurities, violence and error start to paralyze creative activity, people will seek out new trade-offs between these various goods; if regulators are, as they likely will be, as unable to predict values 2, 3, 10 years down the road as the participants in the market themselves, then transparency will be the only check on inordinate risk and will itself become among the highest of values.

The very notion that the media should be unbiased is a liberal one, and unwittingly supports the association of journalism with institutions genuinely charged with disinterestedness, like scholarly activity and, more important, the judiciary. Criticizing journalists for falsifying the reality they report on is perfectly appropriate, of course, but there is nothing wrong with a newspaper or TV station primarily concerned with eviscerating one party in particular. The most healthy media environment is one in which each outlet seeks to please and increase its audience, and in which each reader therefore has access not merely to publications with widely varying political stances but publications with widely varying tolerance for error (so there would be some insisting upon very high standards of verification while others sacrifice some credibility in the interest of getting better hidden stories, or getting stories faster), with different standards for "appropriateness," etc.—and without any one or any combination having the kind of near monopoly status that enables it to be certain that ignoring some other interest won't cut into its own audience share.

The disciplinary space is an engine of differentiations, turning the object into a generator of new signs. Determining which aspect of an object, in its sacral and appropriative relation to the community, is most worthy of attention (a determination that creates that aspect and expands the economy of attention, or lowers the threshold of significance) creates a minimal marketplace, with the more distinctive “aspectivalizations” rewarded by the ultimate currency: attention itself. The marketization process is likely to be more advanced in the arenas Gans, in Originary Thinking, assigns to the ethical (involving “productive” action away from the sacred space), but innovations and a kind of entrepreneurship take place (however slowly and imperceptibly) in the sphere of ritual as well.

Jane Jacobs’ analysis of the emergence of new work within an economy in her The Economy of Cities not only illustrates the disciplinary processes that make up the market but further suggests the interdependence of innovative thinking within the market and more theoretical reflection. Jacobs studies and categorizes a whole series of ways in which new work is added to an economic process—to take her first and simplest example, she mentions Ida Rosenthal, a custom seamstress who invented the bra by first using this new undergarment to improve the fit of the dresses she made for customers. Rosenthal then “became more interested in making brassieres than in making dresses” (51) and went into business manufacturing them; “bra-making now stood as an activity in its own right.” From attending from the undergarments to their effect on the dress, this particular undergarment became a focus of attention in its own right.

“The laws governing exceptions” makes sense in the light of the retrieval of the disciplinary out of the bureaucratic. Exceptions to, or anomalies of, bureaucratic rule, are the forms taken by disciplinary work: the “law governing” such work is the constitutive boundary between the disciplinary and the bureaucratic—the boundary between “virtue” and “norm,” for example. It might be further revealing to consider corporate, consumer and celebrity culture as a form of bureaucratic culture, insofar as political coercion, involving collusion between the security discipline (the state) and other disciplinary spaces in the market (and, secondarily, among those other spaces) raises barriers of entry to disciplinary spaces on the margins of the market.

Without such power, the discipline of the consumer is at the mercy of the addictive power of any relatively monopolized product that targets desires in their more isolated, simplified, amplified and repeatable forms. While categorizing the workings of an albeit corporatized free market similarly to the more recognizable bureaucratic labyrinths such as, say, the IRS, may seem counter-intuitive, and while the pluralism of one differs considerably from the near-totalitarianism of the other, what the two share is the imperative (one that intensifies as it is obeyed) to make predictability and controllability ever more perfect at the expense of the anomalies and innovations that occur at the margins; to put it more theoretically, they both try to increase the probability of intended consequences to the point where such probability is decreased due to excessive interference and consequent uncertainty in the variables. The difference is where they lie on the continuum leading from disciplinarity to bureaucracy.

Within the current “organological” arrangements, the most urgent medium of exchange between center and periphery is data. Any decision anyone, at any level of the social order, has to make, whether it regards corporate governance in turbulent times or which private nursery school to try and enroll your child in (or, needless to say, whether to take—or mandate—a particular vaccine) will depend upon readily available, competently packaged, and “legible” data. We all know about the intense interest companies and the social media companies gathering “intelligence” on their behalf have in our personal data; governments are no less interested in such data, to the point where traditional ways of thinking about privacy and civil liberties seem pathetically outdated.

But it’s not really the case that advocates of these rights stood outside of any entanglements with the state, and just wanted to be left alone to add their labor to various pieces of nature surrounding them. They wanted the state (first of all a liberalizing monarchy) to be deployed against the Church, aristocracy and other privileged groups, such as corporations chartered by the state, independent towns, banks, and guilds. It’s easy for us to overlook this, since the most formidable of those entities either no longer exist (or exist in a thoroughly neutered form), and few today could muster any historical sympathy for them.

If you concede no role to the state, as anarchists like Hans-Hermann Hoppe do, then you concede that the inequality of property will lead the biggest property owners to essentially govern (they will literally be deciding who can walk on the streets, enter businesses, get educated, and so on), and the social order imagined by Hoppe is different from one an absolutist might imagine only in the confusion introduced by overlapping security systems and distributed ownership over thoroughfares needed for social existence. Most importantly for us here, from an originary standpoint, there is no reason to assume that the social center is ever unoccupied: it passes from the ritual center of the primitive community, to the succession of Big Men and then monarchs and then, finally, to the modern state, which undergoes more rapid staffing changes than the monarchies, but never leaves society without an agency and hence some individual that has the final say on what is permitted and what is forbidden.

All subsequent inheritances will refer back to this nomos, just as US law ultimately refers back to the grants by British monarchs of colonies to individuals and companies. To challenge the distribution is to commit to a new conquest, so anyone who imagines doing so in the name of something like “fairness” or “equality” should have that in mind. But every inheritance, division and delegation, in referring back to the nomos or originary distribution, also accesses the intention of the distributor, which can be re-experienced in every moment. The Jewish version of this is being enjoined, during the Passover Seder, to see yourself as having been present at Mount Sinai during the revelation of the Lord and the giving of the Torah.

That’s either a white pill or a cope, but I don’t see how I could know for sure right now. But it does seem to be the case that no discourse can be powerful enough in itself to compel intellectual and moral devotion without some kind of institutional or organizational “currency”—any discourse looks “poor” if it’s still nothing more than a few guys talking about it. There will be something “missing,” and the need will be felt to supplement it with some name brand. (Still, you’d think at least a few would want to get in on the ground floor of a completely new way of thinking—what with all the talk about start-ups and all. And it’s not too late!) So, I’ve got to work on making the originary hypothesis the equivalent of a (not quite) brand in itself.

This is all very difficult and therefore interesting, but we do have vast legal traditions to draw upon here. The informal gatekeeping done by the major newspapers and networks, especially post-Sullivan, has really been a way for those outlets to monopolize defamation, incitement and fraud, and now that that monopoly has been broken the main effect has been to distribute those forms of speech more widely and to lower even further the standards of the sayable. This is a question central to governance, and, of course, any government that wants to combat this degeneration will have to be much more truthful itself. Other countries, without traditions and expectations of public officials being held accountable, have managed to live without believing anything the government says, in part by developing alternative networks and codes of information transmission—but this may not work for the world’s major power, which relies upon some reliability and coherence at least when it comes to commerce.

This, in fact, is a good way of thinking about what we might be working towards, with the qualification that the machinery itself might “insist” on certain hierarchies and gradations. But we’re not talking about “utopia” here; rather, we’re talking about an “installment,” a paying down of originary debt. And the proof of that is that precisely such an order would invest heavily in succession, in the sense a great deal of organization would be put into pedagogy so as to ensure there are future generations to replace the present one.

We stitch our petitions into the fabric of reality by leveraging existing institutions of deferral so as to produce more objects that can become the target of ostensives and shared in more diverse ways, as subsistence and as data and as subsistence that enables us to become carriers of fresh data. Most directly to the question of succession, it can be proposed as a rule to lend support, to donate your resentment, to whoever most proximal to central power seems mostly to, even tacitly or tendentially, nominate and invest like successors because they in turn will be most likely to do the same. A range of actors might fit this description in a floating manner, with it being possible to assign fluctuating probabilities to each of them, and to articulate possible convergences between them.

@Imperius__13 I don't know if there are places where corporations, professional associations, educational institutions, etc., are genetically impossible. If there are, maybe those places won't move beyond tribal organizations.

exoskeleton. If Jews are unwelcomed from both parties, I hope some Jewish political entrepreneurs will form versions of "the Jewish op"--it's risky, but will show the way to more sophisticated political actors with integrity who need to rise to power anyway.

The whole exchange imaginary is for Cernovich and others plying the same logic to project themselves as brokers and mediators, holding the ledger determining who owes whom. It's meant to look realistic and hardheaded but like everything else in the "OG MAGA" world it's a fantasy.

protection of and silence regarding bad actors. Shore up the stronger or at least reparable parts of the system, such as the courts and the knowledge banks lawsuits will produce, rather than aiding cynical politicians who hope to collect dividends from the incitement of

Have those business interests who will benefit from a permanent version of Trump's tariff regime organized themselves in such a way as to lobby for their maintenance? Have any labor associations been organized to do likewise regarding his immigration policies?

But this account leaves out the fact that the West has seen vigorous and effective governance, in both the state and corporate spheres. It turns out that rule is possible without “grounds,” and that maybe the absence of grounds, ultimately a philosophical, i.e., fraudulent, problem, is just nostalgia for sacred kingship. Before sacral kingship, though, there was the Big Man, who usurped the ritual center and took over distribution on his own “authority.” A viable narrative for the recovery of the West might argue that the West has conserved within the transitions through various modes of kingship, that original, revolutionary usurpation—a revolution far more radical than any attempted since the French Revolution.

Who, then, is appointing the judges? This may seem like a more important question than it actually is. Judges are part of the governing system so they are appointed, more or less directly, by the dictator, or chief executive of the central intelligence company. Any form of governance, once it attains a certain scale, will need some kind of juridical order—the carve out of the juridical from the ritual happens some place along the transition from sacral to divine kingship (the ancient Greeks had an extremely robust judicial system, suing each other all the time in what I imagine were fairly wild scenes, and this will always be the case with republics or democracies with unsecure central command structures), simply because at that point commands from the center are no longer transparent and generate disputes—disputes which the king can’t adjudicate himself requiring that he delegate.

We could then end up with interesting questions like how Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man is meant to affect his own credibility as a publishable author, the credibility of the publishing business, and, ultimately, the credit system of American capitalism as a whole, in the short, medium and long runs. I’d like to do this at some point, but for now it’s an aside.

In either case, though, the conversions can be handed off to others better suited to the task and one could set one’s data free into the wild for others to incorporate into design or delegate the labeling of discrete increments of debt to the more scribally oriented.

The word for “center,” if the Online Etymological Dictionary is to be trusted, derives from the word for “point,” which itself derives from the word to “prick,” i.e., to wound, to cause to bleed. So, I can now replace the clumsy “occupant of the center” with “pointman,” as a more resonant and less technical-sounding synonym. Nor is seeking out the pointman a merely passive stance—it’s not waiting for Godot, because there are a lot of candidates out there and you’re looking for them, testing them when they emerge, drawing conclusions from events they create, contributing to the conditions of their platforming and, indeed, in the process, someone so engaged in the process of pointing out the pointman might end up having been the pointman all along. You might turn out to have been the outside option insofar as you have been contributing to the monopolization of the outside spread.

But then it occurred to me that even more fundamental than measure was marking—one piece of reality must somehow be separated from other pieces in order to be measured and, we could say that a measurement is really at least two marks, with the distance between the marks between the measure. Both mark and measure are fundamental to writing, with its origins in inscription and accounting, so I would continue to credit Derrida’s “arche-writing” here. One more category might be enough for a “fundamental” or “originary” ontology: threshold, meaning that a certain articulation of marks and measures becomes something more than those marks and measures themselves (which themselves, therefore, must have “always already” have passed some threshold so as to become marks and measures).

Disciplines can proliferate and become a model for social organization on the principle of creating scenes upon which we can say “this is the same” in a way that would be opaque to anyone not on that scene (which does not exclude the possibility of “inter-scenes” upon which the results of inquiries can be presented in various ways). The target of the Academy is the training of a New Officer Class, or governing class and so we would have another “bias” here: within the terms of a broader pursuit of disciplinarity, the Academy is especially interested in transforming governance into a discipline. This means not only a “field of study,” but a field of training and learning in which the students are considered to be apprentices to the governing class—or, now, whatever fragments of such a class might be said to exist in particular, I think, in those sectors of nomos most concerned with data security, which is to say ensuring the provenance of data and its usefulness for specific clients.

And we can see why—at the very least, from the standpoint of the center, the judiciary serves as a filter, framing, articulating and settling conflicts before they can snowball and become a threat to order or the regime. But the legislature develops out of late medieval struggles between the king and nobles over royal attempts to extract the necessary revenues, mostly for war. The idea that there can be a body of government that “writes laws”—and, for that matter, that “writing laws” was the basic source of laws, is a modern “discovery.” It probably developed out of the aforementioned requests for revenue by the king, which we can see “evolving” into the composing and passing of budgets in desacralized orders.

If you’re responding “pre-emptively” to a request for revenue (implying the king has conceded that it is a “request”), then those providing the revenue must be allowed to determine the sources of revenue (not them, anymore) and its various destinations. (I assume late 17 th -18 th century England would be the place to study this transformation). And here we have most of modern law: grants of funds and authority to bureaucratic agencies (like through USAID). And since this is the money sluice, this is where all the attention of those outside of government who want something from government is directed, which is why a simple answer to any complaint about almost any feature of “liberal democracy” or “constitutional republics” (if you prefer) is: abolish the legislature.

The key here seems to be for some popular president to work systematically at coercing congress by targeting individual congresspeople in coordination with the DOJ and intelligence agencies—only a minority would need to be neutralized to significantly weaken the body as a whole. This assumes the possibility of coordinating with those notoriously “swampy” government agencies (or, given recent events, simply eliminating them—far better!), and the best way of approaching that is probably through the companies which those agencies contract out to, which can provide leverage in the form of necessary intelligence and capability and personnel.

These revisions of the Turing Test only really matter insofar as they provide models for performing our relations to the scenes we are on. That is, it’s not like once we have “proven” that there is something irreducible and irreplaceable about the human we can call it a day. If we are studying texts as transmissions of originary debt then we are interested precisely in how they established and preserved networks of institutional affiliations and obligations—how they kept the ledger. And that study is itself us adding new chains to the ledger, in the form of the data we provide to the central intelligence. Here we can begin to see a productive and paradoxical dynamic in our scenic interactions: the more we make and keep promises, the more we deem, and thank and “authenticate” our social being the more our actions will be intelligible at various levels of the stack.

One’s operationalization of the imperative gap is not an individual matter but derivative of one’s position within the stack of scenes—you can only start with the commands it is within your power to work with, and with whatever clarity the chain of imperatives they issue from is inscribed upon those aimed at you. There is one general rule here, though, and I think it is one confirmed historically, even by revolutionaries—the shift from one line of succession to another is always minimized to the extent possible—under monarchies, this might involve constructing strained or fictitious genealogies, whereas now we might expect something like a coup to refer to data secured under the command of the prior sovereign but requiring the specific skills and location of the new one to be operationalized. Even in the event of an established reality, the approval of the exiting occupant of the center would be sought.

Let’s stipulate that small margins can make a big difference, though—a very tightly controlled institution like, say, an elite private school with its own system of discipline a its own curriculum, groups, clubs, school spirit, etc., creating a highly cloistered space still needs the information coming from students choosing to apply to the school or not. The rachet effect of totalitarianism (including mundane leftism) comes precisely from trying to close off such “holes” and, in the case of this example, try something like mandating attendance at the school somehow. My answer to that is that the school has, and can enhance, relations with other institutions, in particular those through which students will circulate after attending, like universities and companies at which students will attend precisely as alumni, aided in such attendance by other alumni who will, in turn, model the results of attending that school and advise parents to consider it for their children.

Nations are in the first instance little empires, composed of a centralized government—first of all a monarch—who has suppressed tribes and the honor system governing their relations and replaced them with a system of justice, however rudimentary. Nations appear as such against the background of larger empires and take on their shape and mythology in defending their independence from those larger empires. In the end, though, they function within those empires, taking on some kind of “specialty” more or less formally integrated into it. The defense of the nation is therefore a defense of that specialized role and the relative monopoly it represents, and that’s something that may or may not be worth defending.

The convergence of correlation and causality means that massive computing power using machine learning to discover those systematic correlations that tip over into causality and can now determine the investments most likely to pay of over time. I’m reflecting here on Alexander Good’s “[agentic protocols](https://goodalexander.com/posts/agentic-protocols/)”:

Producing data starts with naming and measuring things—you name so you can measure, but new ways of measuring create new names. I’ll set aside the strict experimental sciences here, where questions of justice rarely impinge, to focus on my real interest here, human data. Measuring something basic like births is simple enough but still requires that births mostly take place in hospitals, which are public, record-keeping institutions, and that hospitals are mostly reliable record keepers and preservers—and that those health officials, ultimately from the government but also insurance companies among others, themselves are competent and don’t falsify information.

Justice is an essential point of intervention here because what pretty much all conservative and reactionary thinkers consider the problem of the present, “wokeness,” or, in the GA vernacular, the “victimary,” is really the conversion of the juridical order into a means of deploying the vendetta at the level of the originary distribution against anyone appearing capable of leveraging succession against the parceling out of the imperative of the center. The parceling out of the imperative of the center means that a calculated strategy of betting against those most dedicated to the creation and transmission of practices of data security can not only break those lines of transmission but can turn those very practices against them.

The problem of access to the imperative of the center is the problem of institution building, of data security and scenic design practices. We can at least know something of what we would need to build to eventually acquire knowledge that would regularly interface with governance. And we can know something of what interferes with that, so the inevitable confusions and shortenings of the imperative can at least be made explicit and hypothetical scenes that would draw in information contributory to governance constructed. This practice, as an extension of the originary hypothesis, might then be a way to create a new form of the founding unanimity which rotating occupancy of the center obscures.

As always, I want the concept to be descriptive in a revealing way rather than simply normative or prescriptive, and so succession posits the assumption that this is what we’re always doing, i.e., trying to “bias” the future so that those loyal to us and those who will continue our projects will be more likely acquire the power to do so. And there’s a kind of “existential” dimension here: if you really want what you say you want, how can you just let it all go after you step off the scene? If you’re serious, you must want to pass the baton. Finally, _in perpetuity_ turns succession into “trans-scenic” concept, building into succession the preservation of the imperative of the center, the point of infinity, however vague—you want to select someone who will in turn select someone who will in turn select someone, etc.—a program which moves beyond the “metaphysical” to the increasingly practical as data security becomes constitutive of governance, and futurity can become a genuine political question. There’s a question of “breeding” in the broadest sense here, of continuing a line which has and will accumulate and accentuate various traits, characteristics, habits, etc.

The declarative sentence, under orality, would always approximate the imperative, in the form of oaths, curses, prayers, accusations, prophecies, threats, spells, and so on. It would be incorporated into performances that re-enact stories that are themselves made of those kinds of speech acts. The imperative is delayed just enough to be deflected. The declarative would become isolatable and analyzable as a speech form in the wake of writing, where an observation and clarification of its syntax become necessary and can be modeled on accounting records. The form the declarative takes in writing, what we might call “high literacy,” is what Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner call “classic prose” (I have discussed this many times, but we do have a new context here).

The “Big Man revolution” might take some other path as data exchange comes to replace exchange via currency and assets, but, so far, what I am describing here is the only way of defending the Big Man revolution right now and making that future path possible. Almost everything the left does is a violation of this kind of order—all leftist thinking, what I would join with Eric Gans in calling the “epistemology of resentment,” is ferociously directed against such an order. If, on occasion, it serves some purpose of the left to defend, say, some local community against environmental damage caused (and maybe covered up) by some corporation, we should be capable of restraining our partisan impulses and join in (and maybe take over) such pro-civilizational actions.

Sahlins himself at one point notes the similarity between the metapersons of “most of humanity” and the transpersonal, abstract entities and agencies we appeal to now—governments, companies, countries, universities, “public opinion,” etc., which are all very real but, in contrast to the archaic metapersons, not at all tethered to our own intentions—they will not serve us and we are not conjuring them. How to make every utterance, or sample, performative, like a judgment or prayer or program, is the question. I’ll be coming back to this in the next few posts. For now, I’ll say that maybe more can be done with my notion of “originary satire,” understood as a kind of mimetic disabling of impossible imperatives.

These events can be tokenized by those researching them as well, but differently—the media tokenization realizes value that can be immediately cashed in by the media outlet, its investors and its collaborators in the intelligence agencies, political parties, activist organizations and think tanks, etc. These actors can think in terms of exploiting the short term for the medium term, but not far beyond, with perhaps the exception of some within the intelligence agencies (it’s hard to know about this). The tokenization of scenes with a great degree of reality, though, can think long term precisely by planning the creation of a new nomos out of a more precise building of precedents and assets out of those precedents.

Different media, and different uses of media, are more or less suited to eroding and reconstructing these boundaries. There’s no way to separate what is “inherent” to a particular medium from its historical function in government, and McLuhan also recognized that particular media, like, say, radio, will have different effects in, e.g., literate vs. illiterate societies. Perhaps the best way to generalize is to identify the possibilities for data security opened up by a particular media and the way struggles over the center make for data insecurity in that particular media. In this way we could still speak about things like truth and falsity without reducing such determinations to mere declarative sentences: its more a matter of preserving the integrity and continuity of the imperative of the center, which is really consistent with bringing the various speech forms into alignment. And this returns us to the centrality of pedagogy to the stack of scenes, as pedagogy is a performance of archiving, of creating, maintaining and transmitting practices of collecting, sorting, preserving, becoming data.

So, here we have a link between economics, politics and technology. This link establishes relations across desacralized, or broken down, institutions, but the relations are not harmonious—there’s no reason to assume what is isolated and targeted as an asset will also facilitate a breakdown of some scene so as to recompose it in more productive or energy efficient ways; or that either breakdown will coincide with the rotation in office favorable to either process. We do, though, have a map of the path the candidate for center occupancy will take towards ensuring succession, at the very least his own self-succession (i.e., remaining in power as long as possible): mobilize the distribution (lending and investment) priorities in such a way as to create the scenery that will increase and empower the various layers of active and passive support needed to ensure one’s continued occupancy. This will ultimately be a way of selecting a successor very different from oneself as lending and investment and technological possibilities not taken will find their constituencies and agencies.

So, it’s possible to counter the ongoing progressive reduction to homogeneity, the quantitative, equality, interchangeable, etc., not in the name of some already existing or lost sacrality (a center demanding, in itself, as a condition of recognizing it, unqualified devotion) but the pedagogical relations necessarily built into every human encounter but also continually corroded by the breakdown. This includes starting from the intrinsically qualitative dimension of data security, which is establishing who has seen, heard, felt and said what, when, and upon what scene. And this is what language is for, so learning is always language learning.

The image is grotesque if we think of it in sheer financial terms, like some company bought through a hostile takeover, broken down into its components and then sold off. But confronting that scenario with the sentimentalism of some nostalgic vision of a holistic human does no one any good. That would simply restore the egalitarian fantasy of instantaneous exchange. But parceling yourself out is no different than instituting any other nomos, and there are venerable traditions of itemizing one’s daily activities and returning them, via circulation, to their original owner—some writing now, which also requires some reading and time designated for thinking; conversations and gift exchanges with friends and family, which also, when thought about, are “practices” that can be “maximized”; there’s a part of you set aside for contributions to the local community, etc. Thinking purposefully about such self-“nomosing” in terms of ceremonies of singularized succession is simply the obverse of financialization, an attempt to introduce rigor into what financialization does sloppily now.

Would anyone accept a pension that will pay off their descendants in 150 years? But with pedagogical derivatives, such a thing is possible, if you position yourself in relation to institutions in such a way that you single out that which in the semiotics of the institution will defer the noise always on the verge of engulfing any message. Well, how does one do that? First, here’s how you don’t do it: take as given and fixed reified concepts developed after the fact to institutionalize and museumize the results of activities undertake under very different auspices. For example, “preserving Western civilization”—this is the language of mummification.

That outfit, and contenders that would emerge, are the precursors of pedagogical derivatives, as they would place all ritual, juridical and disciplinary practices in a scene that would strip all the furnishings and leave only the scenic design practices. If you interrupt the flow of some routine with a gesture of presence that can only be completed within an event joined by those interrupted, you are such an outfit. And what massive data flows you will be sending back to the center!

But this entire process is itself an outgrowth of the legislature, and would never have come into existence in a corporate order topped by an executive and regulated by a judiciary—“laws” become increasingly complicated because they have to account for the complexities of institutions created by existing laws and the contortions they have forced all institutions, public and private, into. If “genuine” right wing figures (by which I mean, not those who see the tyrant as Stalin rather than Hitler, but those who want an operational center) are to compete for positions in the legislature, maybe it’s best that they work to turn it into spectacle, creating scandals, making vitriolic (but engrossing) speeches, staging confrontations within the chamber and lots of “cameo” appearances at public events for maximal attention.

Ultimately, this entails being the same thing you are saying. So, what was very much like saying the same thing as everyone else starts to become perilously close to everyone doing the same thing at the same time precisely because someone, maybe you, is not saying the same thing. That just means that everyone must be saying the same thing as everyone else on some other scene, meta or infra, and you approximate what everyone else is saying until everyone can see and say that it is the same. That other scene might be a prolonged one, comprised of widely distributed doings, so one takes out derivatives on its completion.

The idioms I’ve been creating out of a reduction of scenic thinking to Anna Weirzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes is, then, intended to become the language of a team, or teams of teams, operating directly on the field of probability. The Enlightenment model is a derivative of the Big Scenic Imaginary, where we are to imagine ourselves somehow all seated at a table together. What I’m suggesting is more along the lines of “weighing” the “nodes” in a neural network so as to contribute to the composition of the database. Sure, any individual contribution is minimal, but that’s the case with the Enlightenment model as well, where you’re at a table with hundreds of millions of people.

The need for a warrant to enter premises or search a person so as to find evidence is obviously critical to the juridical as it has evolved in Western, or at least Anglo-American law. Part of what the juridical does is sacralize the individual in relation to the state: the individual is protected against a rapid and totalizing convergence upon his person which would destroy any attempt to simply provide his own account and have it checked. But what if the state already has this information, gathered by its own agencies or telecommunications companies in the routine course of everyday service provision? Things get more complicated—maybe the state shouldn’t be able to see a particular individual’s phone records without a warrant, but can it be provided with information regarding patterns of activity that stand out in one way or another?

That earthly imperative, which concerns some earthly inheritance, must be addressed, even if to repudiate it, to turn over the property to other claimants, to donate it all to the center or to satirically disable oneself as an instrument of the imperative. The details of the inheritance implicit in the imperative (which might be a plea from a dependent as much as a command from a superior) then become the idiom in which one becomes a derivative, speculating on the furthest future options of that imperative.

So, that’s the project—as always, I’m glad to leave it open source because no one could do this without me or, perhaps, at some point people who have learned quite a bit from me. We’ll see if there are any takers; perhaps future posts will simulate an ongoing prediction market on the likelihood of various possible kinds of takers.

I’m going to work here on further approximating writing to programming. We have our three co-constitutive categories: ritual (ensuring it will have been the same); the juridical; and the disciplinary. We can identify a threshold for each category so that derivatives can be drawn from it: for ritual it is the reversal of entropic tendencies toward furtherest future options; for the juridical, it is the conversion of the vendetta into cases and claims; for the disciplinary it’s the reduction of the imperative gap so that the problem of “tyranny” and the differend is abolished. We should, then, be able to program the targeting of the threshold of each category so as to ensure performance above the threshold in the other categories.

The value investors represent the “outside spread,” and become critical to the market when the dealer finds himself unable to cover the inside spread, that is, provide liquidity to one of the “time investors.” In that case,

LiPuma associates this ritualistic behavior with a novel mode of subjectivity created by the era of the derivative grounded in what he calls the “speculative ethos”:

Curation and archiving and data analysis would here continue to rely on juridical categories like perjury and relevance. I’m not imagining, then, through the slogan of data security, a form of rule by computer programmers and IT guys—the broader provenance of data precedes its final categorized and analyzed forms. To govern is to protect the disciplinary stance and to display that stance: the public process of singularized succession in perpetuity is a permanent disciplinary project, an open study of forms and requirements of leadership under changing (as part of the changing) scenic and infrastructural conditions.

The only thing to do is to create spaces for the training of writers, with writing understood as the maintenance of data security, as the participation in scribal-archivist-philological-programming traditions, as the meta-representation of oral-literate interfaces constitutive of spaces of writing pedagogy. The more all inscription is traced back to the ascertaining of ritual and liturgical traditions, to discerning the viability of one line of tradition over a sea of others nevertheless maintained in abeyance, the more creative and inventive we will become because it is out of the identification of a stream of seemingly minor differences that all programming emerges.

So, we have two scenes: the one in which you struggle with an imperative from the occupied center and the one from which a voice interrupts that first scene, which we provisionally identify as a scene upon which the signifying center speaks—and this is certainly a scene which, in the post-literate world, we can never claim in any way that meets any conceivable practices for maintaining data security to be present upon. It’s a scene we can only know through its interruptions of the scenes where we can be fit to measure; and, in fact, it’s a problem knowing whether that is where we have derived the voice from. We can only put the utterance of this voice to the test by initiating the composition of a new, third, scene, upon which we work out the terms on which that utterance can be the same on both of those other scenes.

The more that technology surrounds and enters us and becomes the immersive environment so that being outside of it is as unthinkable as being outside of the ritual order for archaic humans, the more we are inscribing our histories and destinies upon that environment. “Data security” may not be the most obviously inspiring rallying cry ever invented, but it’s marvelously compact and rich in implications. What inspired all those ancient men we now revere as heroes? Immortality—to live forever in the memories and emulative actions of others through the ages. This means acting so as to be recorded and commemorated, which until fairly recently meant a significant portion of the resources and energy of the community being devoted to such commemoration—the work of poets, historians, novelists, school teachers, artists of various kinds and so on.

In my previous post I suggested rethinking the “cognitive” in terms of features of textuality rather than logic, and we could extend this across the infrastructure—speaking of the presumably “ethical” concept of “accountability,” for example, implicates us in juridical institutions dealing with economic exchange, administrative auditing and other very concrete practices of power and exchange with the center—but it is precisely through the literary that these infrastructural traces in language can be elucidated, which brings us back to textual infrastructures. Sentences, punctuation, paragraphs, indexes, etc., are all simultaneously administrative and cognitive and the only practices irreducible to one or the other and therefore “transcendent” are those making visible these infrastructures of literacy. The acquisition of this mode and level of literacy qualifies one for the kind of data security and programming of programmers practices that will set to rights our relation to the center.

The press was no less dishonest and scurrilous than the media today—there is no call for any nostalgia here. All the media does is stage trials and invite the audience to participate vicariously as judges, jurors and, increasingly, enforcers. This cannot be fixed. The current mania among leftists to stem “disinformation” is breathtakingly dishonest and itself the greatest source of disinformation today but this strategy has been chosen because the previous mechanism for control of information—large monopolized media companies with professionalized staffs working in close but deniable collaboration with their government “sources”—has broken down, and large scale coordination may, in fact be seriously disabled by the proliferation of incommensurable sources of information. On some level, we all have to be able to say that the same thing happened, and it has become easy to imagine that becoming impossible. But the juridical framing of the media might provide a clue to reforming it, by which I mean completely shutting it down and replacing it with something radically different.

Candidates will be selected and tested, which means that institutions will be designed so as to produce such candidates, from top to bottom—whether we have presidents or kings, or CEOs or something new, there will continue to be social “heights” focused, as I have been arguing recently, on data security, and they will set the tone for the more local events.

In that case, what we derive from deferral are those transactions between explicit and implicit created by deferral. The appearance of the late-comer, who can be a parvenu or bureaucrat, and not a criminal, signifies the exhaustion of a field of deferral—even early on, then, one could anticipate this devolution, as it’s implicit in the various checks regarding what counts as saying the same thing in that field. Clearly, then, I’m writing this for those who want to anticipate, delay and reverse such developments, beginning with the founding gesture itself—in other words, those interested in working in the field of derivatives.

The path to doing so, and a sign of good faith on the part of a new officer class, would be the use of techno-media infrastructures to revivify kinship networks, locally scaled economic units and ethnos, as sites where responsibility for norm-setting, surveillance, policing, pedagogy and so on can be “off-loaded.” It is this space of deferral that generates the derivatives that we use to “up-load” the resentment we donate to the center. The (non-mathematicalizable) calculation involved here is as follows: acting and speaking so as to support the comportments needed to restore and preserve the juridical forms providing for transferability and reciprocal strengthening across juridical-scientific interfaces.

We can now say that the closing (always provisional) of some imperative gap is the staffing of some fragile and critical sector of data security. You want to write like you’re presenting yourself to be next in line to take charge of that staffing. You then approximate the convergence of saying and doing, with a saying that is insistently what everybody else is saying and a doing thereby properly distributed by that saying.

These struggles between capital-state articulations take the form of struggles between and within media, all of which can be brought with the compass of intelligence operations aimed at enhancing one’s own or undermining some opponent’s data security. Effective mobilization is when those in your own ranks know exactly what they need to know and no more, assuming what they know is in fact knowledge, however limited. (Knowing that your enemies can be hurt by the repetition of particular mantras is a kind of knowledge, regardless of the truth or meaningfulness of those mantras, and for certain ranks this may be enough.) But effective mobilization is also relative and depends on your ability to recruit to the point where effective mobilization is decreasingly possible for other sectors.

And the people at the top of the doomed company might make a lot of money by selling out as well. To design another path one needs to discard metalanguages for idioms, even while those idioms will in large be composed of pidgins and creoles composed out of satirized and broken up metalanguages (created by refugees of the disciplines).

The greatest challenge, though, will probably be engaging surveillance itself—the kind of “casual” surveillance that results from the fact that every means of communicating, transporting and transacting we have today leaves digital traces that could be collected and used by corporations and governments. The current approach, one that with no exceptions I can think of is shared by left and right alike, is to deploy existing juridical categories to denounce and seek to minimize and control this pervasive surveillance. Indeed, much of the existing surveillance exceeds existing legal (and moral) provisions, which were not designed with the existing technological means in mind.

The figure or “identity” of the intelligence gather across scenes, which draws upon the scholar or scribe, the priest (who acquires meta-personal intelligences for his congregants), the derivatives trader, the statesman and spy, seems to be the best way of ensuring the commensurability of the center, its sameness, across time.

Even an innocuous and potentially beneficial (to some) law that, say, lowers the cost of some widely used medicine will also have some slander of the drug companies built into it—at the very least, it will slander by omission (an interesting legal category to create if it doesn’t exist) by providing a very selective account of the reasons for drug pricing. Now, if the government were to broker an agreement pursuant to a dispute between some combination of drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals, patients organized as a class, etc., that could be done without impugning anyone’s motives or flinging wild accusations.

There’s something here for the materialists—if a particular way of organizing economic relations makes it essential to lie, commit fraud and slander then that doesn’t speak well for that mode of organization, which should therefore be replaced; and for the idealists, even the Kantians, to some extent at least (lying to a murderer about where his victim is doesn’t really harm the murderer). It would also encourage us all to become scrupulous handlers of text and, of course, expert attendants upon data security.

But honor culture also verges upon the juridical, insofar as injuries done by one tribe to another can be compensated materially, in which case something like a legal tradition would develop, albeit one very different than one based upon our notions of the “sanctity” of human life—not all that different, though, than the compensation doled out by insurance companies based on actuarial tables.

Once you’ve written enough, you’ve generated your own interlocutors in the form of arguments at cross purposes or seemingly unrelated to the one you’re making now, and in fact a lot of theoretical development happens this way. In this case, the “assignment” is to articulate searching as wisdom with the derivative, or future presentism, and technology as scenic design. If these are all generative concepts, they must be reciprocally generative. It was bringing Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Sematic Primes to bear on the originary scene that enabled me to say that saying “this is the same” is constitutive of all language use.

There is a political movement in the US that, presumably realizing the futility of changing the Constitution so as to turn the presidential election into one determined by a national popular vote, has tried to circumvent the constitution by trying to get states to agree to elaborate vote-swapping schemes so as to attain the same result as a popular vote would. This seems to me to leverage the logic of the derivative. The starting assumption is that only majoritarian decisions can be legitimate in the election of officials, and so the pre-modern electoral system is a dangerous form of illegitimacy; rather than conceding the inevitability of this illegitimacy, and further conceding the illegitimacy of the Constitution itself, these sources of potential “volatility” can be addressed by introducing auxiliary institutional arrangements that would ensure the “legitimate” result.

But derivative thinking can provide a way of articulating a long march through the institutions with satiric exposures of the existing order. If what we’re interested in is the order becoming more of an order, with the ritual, juridical and disciplinary mutually shaping each other and the ostensive>imperative>interrogative> declarative forms being mutually clarifying and approximating reciprocal exhaustion we have advantages over those with fantasies of finally installing real democracy. There are specific levers within the ritual (scene-setting and commemorative), juridical and disciplinary orders that can be discovered and pulled in tandem.

These reflections draw upon the increasing recognition that the US, and no doubt other Western states, are increasingly becoming states run out of their national security apparatuses—security and intelligence—as they govern through media, academic, NGO and corporate proxies (which in turn convey intelligence back to the center). No doubt this was always the case more than just about anyone was willing to acknowledge, but that it’s nevertheless becoming more obvious, with fewer people having the energy to try and deny it, is significant. The behind the scenes is becoming the scene. The most common initial response to these revelations is to resist this transformation (one that brings the US into conformity with less discreet security apparatus run states like the USSR and Nazi Germany—suggesting that this transformation might simply be the logic of centralization in the post-sacrificial world order) in the name of restoring the nation or republic traduced by it.

Making America weaker is not patriotic. Such a political party would take on as its core mission the recruitment, defense and cultivation of such infiltrators, and the creation of the legal, educational and ideological means of doing so. (A policy towards corporations, which will essentially evaporate as a political force once the compulsion of wokeness is removed, is implicit here.) And here’s an impeccable, clearly workable and easily understood imperial principle of action: ruthlessly suppress any action (or incitement or incentive to action) that would revive the honor system (domestically and internationally), especially those that would lead to its revival by leaving the kinds of crimes once covered by the vendetta unpunished.

The work of closing the imperative gap is conducted in “disciplinary spaces,” which are retrievals of the originary scene/event. This speaks directly to the question of scale: the configuration of the originary scene/event is reproduced in all human activity, but directly only within disciplinary spaces, which are governed by their own inquiries and idioms. It may very well be that disciplinary spaces generate their own utopias by mapping themselves onto the social—a small group, bound by duty, devotion and sacrifice easily takes itself to be model of the ideal order. But scenes directly orchestrated by the center, in collaboration with its closest subordinates (these being, today, the major media and tech companies), are of an entirely different character: these are spectacles, mass mobilizations, shows of force, sentimental morality plays, scapegoating rituals, and so on.

You “show your work” so as to mark your translation and the innovation in your practice, and it is in fact those markings that turn your mimological practice into an assignment for others to translate it into their own. Markers of your own translation work will present or impress themselves as interferences to be marginalized within successor practices but also as a program to resist that marginalization when the originary form of the practice can be deployed against the infiltration of Big Scenic fantasies into the successor practices. This all sounds very literary, I know, and I’m insisting on the literary as a model for the technological, but if you think about technological innovation not only in terms of the mechanically describable operations of a technological form but as the generator of scenes, in terms of corporate organization, some form of “skunkworks,” and the array of possible deployments by and of end users, then you will equally find such markings of mimological practices there as well. In principle, technology and science involve a simultaneity of operations across fields any one of which is an equally appropriate entry point but, in practice, any thing has a point of reference and origin which marks it ineradicably.

Writing represents the sentence as a linguistic artifact and thereby rips it out of its relation to the ostensives and imperatives out of which it flows and back into which it would directly flow. Among other results, this creates a relation between a sentence that could have been said by anyone and that is “heard” by each reader internally (even if the silent reader stands at the end of a long history of reading—“hearing” internally is just repeating the words silently). More importantly here, this is an early, enduring and highly transformative mode of technics. The objectification of the declarative sentence leads to logic, and therefore math, and then computation (but also accounting and therefore accountability): what science does, through mathematics, to the world as text, is first of all what the declarative did to the earlier speech forms: study, dissect and rearticulate elements and movements so as to make them available on a scene.

The exchanges within the stack can be readily understood as data exchanges once we presuppose the perfecting of practice as the grammar of the stack. This makes sense of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Practices within the schools provide data taken up in various ways by Church, military, corporate world, scientific enterprises, etc., and the data provided by each individual going through these institutions is taken up other institutions as a measure of that person’s needs and abilities. A student’s performance in the 100 yard dash will be relevant to the military more than to the Church, one imagines, but the Church may make some use of it as well.

What it will do, though, is turn individuals into designers—of practices and institutions. I’ve been doing some reading in contemporary design theory, of the kind that is very cognizant of postmodern thought (I’ll mention briefly the work of Benjamin Bratton, especially his The Stack , and his colleagues in the Strelka Institute in Moscow), and one can see the tendency towards a very promising post-humanism. The notion that individuals were “constructed” was once a fairly esoteric theoretical speculation, but how does one deny it now that our whole lives are very tightly governed by algorithms under the control of corporations and states that now, between them, regulate all social interactions?

The existence of the play, and the increasing density of the “traditions” of moves embodies an adherence to the center around which we revolve, however unevenly; meanwhile, the ongoing play provides opportunities for the players to occupy centers by making moves that create “temporary monopolies” (a term of Gans’s) of attention—all on the condition that no one steps outside of the play into a meta-language (super-sovereignty) that would claim to codify the rules from outside of the play. (Any attempt to do so would be treated a mistake and recouped within the presence of the play.) Such temporary monopolies would be, within this analogy, “governance,” and one possessing such a monopoly would govern so as to sustain that position as a node within the field, that others could subsequently occupy, insofar as they model themselves on the present occupant and make that region of the field especially productive and “corporal” (that is, involving all its members).

Furthermore, Bratton makes it clear that Users are not necessarily human—in fact, the vast majority of them are not—or, at least, that will eventually be the case. Companies and institutions can set up proxy users, automated users with addresses through which business can be transacted. And this brings us to another aspect of what, for now, I’ll call “the thought of the Stack”—its development of tendencies within posthuman and postmetaphysical discourses that relativize or, better, “relationalize” the human in relation to the non-human—the mechanical and algorithmic as well as the animal, vegetable and mineral. To put it simply, humans are not the only agents—al though the question seems to be left open (Bratton often seems to be ready to close it, though) as to whether humans are a particularly important or special kind of agent.

Genres like the idyll and the pastoral are the products of urbanization no less than modern genres like film noir and the horror film. Film noir reconstructs and sensationalizes the murder events neutralized through insurance claims, police procedure, property disputes and other urban non-events. The horror film tries to simulate the revenge of repressed nature, from which the viewer is of course at a safe distance. This is fundamentally no different than the pastoral representing the shepherd as a paragon of the virtues forgotten by the city-dweller. “Nature” is a product of the “artificial” city.

One more element of the city is worth mentioning: the grid, or replicable patterns of infrastructure, architecture and information transmission. The grid is the material manifestation of the abstraction exercised through money and the justice system. The grid enforces the distribution of human activities along the lines of the distinctions mentioned above, but also divisions like residential and business, financial and manufacturing, city and suburb—which replicate those other distinctions. The killings on which each of us depend are occluded in the other districts. Should we see the beasts being slaughtered for the benefit of what seems to us a more benign secondary or tertiary activity?

To transgress against the center is now to transgress against a human occupant of the center. It is possible to refer to a discrepancy between that occupant and the permanent, or signifying center. There can be a discrepancy between human and divine “accounting” or “bookkeeping,” in which sins and virtues, crime and punishment, must be balanced. The discrepancies between “accounts” will attract commentaries exploring this discrepancy. The injustice suffered, the travails undergone, perhaps the triumphs, real or compensatory, experienced by the figure of such a discrepancy will come to be incorporated into a text that is, we might say, “always already” commented upon—that is, such a more complex story will include, while keeping implicit, the accretion of meanings to the “original” narrative. This is what gets us out of the ergodic, and into the vertiginous world of essences (new centers) revealing themselves behind appearances, as well as historical narratives modeled on such ambivalent relations to the center.

I was thinking of writing a separate post on “American freedom,” but what I want to say about that can be incorporated here by way of an example. I am very favorably and generously inclined toward American freedom because what American freedom really means is a very strong prejudice in favor of an executive culture—freedom means that people in charge of something should be allowed to actually be in charge of it. This is just about the healthiest thing one can believe. Americans passionately hate the “consensus” model of decision making that seems to be popular pretty much everywhere else in the world and is systematically recommended to us as a move toward a less “white” and more “diverse” culture.

The succession problem is the problem of all our practices. It’s the problem of immortality—how else do we live on if not through others repeating and extending our practices and words? According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat (who very decisively clarified the origin of writing in ancient accounting notation), the ancient emperors helped advance the development of phonetic writing by having declarative sentences, spoken in their “voice,” inscribed on their monuments in the earliest forms of phonetic lettering. They did this because they wanted the reader of the inscription to have to repeat, “I am _________, ruler of _______,” etc.

Bichler and Nitzan certainly intend for the “hologrammatic resonance” I discussed in my previous post to serve as a model for the abolition of capital. I think this helps to explain their neglect by the left—they don’t provide an “agency” for such transformation that can become a target of political “investment,” i.e., that can be capitalized. Thinking in terms of privileged agencies is sacrificial, Big Scenic thinking—it relies upon the imaginary redistribution of the social product and social power in a more “equal” way that can never be determined outside of the mimetic struggles it incites and depends on. But this also means that the hypothesized practices that would promote “industry” must “resonate” across the entire social order. I think that the most concentrated way of approaching this, and one that might actually become fairly realistic even under the rule of capital is a post-sacrificial reconstruction of kinship structures. This will be the subject of a future post.

It merely marks a presumably inviolable center to be protected from tyranny. Moreover, these modern forms of legitimation have never corresponded particularly well to actual social relations, which remain every bit as hierarchical and, in most areas of life, “dictatorial” as most historical “tyrannies.” Demands for more democracy or equality are demands that the state act on your behalf against some of your enemies; it thereby empowers the state, and whichever agencies are best able to access and leverage the state. It follows, further, that the way for the more powerful players in the modern world—state agencies and corporate leaders alike—to enhance their power is precisely by leveraging such concepts against their rivals.

The Axial Age acquisitions of metaphysics and scripture made it increasingly difficult to levy these vast, sacrificial, masses. So, in the European middle ages, while there was steady technical development, and some remarkable feats of engineering and architecture, such development never exceeded the limits set by existing corporate and authority relations. The masses confronted in the New World, then in conquered regions abroad and, finally, those at home flowing into the cities from the farmers enclosed out of their land must have ignited a new technological imagination. For quite a while, the development of machinery seemed to track pretty closely intensifications in the division of labor, with each laborer being given increasingly simpler tasks within an increasingly complex process, with those tasks eventually being transferred to technology.

It merely marks a presumably inviolable center to be protected from tyranny. Moreover, these modern forms of legitimation have never corresponded particularly well to actual social relations, which remain every bit as hierarchical and, in most areas of life, “dictatorial” as most historical “tyrannies.” Demands for more democracy or equality are demands that the state act on your behalf against some of your enemies; it thereby empowers the state, and whichever agencies are best able to access and leverage the state. It follows, further, that the way for the more powerful players in the modern world—state agencies and corporate leaders alike—to enhance their power is precisely by leveraging such concepts against their rivals.

The Axial Age acquisitions of metaphysics and scripture made it increasingly difficult to levy these vast, sacrificial, masses. So, in the European middle ages, while there was steady technical development, and some remarkable feats of engineering and architecture, such development never exceeded the limits set by existing corporate and authority relations. The masses confronted in the New World, then in conquered regions abroad and, finally, those at home flowing into the cities from the farmers enclosed out of their land must have ignited a new technological imagination. For quite a while, the development of machinery seemed to track pretty closely intensifications in the division of labor, with each laborer being given increasingly simpler tasks within an increasingly complex process, with those tasks eventually being transferred to technology.

All of this is designed for winning elections, and appealing to donors who are necessary in order to win elections, and frames media discourse and leads to the creation of think tanks and other institutions aimed at studying and modifying public opinion. The basic question is also something like “what can I say to the person with profile X to make it sufficiently likely to make the investment in persuasion worthwhile that that person will vote for candidate Y”? We can easily imagine a dollar per vote calculation underlying efforts at communication.

Firstness depends on egalitarianism, as the rights of the community, because a privileged position can be claimed and defended only in terms of its benefit to the group. When Obama said, “you didn’t build that,” he was attacking the privileges accorded to firstness, and ignoring that individuals who invest their lives in a business are rewarded freely according to their benefit to the community

These hedges also minimize the degree of testing to which the competence of the ruler is subjected to. He delegates, and since those to whom power is delegated are less secure in their positions, which is to say, have fewer hedges, they must be more competent—and more competent means obligating their subordinates in the manner of the Big Man. The king must at least be minimally competent enough to assess the competency of his subordinates—incompetence past a point would introduce instability at the top. Meanwhile, the more his subordinates are able to hedge against reverses in conditions that might undermine their power, the more they are able to target their mode of obligating their subordinates in coercive, rather than reciprocal ways.

This is done through satire. I don’t mean a tension diluting joke, or a self-deprecating quip. I mean each performing a response to the typical expectations coming from the other—the boss showing that he knows he might be read as the typical slave-driving bully and the employee showing he knows he might be read as a lazy smart-ass. It becomes a satire they perform together. While in the end someone has to be right about how many conscientious employees to takes how much time to do inventory, the two will get closer to being right together through satire than serious, reasoned discussion. This is even the case if we assume that both are completely devoted to the “mission” of the company and know each other (as well as such things can be known) to be sincere in their desire to do things properly.

Liberalism might be seen as an attempt to stall this dialectic by internalizing it within the economy, producing a pseudo-dialectic between expanded production and expanded consumption. This also cannot create anything new. But if we see the adherence to the model of the originary scene as itself a product of struggles between hierarchs seeking to efface their descent from the Big Man, we can set the dialectic in motion again. The logical endpoint of victimocratization would be the direct branding, like with sports stadiums, of groups demanding absolute, genuflecting respect from anyone marginally more normal than them by corporations defending their fiefdoms within the global distribution process.

In the modern world, there are centers backing these with which we are in direct contact: corporations, media, the state. These larger centers support the local ones, or encourage us to resist them, or some complicated combination of both that individuals need to figure out. The local centers, meanwhile, may support or subvert each other—the cool kid implicitly or explicitly encourages us to defy our parents and teachers. And, of course, the power of the cool kid might be enforced by entertainment media while the authority of parents might be reinforced by the state. Whatever goes into making up individuals will be the “processing” of all these articulated centers in tension with each other within a more or less stable and dynamic structure of desires, resentments and imperatives.

Needless to say, I continue to consider this concept essential and unimpeachable. But I formulated it before I had thought through sufficiently the consequences of installing, so to speak, the concept of sovereignty at the heart of absolutist theory. The concept is itself ultimately a liberal one, assuming a “natural” condition of violence among abstract individuals that can only be quelled by a sovereign with direct power over each individual. It is better to see ruling as helping to maintain and enhance the peace preserved throughout the social order by its various corporate powers and governors. I have come to use the term “central authority” rather than sovereign, and so I will now speak in terms of a “central imaginary.”

It still needs to be explained, though, how those agents interested in more direct state power over the individual go about mobilizing the masses they need, or, for that matter, why they want this centralization. Regarding the latter, there might be all kinds of reasons: corporations want to open up markets, which might require breaking up local monopolies and regulatory and tax regimes; for those within the state apparatus itself, it might be felt necessary for making uniform rules of operation across the country, and eliminating various logjams created by the diverse and often confused local prerogatives. In each case, some kind of resentment towards central authority is involved, ultimately for not being central and authoritative enough, as proven by the fact that one can challenge, revise and circumvent it in these very ways.

The Axial Age acquisitions made it increasingly difficult to levy these vast, sacrificial, masses. So, in the European middle ages, while there was steady technical development, and some remarkable feats of engineering and architecture, such development never exceeded the limits set by existing corporate and authority relations. The masses confronted in the New World and, especially, those flowing into the cities from the farmers enclosed out of their land must have ignited a new technological imagination. For quite a while, the development of machinery seemed to track pretty closely intensifications in the division of labor, with each laborer being given increasingly simpler tasks within an increasingly complex process.

So, to take just one example, it seems to me that, preferable to Missouri Senator Hawley’s bill that would require the Big Tech firms to be certified as “neutral” by the government so as to retain their designation as service providers rather than publishers (which would make them liable to libel lawsuits) it might be better to simply change the designation and have the DOJ initiate or support a wave of lawsuits so that the conversations, texts, emails, love affairs, etc., of the petty bureaucrats doing the banning and de-platforming within those companies can all be brought to light. The elites need to be shown, and they need to be seen to be shown: these are the people you have running things, deciding on information to be available to the public and peoples’ livelihoods.

Indeed, in selecting other Jews, they could simply be selecting those exhibiting greater capacity for deferral. At the other extreme would be the possibility that Jews have figured out some mechanism for controlling the institution against the best interests of the institution itself--just like a group of Wall St. traders could leverage the funds to take over a company, sell off all its assets, make a fortune and leave the company an empty husk. In this case, the Jews could only be running the universities into the ground, or making it profoundly dysfunctional in some way. This kind of power can't last for long--even if what counts for a "long" time for an institution with so much social investment as the universities is not easy to say.

We're at the point where even small cases have the potential of putting liberalism as a whole on trial. But think about the kind of institutions of the Right that would be needed to sustain such an effort. In a sense, what the Federalist Society in the US did is a kind of model here--they genuinely transformed the legal profession, and are the reason there are justices like Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, etc., for Republican presidents to put on the Supreme Court. But this is a very specialized arena where big businesses have very precise interests that can be defended by traditional "constitutionalism." Doing something analogous in medicine, psychology, education, etc., would be a massively larger project.

Hopefully, we'll get more people with business knowledge and experience interested in what we're doing and they'll help us out with the specifics. (Maybe you're one of those people,) Or maybe a new journal will come along that's interested in these questions--I thought that might be *American Affairs* for awhile, but they seem to have gotten interested in other things. As a theorist, I'm content to have the question, and to know what kind of a question is for us. That allows for a kind of dialectic with liberal economics, and we'll learn from that. It also provides an opening to address something liberal economic really can't: what would be possible in a well-ordered society, in which adherence to the center is a given, that wouldn't be possible in more centrifugal settings? Social order and de-pathologization must count for something, economically.

The corporate congregants permeate the social order, bringing their more specialized inquiry into the originary-within-the-sovereign to bear on other areas of life. The missionary or evangelical goes out among men, preaching the word, living the word, and doing so, as much as possible, within the lives and languages of those amongst whom he moves. The undercover police agent represents the law within the lawless, and must pass as the lawless, while never forgetting their loyalty to the law, lower and higher, and their other law-preserving brethren. In both cases we have the enactment of the tension between the lower and higher, but the undercover agent is the better example for us now because it is impossible for that police officer, as long as he remains honest, to do anything other than serve the sovereign.

If such practices are being endorsed, wittingly or not, by the sovereign, you can only stand as an example against it—not as a counter-power, because your very centrality in this case depends upon you eschewing any higher order centrality, which could only introduce interference into your scene. Once the higher law is made immanent to, constitutive of, constrained by, sovereign law, all the imperium in imperio problems invented by liberalism disappear. In assessing institutions and judging actors, we always look to the corporate congregants in those institutions—if we watch and listen to them, we will learn what is going on and what needs to be done.

I’m suggesting that the high-low vs. the middle scenarios available to the elites now have their limits. Let’s say that the major corporations and foundations keep funneling money into BLM, Antifa, various pussyhat movements, the next iteration of Occupy Wall Street, violent environmentalists, etc. They have to do this because simply giving money to media outlets and politicians to try and get people to vote for more power for the left is insufficient—if it’s just a question of getting the middle to passively support the low with its votes, why should they bother, regardless of how much you harangue them? You need an army, however rag-tag, to engage in actual confrontations that will extract concessions—i.e., you need blackmail leverage.

How to replace a liberal democratic regime with an absolutist one? We’re clearly not thinking in terms of a revolution, which would replace the liberal democratic regime with an even more radically democratic one. There might be elements of regime change similar to military coups, but military regimes don’t really change anything—they’re just placeholders until the powerful and propertied can get their act together and re-establish some mixed authoritarian/liberal regime. Some portion of the “high” (the corporate elite, the top military brass, perhaps presidents of universities and heads of other institutions) would have to break from the high-low vs. the middle action and work on preserving the middle against the high-low coalition.

I’ve pointed out before that words like “sexism,” “racism” and “homophobia” don’t really mean anything—no one could give you a clear definition of any of them; indeed, they’re not meant to be defined, they are “always already” weaponized. The meaning of “racism” is that you use the term to identify “racists.” But this is because “racism” is the ideological expression of anti-discrimination law. Once you have laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, you need a concept like “racism” so that you know who to punish for breaking the law. Paradoxes abound here. Once “discrimination” is against the law, no one will ever admit they are discriminating—so, if we have some employer who doesn’t want to hire blacks, he’ll just tell prospective black employees that they’re not qualified enough, or they don’t fit into the company’s culture; or he’ll fire them quickly for being lazy or insubordinate.

The first is transnational corporate interests, which use economic power to blackmail and bribe politicians and impose policies on individual states and aim at breaking up coherent nations: i.e., globalism (supported by conservatives). The second is forms of political power that leverage the instruments of destabilization built into liberalism, such as equal rights, human rights, and judicial delay, the media, the academy (“civil society”) to short-circuit commands on their way to implementation: i.e., the political left. The third is insubordination within the state itself, within the vast extent of its permanent institutions, whose members outlast any particular government and therefore (quite reasonably) feel their expertise and long-term responsibility should override any “irresponsible” short-term, politically motivated, incompetent decisions made by mere elected officials: i.e., the “deep state,” or the “swamp.”

Without powerful allies within the state apparatus, corporate and civil society defectors would be powerless. So, the entire problem, hypothetically at least, can be reduced to establishing a clear chain of command within those apparatuses, which also means expelling the traitorous elements. Easier said than done, but saying it is the first step towards doing it, and this is where I do think Trump is focusing his efforts. One way, for example, both corporate and leftist interests are “laundered” through the state is via the “leak” system uniting insubordinate state agents and media operatives (and through them the Democrat party and left more generally).

In a ritualistic culture, one cannot be a fraud—one fulfills or violates what is required. Before we can speak of fraud, we have to have disciplines. Someone purporting to be a doctor, lawyer, banker, investor, soldier, teacher, etc., can be a fraud. All these professions are products of literacy (even soldiers who can’t read and write are part of a literate culture, which makes their discipline and method possible). The authenticity of one’s professionalism, or participation in a discipline, then, depends upon one’s relation to the metalinguistics of literacy. To review: writing, presenting itself as reported speech, supplements the elements of the speech act that are lexically inaccessible (tone, body language, etc.).

So, that’s going to be one vector of algorithmism. The question for the algorithms constructed by the social media companies, though, is a bit different—they want to keep you within their system, and the way to do that is to make the system consistent on the terms on which you enter it. Even when we’re obsessed with buying things, we don’t really see ourselves as “consumers”—rather, we see ourselves as interested in certain things—sports, and specific kinds of sports, specific discussions about sports; books and intellectual “ideas” and “topics,” and specific discussions within these spheres; family, friends, members of our social group; and so on. The social media company wants to help us find our way from something we are interested in to something we might be interested in, and out of that network can be carved various consumer profiles useful to other companies.

Even when an institution or organization deliberately goes out of its way to break up established networks by, for example, pursuing “diversity hires,” that just means that either the institution has embarked on a path of self-destruction or the network will take on some new form, drawing upon other, emergent networks—perhaps this helps to account for the politicization of so many corporations.

In fact, the recent discovery that the major media companies manipulate their algorithms so as to hide and marginalize thinking considered heretical by state liberalism, provides a perfect example. Now, there’s no doubt that Google, Facebook and Twitter have become the media arms of Antifa; that’s not the issue. The issue is the assumption that algorithms can be neutral, constructed without assumptions regarding a hierarchy of importance concerning ideas, events, agents, and so on. When someone searches “Trump” what should they find? The documents that mention his name the most times? The most recent documents? The documents that mention his name and are on sites that are otherwise the most searched in general? The documents that have received the most hits (partisans could hire illegal aliens to sit and click on the preferred sites all day long)? Some combination of all of the above (and a dozen other criteria we could easily devise)? Which combination?

And I contribute to the ruination of the society I live in, diverting the resources of the state into expensive quagmires, where it ends up at war with many of its own citizens. Here, then, we have a model of a clearly anti-social market, from which existing markets will differ to some extent in degree and kind. If I prefer to sell something other than heroin, even if doing so yields me much lower profits, and even if I could insulate myself from the legal liabilities of the drug trade, then this is a choice any individual or firm could make in less extreme situations.

Or, if your company’s brand is that you don’t skimp on brick, then those who agree with you regarding housebuilding priorities will hire you. It may very well be that not enough people consider top-notch brick to be more important than the most up-to-date windows, and you will have to change your brand, accept a smaller market niche, or take up another profession. There will be all kinds of “interfaces” where the market rules in the sense a liberal economist means. It may be that majority, even the vast majority, of transactions take place at such interfaces.

She was a hostage, even if this didn’t become explicit until she was dishonored. Post-honor teams consider their members irreplaceable because the team performs some essential function, but no team, and certainly no team of teams, i.e., no government, can ever be once and for all post-honor (and irreplaceability in functional terms is always relative and diminishing). Why is it an issue when a single American is held hostage by some terrorist group, when 50,000 people, or however many, are killed in automobile accidents every year, etc.? Because the investment in redeeming the hostage is a marker of the coherence of the team.

In the end, “academic” is given a new meaning. In hostage-taking terms, what happens here, at least in the initial stages, is that the activist/entrepreneur takes some member of the team hostage, while simultaneously offering herself up as a hostage. The team member (who has been “critiqued”) can be demoted in some way, while the entrant can be expelled. It’s a long game, a trial and error process—over time, if the game is played right, enough prominent team members get demoted and enough entryists are redeemed. At a certain point the entryists are in, and can dispense with the pretense of playing by the old rules, at least for internal transactions—for external messaging, it might be necessary to keep up the pretense indefinitely.

The very impracticality of this proposal makes it very useful as a thought experiment. The media and bankers “possess” the power they do in part because they are not officially sanctioned—being labeled the official state media would be the kiss of death for any media institution, even if we all know that that is pretty much what the major media institutions have been, almost explicitly so for the past 8 years. The same would be true for banks, universities, corporations, and so on. The power exercised by these institutions is, in fact, in flux, and therefore difficult to “entitle,” because they in turn delegate power to those they depend on (in the end, we can choose whether to read the Times or the Post, we can bank at a small credit union or buy gold, we can go to the state university rather than Harvard, etc.), which also means that in the end power does reside on some kind of genuine authority and excellence and Harvard can degrade its brand for only so long before its graduates no longer get the highest paying jobs in the most prestigious institutions and therefore people stop applying to go there. And officially designating these institutions as “official” would, under present conditions, accelerate the process of decline by encouraging complacency and arrogance.

The media keeps an eye on the politicians and corporations, the government keeps an eye on the corporations and “usurpers” within other institutions, the schools teach you to be suspicious of everyone except for those telling you to be suspicious, the corporations liberate you from your confinements. None of them can be held accountable, except in the most indirect ways, with the seeming exception of the politicians—but even they have figured out a way of evading accountability by rotating out of official power into unofficial power as lobbyists and corporate executives. There are a lot of checks, but the only balance could come from a commitment to reciprocal relations within constrained institutions, and such commitment is discouraged by the ongoing subversion that meets the short-term interests of liberal institutions.

And if they can’t, that is just a sign that they have lost their power, and another institution will surely fill the vacuum. We already have long and more or less coherent set of rules for banks, universities, corporations, government, and so on, for their interactions with its clients or customers and between the institution and others. Consider various ways of breaking those rules to the advantage of those subject to the institution, along with the likely consequences of doing so, and you will have a measure of the power of the institution.

We could break down, as in libertarian accounts of the making of pencils, any activity into innumerable miniscule acts carried out in oblivion to each other; but we can just as easily find, in every activity, someone who took a risk others avoided, or found a new way out of failure—and we can imagine that human resentment wants to incorporate such instances into a broader mythology of inevitability, or historical laws—to reduce what is different to a fraud practiced upon our sameness.

It is these little models of sovereignty where the real traditions are embodied. The monopolies will also monopolize knowledge and lore transmitted from the past. What makes a tradition a tradition is that the final reason for doing something is that this is the way it is done. But whatever we do, we get to that point. The adherent to “pure reason” ultimately ends up defending a particular version of reason because, well, that’s what reason is, and you’re unreasonable if you doubt it. In the end, you can only define so many words in terms of other words before you get to a point where you just have to say, “well, that’s what the word means.”

The problem is in the original move of purporting to identify a gap in the attentional economy of the sovereign and substituting one’s own attention for the sovereign—rather than further anthropomorphizing the sovereign and attributing to him an intention drawn from reserves inaccessible to us. In the latter case we would think better, less clouded by resentment, and draw upon the reserves of our tradition to better correspond to the apparent distribution of sovereign attention. We can recognize the avatars of divided power in their attacks on disciplines and their monopolies, on traditions, in the claim to possess some power “beyond” or “underneath” disciplines, and to be independent of tradition.

If a development company comes to bulldoze the block and put up a series of high rises, it doesn’t need any of that—it can all be designed in an office half-way across the country, or world. There’s some difference here, and it has something to do with power. Here’s a radical (radically reactionary) claim: all mass production is part of a high-low alliance against the middle, and works toward the subversion of secure central power. In that case, either reaction and absolutism are hopeless, utopian projects; or, all the more necessary, if far more difficult than imagined. I’m not making that claim, but I’m not dismissing it, either—at the very least, I would want an account of mass production that can reconcile it with an absolutist hierarchy of power.

Now, how do all these corporations and foundations know whom they should give their money to? How, for that matter, do the Koch brothers, or the Mercers, know? They must hire the people who are holding auditions and doing the casting. How do they know whom to hire? That’s what the universities, media and think tanks are for. It’s helpful to keep in mind that these people get it wrong all the time, when they are funding terrorist groups that turn their weapons against their original supporters, when they dump hundreds of millions into a presidential “war chest” for a lemon of a candidate, and, no doubt, when they invest in this or activist group or human rights or anti-war organization—or an academic or artistic trend.

Friends can engage in reciprocity with each other without any explicit hierarchy, but here we’re talking about a gift economy with all kinds of implicit hierarchies. I wouldn’t deny all reciprocity to market exchanges (overwhelmingly between gigantic corporations and individuals), but this kind of reciprocity is minimal and, as we can see, hardly sufficient to stake a social order on. Language makes it possible for us to all participate in social order, but inclusive participation is also not equality, nor is recognition or acknowledgement. In other words, morality (recognition, acknowledgement, reciprocity), yes; equality, no.

Thinking in originary anthropological terms, we can recognize here the human appropriation of the sacred center, executed first of all by the Big Man but then institutionalized in ritual terms. The Big Man is like the founding genius or entrepreneur, while the sacred king is the inheritor of the Big Man’s labors, enabled and hedged in by myriad rules and expectations. The Big Man, we can assume, could still be replaced by a more effective Big Man, within the gift economy and tribal polity. Once the center has been humanly occupied, it must remain humanly occupied, while ongoing clarification regarding the mode of occupation would be determined by the needs of deferring new forms of potential violence.

Blackmailing corporations and other large institutions, along with infiltrating the permanent state (which ensures the blackmailing will work), pretty much defines the left at this point. No one is more calculating and exchange oriented than they are. And those on the left who wish to return to class, economic inequality and socialist transformation are completely unwilling to challenge the splintering of the leftist project along identity lines.

So, you look for dissenters to fund—those who challenge the “complacency” of the majority, and create “real” democracy, individualism and all the rest. There is a felt need for full spectrum dissension—it’s like those activists (in favor of what, exactly, I’m not sure) who complain about uncontested legislative seats and won’t be satisfied until every election is 51-49%, with every community effectively polarized around every issue. Those who feel this need most strongly are the “forward looking” elites, those enhancing their power by distinguishing themselves from the “entrenched,” backward looking elites. And, of course, it makes sense that if you see your growing, spreading enterprise as requiring a more receptive sphere of circulation and consumption, you will see society in general as in need of being “opened up.”

This erosion is furthered by the capacity, within the one medium, to modify and mix different products of different media—Gans alludes to the implications of this capacity indirectly by discussing an effort at UCLA to impose a licensing agreement on university journals allowing “users of those materials, once the original source is referenced, to ‘tweak, remix, and build upon’ the materials they contain.” It’s easy enough to imagine what might be done by integrating text or “performances” of scholarly articles into music videos—just remember that Hayek vs. Keynes rap contest that was current a couple of years ago. Gans also points out the fragility of the medium, based as it is upon advertising revenue and, even more importantly, like all markets, “on political systems, with peace enforced by arms.”

The internet and social media have accelerated the process by creating, as Gans pointed out not too long ago, a new and devastatingly effective mode of scapegoating; at the same time, the absolute binaries generated by victimary politics are fodder for the creation of new algorithms, which is the manifestation of power by the internet monopolies. Developing an algorithm for identifying “white supremacist” websites, blogs, videos, etc., is precisely the kind of task Silicon Valley is prepared for. You need input from organizations like the SPLC and ADL—they will help you develop keywords, phrases, verbal patterns and other markers to look for.

Whether an authoritarian system (but why not “autocratic,” or “absolutist,” since China seems to be closing in on that, and that was the very point of Gans’s discussion leading up to this question?) can generate greater political efficiency is an excellent way to formulate the question, but why presuppose the diminishment of economic efficiency? The reason Gans gives here seems especially weak—it would be very interesting to find a way to compare the collective “morale” of China with Western Europe or the US, and I don’t think anyone would be all that surprised to see the former outperforming the latter in this field. It would seem odd to assume that political efficiency must somehow be at odds with economic efficiency—don’t businesses, scientists and engineers prefer a stable social environment?

Sovereignty is incompatible with democracy, but contemporary politics often make the most ardent advocates of majority rule the most insistent upon a reclaiming of sovereignty. This is most obviously the case in the US, where Trump was, if we sum up his central commitments (anti-immigration, anti-free trade, pro-swamp draining, America First) the candidate of both the restoration of American sovereignty and the redirection of government to the service and control of the American people. The apparent convergence of sovereignty and straightforward majority rule derives from the formidable opponents they share: transnational corporations with economic interests in the ability to move facilities around the world at will; corporations and activists who benefit from the continual migration of masses of Third Worlders; transnational progressives and foundations who find it more efficient to work through institutions less responsive to popular will, like the judiciary, the media and government bureaucracies.

Shaked may mean “destination” in a weaker sense: if the government, say, decides to partner with an energy company to explore off-shore oil reserves (the very issue that is forefront in Shaked’s mind in her polemic against the Supreme Court) no higher authority should be able to disallow or “derail” that “trip.” But if that’s the only kind of “destination” the government is allowed to set, if it cannot, for example, set itself the task of suppressing de-moralizing cultural tendencies, or establishing harmonious terms of interaction between the country’s different ethnic groups, wouldn’t that make it nothing more than a “contractor,” because other forces will then be setting the agenda in those areas, and the government will have nothing more to do than “lay the rails” where they say. Indeed, this question raises itself forcefully in the one area where Shaked lapses into a tentativeness uncharacteristic of the rest of the essay (and, indeed, Shaked’s political persona): Israel’s Jewishness.

Economic productivity used to require a certain degree of cultural solidarity: bosses, managers and workers needed forms of extended cooperation; the educational and entertainment system had to enforce standardized cultural norms, so as to sustain cross generationally the models of behavior required for an advanced workforce and citizenry. Meanwhile, I just googled to discover the number of Google employees: 72, 053. (A much diminished Ford Motor Company still has 201,000.) The only cultural solidarity needed there is that of the graduates of the top dozen or so universities in the US, perhaps the world. As Gans notes, these elite workers will be able to produce substitutes for the satisfactions previously offered as inducements to participate in cultural reproduction: instead of a wife, increasingly realistic sex bots (will women want these as well?). Soon enough, people will forget what “wives” were. The often cited Morlock vs. Eloi dichotomy is being realized. What to do with all that surplus population?

Perhaps this too is a high-low vs the middle strategy, with God about as high as one can go, and the realization of justice on earth an open-ended project that can never be considered defeated once and for all. The development of writing from its origins as a bookkeeping device to the broader purposes of cultural transmission also follows the trajectory of the establishment of those empires, with alphabetic writing in particular—writing based on the analysis of speech down to the most elementary individual sounds—making available to the “low” (the general population, or much of it) a technology previously controlled exclusively by the specialized scribes of the empire, who monopolized the very intricate technique of hieroglyphic or syllabic writing.

If investing in the institutional forms needed to create more people like this is what we mean by “individualism,” then as an absolutist I’m in favor of it. (And this is not even to address the necessity of small, independent teams in scientific and technological innovation.)

These reflections were inspired, in part, by Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State: A Study in the Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX . Jones seeks (successfully, as far as I can see) to show that the French kingdom under St. Louis recognized neither a “separation of Church and State,” and therefore no conflict between them, nor “sovereignty,” in the sense of a single source of power and a legitimate monopoly on violence. What the sacramental kingdom did recognize is the “business of the peace and the faith,” a business carried on collaboratively by all the power centers of society. Categories like “heresy” and “rebellion” pointed to a single nexus of social unrest that needed to be bound up with the peace and faith of the realm.

Yes, I accept your restatement of my argument. The statement "the Supreme Court decided...." is fine for some purposes--if you're reading a newspaper, you don't need to know that Sottomayer deferred to Breyer's authority and wisdom 4 hours into the deliberations, etc., so, it's not quite as meaningless as "green ideas sleep furiously"--corporate bodies have a reality of their own. But there are nine individuals there, so obviously something else happened. Now, we could further develop the analysis by saying that the second most eminent "decided" not to resist the decision of the most eminent (which is to say he refrained--decided to refrain--from attempting what would have been the equivalent of a coup) and the third did the same regarding the second and so on down the line.

Now, if we follow through on this notion of the "little absolutisms," in trying to secure power, which I see as securing or clarifying sovereignty, the "middle" the absolutist would rely on would be all those in favor of such absolutisms in social institutions. Absolutism would restore all them in restoring itself. Schools that want to prepare students for entrance into professions and disciplines, universities that are interested in inquiry, businesses interested in providing a good product and providing for their workforce, police interested in maintaining law and order, etc. The perversion of all those institutions means that restoration might require establishing dictatorships in many of them--giving a few "real" professors charge over the university, for example.

The anarchist always targets a specific institution--a business, law enforcement, a university. In each case, there has to be a command structure, however corrupted or degraded--something makes a university a university and not a PR firm. In defending a command structure, you are defending it as well, maybe even more, against the forces within as those without. So you're right that it may be more a virtual than actual command structure--still, if the institution persists, there must be some actuality.

It may be the case that the US could never have won WWII (much less become the post-War leader of the “Free World”) without those tens of millions of immigrants (but perhaps they wouldn’t have had to fight it?—that is, we’d have to imagine an alternative history to assess these hypotheses). But it’s interesting that all of these pro-immigrant arguments come from the standpoint of the elites—the tycoons, the corporations, the politicians (and their academic and journalistic hanger-ons) who want a globe-spanning empire. (Has there ever been a majority of the American people in favor of immigration? We probably can’t answer that question but there are good reasons to doubt it—the restrictionist arguments all seem to come from the middle class.)

And you will then find—and I suspect conservative politicians and pundits recognize this intuitively—that, aside from simply ensuring every American citizen the right to vote, nothing from that inheritance is worth preserving—not the body of law, and not the anti-prejudice, anti-discrimination, blank slatist ideologies that have come to protect that body of law. Once you say that businesses can’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, etc., you must then answer the question: since, once it’s illegal, no one will tell us that they are discriminating, how can we tell? You can either sort through the minutiae of each individual case, with all the local and personal idiosyncrasies each case drags along with it, or you can simplify things by just saying that if 20% of the population in a specific area belongs to a specific group, if you have only 10% of that group among your employees, the burden will be upon you to prove that you are not discriminating. The choice will be very easy to make.

Furthermore, nationalism transcends while incorporating the tribal. At the very least, nationalism entails the free movement of all nationals through the national territory, and the free adoption of any profession by all. In other words, nationalism presupposes at least a minimal market, and that that market is protected from the imperatives of tribal honor. Insofar as the nation remains, at least to some extent, a nation of tribes, but also of cities, towns and neighborhoods, various forms of local patriotisms will ensure resistance to premature or abusive attempts to establish, preserve or restore national unity from some national center.

But the sidelining of the “productive” or industrial working class is a side effect of much larger developments—if the workers have been shunted aside by the investors and ignored by the salaried, it must be because they were neither particularly indispensable nor a force to be reckoned with in the first place. The overall trajectory of Western capitalism is towards fewer and fewer people producing for more and more people. I have recently seen the proposal for free education made (by whom, I can’t remember—maybe all the way back to Mc Luhan?) on the basis of the following calculation: if you send a thousand children to school for free it will pay for itself because at least one of those thousand children will create something that will support the other 999.

Well, one might say that other countries won’t reciprocate—but, according to free trade orthodoxy, they’re just hurting themselves, and should be left to their own devices. But we do enter these enormously complex agreements, negotiated with dozens of countries over many years, so those negotiating in our name must be trying to get something out of it—what? Is it so unreasonable to assume that they have the interests of global corporations, along with the pet environmental and immigration (among other) concerns of the participating politicians, or even, perhaps, abstractions like “the stability of the global market” uppermost in their mind, rather than the living standards of American workers?

Most of those preferences are incoherent, anyway—how is any president, even in conjunction with a sympathetic or compliant congress, going to “bring manufacturing jobs back to America”? Any attempt to keep American companies in the US, or to encourage foreign companies to come here will get mired in even deeper layers of cronyism, incompetence and inefficiency (along with further infringements on the rights of small businesses and independent contractors) than is already considered intolerable by those in revolt against the “establishment.” Also, for decades it has been recognized that the line between American and foreign, when it comes to companies and consumer goods, has become irremediably blurred: is it more patriotic to buy a Toyota built in Tennessee or a Ford built in Mexico?

This asymmetry expands to grotesque lengths, investing new but sharply restricted ethical possibilities in astonishingly brutal social orders (mass slavery and extermination, human sacrifice). The invention of the God whose name is the declarative sentence begins the long reversal of this process, by directing resentment towards the Big Man and Big Man tendencies in everyone. Responsibility again devolves upon everyone, but it is a responsibility both enhanced and truncated: enhanced, because a far wider range of human intentions can now be comprehended and therefore demand recognition (while inspiring caution); truncated, because the resentment toward the Big Man (in all of us) locates morality in the consumer’s desire of the vast majority, leading to the stigmatization of the producer’s desire that is more necessary than ever for the consumer’s desire to be satisfied.

As far as I know, American society is the only one that has been able to fully value the “producer,” or entrepreneur (where else can billionaires become folk heroes?), and even that idealization is always tenuous, in competition with perhaps more powerful resentments than are found elsewhere as well. This dynamic, perhaps at one time a source of creative tension, has become sterile.

The enemies he attracts, then, are those interested in de-escalating conflicts with other countries (but, also, with others within this country who gravitate toward a transnational economic, political, and/or cultural sphere of activity) but, paradoxically, are willing to be drawn into an escalating antagonism with Trump himself. If my analysis is right, we can expect a kind of stabilization of the Trump phenomenon (assuming his continued success) as those heavily dependent upon transnational progressivism or transnational corporatism and/or finance line up against him with ever more intense paroxysms of denunciation while those more flexible in their affiliations and commitments find ways of coming to terms—either Trump will be swept away by the opposition or we will, as Gans suggests, find ourselves in a new, more unpredictable era as responsible agencies (e.g., corporations and other states) come to the table, and conflicts become more explicit but maybe also more manageable and transparent.

The alt-right is, as much as it is anything, a call to arms in defense of nationalism against globalism—or, more specifically, the “global elite,” the network of corporate executives, media owners, bankers, politicians, and others who form consensus and strategize through Davos and other formal and informal global institutions. The globalists seek to reduce the world to a single economic and political unit, and whatever their own country of origin, citizenship or residency, refuse to privilege the interests of one nation over any other. If this is indeed the aim and outlook of the global elites, it’s easy to see that, barring a rather extraordinary, even miraculous, success in creating a harmonic convergence of some very divergent interests, such a project dooms the elite to, in the end, become the enemy of all nations. A very formidable enemy, to be sure.

It is a levying of the mob for imperial ends, and a very effective way of creating a terrorized, and therefore pliable, workforce. Even more than the rapidly accumulating economic and safety regulations, “anti-discrimination” (i.e., victimary) rules make it extremely difficult for small businesses and individual contractors to survive on the market: a single lawsuit can destroy years of work. All this means that anti-victimary and anti-imperial politics are one and the same now.

Well, first of all direct opposition at all the international organizations—fire away indiscriminately at NATO, the UN, the EU, SEATO, the World Bank, the IMF, plus a half a dozen others that must be out there that I know nothing about. Oppose, unconditionally, all trade agreements, which are nothing more than a slicing up of the world for the benefits of the corporations. It would be better to just have tariffs tied directly to the tariffs other countries set for us. Start with 10% tariffs for all, and if a country sets a 15% tariff for us, raise it for them; if a country sets its tariff at 5%, lower it. At least everything will be transparent that way, which at this point is more important than efficiencies (not that I concede that the current approach maximizes efficiencies).

At an earlier point in the emergence of victimary politics, the shepherds of major institutions (corporations, universities, the military, etc.) must have resisted this new, destabilizing political agenda. At some point, though, they realized they could harness it for their own purposes, as a way of waging war against the middle, atomizing them, terrorizing them, devaluing them, reducing them to replaceable parts in a global economic machine. It was probably at that point that the coinage of new terms for anathematizing the normal began to accelerate. It is much easier for the “high” to manage a world of “lows” without a middle, as a flourishing middle class is always a problem for tyrannical governments.

What should we do about resentment? Is there some non-resentful position from which we can ask that question? Interestingly, there may be: among the hundred or so flowers blooming on the right these days, one of them, represented by the blog Reactionary Futures and building upon the “ Unqualified Reservations ” of Mencius Moldbug, argues, very cogently, for a new kind of absolutism. The idea is that power divided ultimately leads to chaos: a single, undisputed locus of sovereignty is the only basis for social order. The models for this proposed order seem to be absolute monarchies and corporate CEOs. How to get there, and how to sustain it seem to me unanswered questions (the only answer I’ve seen so far seems to be “virtuous elites and rulers”), but this argument (predicated, how accurately I have not determined, on the thinking of Thomas Carlyle and Bernard De Jouvenel) takes into account (explicitly) Rene Girard’s understanding of the unlimited, envious, rivalrous desire constitutive of the human.

The politician is clothed in the dignity of the office, the manager embodies the accumulated capital and knowledge present in the enterprise, the mediocre academic plays by the rules of and takes on a patina of the prestige of, an institution that has been a home for geniuses and site of discoveries and innovations—in which case, power is conveyed by a tacit reference to the founding and maintenance of the institution, which did require degrees of discipline well beyond the capacity of the average individual. The same people who ordinarily obey figures legitimated by past discipline (but also by the disciplinary demands, iterating the demands met in the original founding, required to enter and remain within the institution) can be brought to rebel against them, to follow a new form of power, by a new display of discipline, whether it take the form of exposing what has been hidden by those institutions, including their “mythical” foundings, or by a claim to hew more closely to that founding, or even by a simple show of insolence towards authority figures you yourself would never have considered challenging.

The power and relevance of this framework is pretty obvious, but the reasons for it, and the best way of accounting for it, is not immediately clear. Why would the “highs” (the billionaires, the corporations, Wall Street, the media) prefer an alliance with the lows rather than the middle? On the surface, it looks like the SJWs are driving the agenda—the corporations seem to be scrambling to figure out how to avoid boycotts and protests—but the theory of the high-low alliance complicates this picture considerably. Indeed, Reactionary Futures argues, fairly convincingly I think, that the civil rights movement was not some spontaneous demand for justice, or an inevitable step in the path of social progress but, rather, instigated and funded by the foundations (the blogger makes a similar case for the leading intellectual movements of the later 20th century, from left to right—differences between which RF considers virtually irrelevant).

Anything that happens under the sovereign is overtly or tacitly approved by the sovereign—that might mean lots of laws, lots of police forces, lots of interventions in everyday life; or, it might mean a firm setting of general terms and unremitting enforcement of those terms—such things will depend upon the character of the people and the skill and intelligence of the sovereign. If your question is, why was this done, or left undone, the answer is: the sovereign. If foreigners are pouring over the border, that’s the sovereign’s decision—not “international human rights law” or “labor market imbalances”; if thousands of people are laid off in a small town, that’s the sovereign’s decision, not “the global market.”

I would add that the alt-right, in taking up the nationalist cause of (in particular) those working class whites displaced by the globalizing economy over the past 35 years ascribe this development to the self-interest of elites to an extent well beyond what the facts merit—there’s a bit of a stretching of the truth here as well. A lot of us remember the late 70s, when we had the national economies, strong labor unions, and relatively high wages for the white working class so many yearn for today, and if we remember it honestly we also remember how unsustainable it was. The unions priced the workers they represented out of business, the collaboration with unions and governments made the giant corporations increasingly inefficient and unprofitable, liberal urban policies (and liberal politicians were not only empowered, but made a single ruling party by default by the union-corporation-government troika) turned America’s cities into dystopian hell-holes.

Donald Trump might be able to compel/persuade Apple, say, to produce more of its products in the US, but there’s a good reason he doesn’t make that promise regarding any of the other companies listed in my parentheses, because they don’t (except for the declining Microsoft) don’t really produce much of anything at all in the traditional sense. There is a great deal of disruption here that cannot be blamed on anyone, even while, like any large-scale disruption, creating a huge vacuum that can only be filled with some kind of resentment. For things to have gone this wrong for so many people, someone must be stealing something big.

Protection from international corporate oppression: We support nationalist economies with a focus on local industry and small business.

This could very easily be the, or a, or part of a program that emerges from the Alt Right. This program clearly emphasizes the globalist/nationalist antagonism. The final demand, for “protection from international corporate oppression” is the one, I think, that really includes all the rest—it is both vague and comprehensive. All the evils of today’s society could really be traced back to “international corporate oppression,” as is evident from the very odd insistence on “protection from globalist pollution”—is the implication that nationalist industries wouldn’t pollute (why not?), or that we simply prefer nationalist to globalist pollution?

RF sees the Alt-Right “as a middle rebellion in the De Jouvenelian scheme,” a middle rebellion, presumably, to paraphrase Pirandello, in search of a High. But you can only attract a High patron by looking effective, which the Republican party and conservative movement haven’t for a very long time, so perhaps some billionaire backers who would like to see a restoration of Western order and have been hedging their bets will take this as an opportunity to get into the game. So, rather than asking, as does RF , “how exactly is this [VD’s stated goals] to be brought about,” we might ask, what can be done (and undone) with this [the movement itself]?

The Big Man is the beginning of history and of all our ethical and political dilemmas. The Big Man disciplines himself so as to accumulate and ultimately break the gift economy by placing himself beyond any possible reciprocity. But in the meantime, he must be managing rivals, cultivating alliances, discovering norms and founding institutions, even if in minimal ways: what is not allowed to others must be allowed to him, and so he finds ways of formulating and enforcing this new ethical realm—and, then, recognizing the new desires his own innovations have inspired in others, and which must be incorporated into his own praxis.

All of this, remember, is to figure out whom we are to obey and how, and the conclusion is appalling. To be absolutists, we must seek out officer positions in the Inquisition? In a way. How secure is the Inquisition, though? Its rules change constantly, and it doesn’t put forth a version or order that all of the upheavals it initiates are to issue in. Even if we link the Inquisition to “Globalism,” which is to say the continuing transfer of power from national to transnational entities, governmental and corporate, or “govcorp,” that is a result of our own induction and not anything the Inquisition itself is open and unambiguous about—and even the results of that induction are unclear—is the end point one world government?

The problem for the nationalists is that they haven’t won over the managerial class—not an easy task, as the managerial class has gone thoroughly globalist. Managerialism and globalism have been converging for decades—professionals of all kinds—academics, lawyers, doctors, executives, actual managers, etc., see themselves on a global stage and find nationalism embarrassing. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but I doubt that more than 20% of the managerial classes are really sympathetic to nationalism. And for good reason—they are more powerful, or in some cases imagine themselves more powerful, considered as global agents. Colleges actively promote, especially for the better and more ambitious students, various kinds of entrepreneurial/do gooder projects and internships abroad, the deeper into the Third World, the more embedded in transnational progressive authority, the better. Obviously there is plenty of money for such things.

Meanwhile, all those powers playing musical chairs are attributing responsibility to each other—the media blame the corporations, the corporations fund think tanks and media outlets that blame other corporate sectors, or the government bureaucracy, the political parties blame each other and each other’s constituencies; foreign powers, and of course, the Jews, get thrown into the mix. There may be more or less truth in any of these assessments, but no one is in any position to determine how much with any real certainty, in part because the precise power balances shift constantly. Ideology, then, is really the miasma of distributed powers all trying to ally themselves with some powers and oppose others, which means all share an interest in never allowing power to become settled, never allowing the center to be occupied.

Agamemnon’s value is testified to by the fact that Agamemnon initiated and sustained the project, and, perhaps, was the only one who could have done so, insofar as it was on behalf of his brother Menelaus, making him a highly motivated party while still not necessarily incurring the skepticism Menelaus himself might have as leader—assuming, of course, one sees the project as valuable one, or at least one worth concluding once started, or once a certain threshold of investment has been reached. So, one could say that Agamemnon is just as valuable to this project (if he were to be killed, could the Greek armies have been kept together?) as Achilles, maybe even more so, in which case we would have a clash of two values: skill or excellence in the primary activity, on the one hand, and initiative and organization in a collective project, on the other.

Beyond that, just as a king leading a conquering force would have to divvy up the rewards to those who have fought alongside him, the restoration of sovereignty would have to give existing institutions—universities, the media, corporations, and so on—to those who have been marginalized under the liberal order and helped fight back. That means that Trump’s addiction to tit-for-tat responses to all attacks, even the most trivial insults, is both his greatest flaw and the most perfect embodiment of the restorer, who will have to assure all his followers that every blow will be met with a commensurate counter-blow. And that all the victorious blows will be commemorated and institutionalized in the restored state.

The emphasis should be on suppressing lies and broadcasting truth, but questions of public safety and public morality will shape decision making as well. These companies promised so much, and betrayed it all, so few will weep when they are brought to heel.

But all of this means nothing without reactionaries undertaking their own long march through the institutions. Of course, alternative media and social media institutions will need to be built, and schools and (far more difficult) universities and businesses. But all this pales in importance compared to the real institutions of sovereignty: the military and police forces. The tops of these institutions are already highly politicized—Obama has carried out a Stalinesque purge of the top military brass, which now parrots his moronic talking point that climate change is our main national security concern, and we can see how the FBI has been coopted by the Democrats—while the ranks themselves remain right wing.

At any rate, any sovereign will want to replicate, to the extent possible, such prior investments in restoration in the restored sovereignty itself. Those who entered early and contributed significantly should only be excluded from the power structure for extremely compelling reasons. A large part of the attraction of a genuine sovereign, as things are falling apart, is the promise that people will be far more likely to get what they deserve—so, the foundational sovereign acts should exemplify that promise by giving those who ensured the restoration their due.

We could then see the imaginary sovereignties and anarchistic fantasies generated in the universities, media and corporate think tanks as auditions and job interviews for one elite faction or another, just as we can see activist groups as auditioning for the role of shock troops and street fighters for those same factions. But they can all audition effectively only under the condition that they think that the show is real, that they are making history. That’s not so hard, because in a sense they are, even if as tools rather than makers. Perhaps part of the point of determinist theories like Marxism is to reconcile its agents to being tools.

Just about every pick for his cabinet and staff so far seem aimed at providing him with a strong hand within the governmental and corporate institutions that most need to be de-weaponized. An Exxon CEO friendly to Russia; a Labor Secretary very knowledgeable of the way the EEOC keeps the illegal immigration scam going; an EPA head seemingly prepared to create a hostile environment for climate change fanatics; an Attorney General with a long history of insisting the immigration law be enforced to the letter—all, except for the women in somewhat marginal roles, seemingly “Alpha” males, like Trump himself, designed to trigger panic in SJWs.

The appetite belongs in the first place to the refugee importers, the so-called Voluntary Agencies, who get vast grants of federal money to aid them in their efforts, and who pay their executives grand salaries; and in the second place to Midwestern meatpacking and food-processing companies wanting cheap labor.

So, the arguments over “immigration policy” and “the New Jim Crow” are a bit beside the point—if we shut down Voluntary Agencies and restricted Kelloggs to the business of producing obese children, we wouldn’t have to talk about this stuff in the first place. (it’s probably needless to say, but the examples I’ve just mentioned are the tiniest of tips on the most gigantic of icebergs.) We would, though, have to start talking about shutting down a very wide range of completely “legitimate” and even highly esteemed forms of philanthropy, which would in many ways be an even more difficult “conversation.”

All people who won’t want to pay high taxes or be forced to provide their employees with expensive health insurance or exorbitant minimum wages. None of whom need to be particularly skilled in the use of computers—the digital in fact lowers the threshold of knowledge needed to use the latest technology. You don’t need to be a computer genius to set up a functioning, attractive, interactive website. But, also, none of whom have the slightest political representation, or immediate chance of getting it. The real political scandal is the union of the victimocracy and the corporate oligarchy, of the bio-politics of immigration (in the broadest sense of bringing to bear the needs and resentments of the Third World upon the politics of the First) with the digital politics of cool (the ever more granulated set of possible self-distinctions from the awkward, the stupid, the brute, the literalistic, the outdated, etc.). The Democratic Party relies upon this (very much transnational) union, and the Republicans, with very few exceptions, just want a piece of the action.

Any enthusiasm for the emergent entrepreneurs enabled by the digital should be tempered, of course. Part of the reason for their political impotence is the fact that they are a tiny minority who generate resentment when they achieve a certain level of success, join the victimocracy/oligarchy axis when they achieve yet more success and, anyway, are resented simply for receiving political attention when that actually happens. There are the other victims of the victimocracy/oligarchy: the privately employed, Church-going, married-with-children “middle class.” They have nominal political representation, since the Republicans depend on their votes, but no real representation.

I have been arguing in recent posts that the only possible anti-victimary politics today would involve setting aside all these modern concepts and debates and simply arguing for civilization against barbaric and savage recrudescence. Civilization does not require a notion of universal right, much less endless cynical and acrobatic reinterpretations of supposedly fundamental and self-evident rights. A politics of civilization can focus on the praxis of individuals constitutive of the institutions and practices to which all must habituate themselves. In a university you treat everyone as a scholar and teacher; in business you treat everyone as a competent practitioner of their specialty; in economic transactions you include your partners in a zone of trust constitutive of a voluntary exchange; in neighborhood you treat everyone as—a neighbor.

Inclusive Communities Project, Inc.) the Court ruled that racism is completely separate from racist deeds or intentions: “racism” is what the government uses to micro-manage communities as it sees fit. That regulators also get “captured” by the industries they regulate, and those industries in turn use the regulatory apparatus to build monopolies for themselves binds the big business community to the victimocracy and bureaucracy alike.

I suspect that most, if not all, of the political hopes of the present are not all that different than attempts to sell or buy “food insurance.” There is some part of the social order that one likes, and there are other parts one doesn’t like. The parts one likes are authentic, or progressive, grounded in something natural or in some law of history; the parts one doesn’t like are parasitic grafts on the whole implanted by some special interest at odds with the general interest. It’s not always or even, necessarily, often, wrong to speak in these terms: we can certainly distinguish between the core and peripheral, the healthy and the sick, in our institutions.

But Vox Day doesn’t seem particularly interested in the question of why all this works, and it does need to be explained—we don’t need an explanation for why saturation bombing and an invasion of hundreds of thousands of troops breaks the enemy’s will and leads to surrender; we do need an explanation for why everyone in a corporation cowers when a charge of “racism” or “sexism” is levied. (Of course, part of the explanation is simply that the government can exact a very heavy price for such transgressions, but not only does this just push the question back to another level [why do we comply with government rules that no one ever voted for?], it is far from always the case that complaints which are anxiously addressed rise to the threshold of legal action—the anxiety is more free floating than that.)

Libertarian theories can serve as a powerful “regulating ideal” on any new social order (it will always be helpful to ask “how would this be done if there were no government…”), but not only have 19th century Britain and America been the only societies even vaguely approximating a libertarian order, not only there is virtually no public support in any contemporary society for anything more than bits and pieces of one, but libertarians have the same problem of accounting for the boundary between civilization and its others, based as it is on the same liberal abstractions.

And disciplines give way to bureaucracy—a bureaucracy is nothing more than a discipline that must account for itself in relation to some public, or other disciplines—those of us in the academy might like to do nothing but inquire and teach, but we have to concern ourselves (our we have to siphon off resources to those who so concern themselves) with accreditation, student admission, maintenance of the grounds, federal anti-discrimination laws, etc.; the entrepreneur might just want to invent, innovate, and spread the results of his inventions and innovations, but he must deal with tax codes, employment law, all manner of federal regulation, etc.—in both cases a substantial bureaucratic exoskeleton is secreted.

Perhaps the above account exposes something of my own constitutive fantasy and violent imaginary. Even so, it seems to me that the relation between highly formalized, politicized and risk-averse bureaucracies on the one hand, and various “nomadic” figures (lone entrepreneurs, but also various “rogue” disciplines, artistic and political, that mock and subvert the bureaucracies from within) on the other, provides a more accurate accounting the contemporary socio-political field than the categories of liberal democracy (equality, voting, rights, freedom, etc.). To allude too briefly to Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle on the Cartesian iteration of the Hebraic Declarative Sentence-as-the-Name-of-God in the foundation of the modern internal scene of representation, the “self” seems to me to be this nomadic figure: if the “I” is because it thinks, the self is because it was, with each self-reference iterating and distancing the self from prior iterations.

But even if Picketty’s analysis, referenced by Gans, to the effect that today’s polarization is more representative of the trajectory of the market economy than the rough equality of the post-War years, is accurate, the two questions, distribution of wealth and distribution of recognition, can be delinked. It is not the emergence of billionaires that has destroyed “Fishtown,” or the “middle.” Even the much bemoaned decline in manual labor has been exaggerated—plumbers, roofers, contractors, carpenters and others employed in improving and fixing up can still make a very good living. In fact, there seem to be too few of them. Government enforced unionization destroyed Detroit, not the greed of the Big Three automakers. The welfare state’s assault on the family and victimary eruptions in the inner cities that crippled law enforcement and education destroyed wide swathes of black America (and ever larger pockets of white America), not the desire of corporations for cheaper labor overseas.

The welfare state isn’t a very good buy. The average Social Security benefit runs just over $1,100 a month—peanuts, hardly enough to keep you in cut-rate butter once your median rent of more than $800 has been paid. For that, you’re taxed 12 percent of your take- home pay. Compare that to this: A married couple, each earning the minimum wage, investing only 10 percent of their earnings at a modest 7 percent return, retires with an annual income of more than $100,000 a year—even if they never touch the $1.5 million principle they’ll leave to their children. President George W. Bush was mocked for calling his proposal to cultivate such minimum-wage millionaires the “Ownership Society,” but it was the most important initiative of his presidency.

But it might happen often enough regarding some of them—and it seems to me that such a community, so reliant upon the self-reliance of all its members, would have a very low tolerance for behaviors that strained the norms of the society. (I get the sense that some libertarians—perhaps the College Libertarian variety—believe that libertarianism means you can smoke a joint in the morning, visit a prostitute in the afternoon and go to a casino in the evening, without ever becoming a junkie, a pervert or a gambler. You might do all that, but the effects would be evident in your behavior, and no one would be obliged to give you a job, rent or sell you a home, provide you with security or insurance, or let you on their property.)

But given just as much in the sense of what has been given, that is, reality and everything in it as a gift. The two senses are really one—data is an array of gifts. A gift economy in the strict sense might spiral out of the egalitarian distribution on the originary scene, but it’s on the scene already in the form of the gift of life and peace given by the God object to the newly human community. When we divide amongst ourselves, we are merely dividing the gifts of God. When we give gifts, we are imitating God, when we accept gifts we are honoring God and freedom is really nothing more than the capacity to reject or accept any particular gift—just as language is, ultimately listening, sifting through a lot of noise and ordering the given, and then passing along, as faithfully as we can, what we have heard. Even the market economy can be conceptualized as a mere adjunct to the gift economy, as the entrepreneur first of all packages up his gifts for strangers, each of whom asymmetrically returns a bit of the gift of continued existence as a producer.

Indeed, though libertarians will dispute it, I consider it quite likely that commerce could only have expanded under the protection of empire and, even more, that modern science and technology could not have developed outside of the cosmological picture generated by the imperial incorporations of Christianity. Still, the distribution of responsibility between rulers and ruled has never been worked out, which is why war was transformed from an affair of monarchical and aristocratic elites, with restricted ends and carefully constructed rules (even if, of course, civilian populations in the way often suffered) to exterminatory assaults upon civilian targets (in World War II)—after all, from a democratic perspective, shouldn’t we hold the people responsible for the policies of their rulers (and even if the Nazis usurped power from the democratic state, the people must have been complicit in that usurpation, and hence still guilty) and assume that they can affect them?

This resentment is stoked in a paradoxical way: by continually ratcheting up the asymmetrical gift relation between rulers and ruled, which is to say by extending more and more government largesse. The people resentfully assert on this on the assumption that the rulers live at their expense and this is just payback; the rulers give it through partisan competition but also through fear, never far from the minds of the rich and the politicians during the long period of Communist global terror, and, going even further back, the roots of the civilizing empires in slavery and conquest, of popular uprisings or some kind of leftist or rightest putsch; even more, such largesse must be concealed under democratic forms so as to include the middle class—so, while our finances would probably be in better shape with straightforward redistributions from, say, the top 1/3 to the bottom 1/5, it becomes politically necessary to insist that the entitlement programs are really social “insurance” so that we only get back what we paid in.

For a while I have tried to figure out how to define Barack Obama politically. “Socialist” is not quite right—he and his party are much more likely to coopt corporations than to take over ownership (and responsibility) for them. But he’s not a typical European social democrat either—how could he be, given that he only barely includes the industrial working class as part of his coalition? He’s not a New Deal liberal, or even a Mc Governite either—he’s not just to the far left of particular American concerns like racial justice, individual liberty, civil rights, social welfare, etc.—he is too interested in seemingly odd cultural issues, like sticking it to the Catholic church, gay marriage and defending Mohammed from “defamation.”

So, is patatiquity sustainable? On the face of it (and both conservative and postmodern critics, with differing evaluations, agree here), patatiquity seems to herald an era of irresponsibility and carelessness we can ill afford—isn’t the Obama cult exemplary of patatiquity, with its investment in the sheer possibility of hope and change; isn’t endless debt, both personal and national, equally patatiquital (or, perhaps, continuing with the model of antiquity, “patacient”)? Maybe—that’s certainly one possibility. But it might also turn out that the most avid explorers and investors in possibility will insist on the kind of minimal reality that makes possibility possible: to take just one example, real money.

Very simple things, like acquiring the most useful skills, and saving as much money, or real wealth, as possible, would be preferred—you could always check the status of those things daily on the market. The future can be divined in signs of the present, while the firm fact that (real) money will always be useful allows for the future to be otherwise completely open, populated only be sheer possibility that one need barely adumbrate.

So, it’s better to keep electing Democrats, who at least might spread the largesse around. Even more: public employee unions have a monopoly within a monopoly—not only is there no competition for government provided services, not only does the government not have to worry about making a profit, but now the government can’t even exercise its power as monopolist to impose reasonable terms upon its workforce. And there’s even more… But you get the point.

It makes perfect sense, then, that progressive politics has always seen the incorporation of health care into the cradle to grave welfare system of the modern state as the jewel in the crown of the expert-centered organization of life central to such politics. The nationalization of health care makes state power potentially unlimited: not only directly medical issues, involving coverage, treatment, price of medical services, training of practitioners, research and innovation, etc., come directly within reach, but all questions indirectly bearing upon health do as well. And which questions don’t bear indirectly upon health? Whether it’s what parents tell their children about homosexuality, the hamburger you had for dinner, or the availability of birth control and, increasingly, social situations such as bullying, shyness, etc.—all affect health, all impose potential costs on the system, all sprout new forms of expertise and regulation. To use a medical metaphor, whether health care is centralized or decentralized is a life or death question for the free society.

Such a system could only work if a significant majority of the members of society could openly accept the basic unfairness of life chances and death. We would have to be able to look on, with equanimity, as insurance companies withdraw support from dying patients, including those we love and ultimately ourselves; as grown children decide that funding their children’s education is more important than a few more years of life for their own parents, etc. And, of course, such equanimity would have to coincide with an acute awareness of the unprecedented character of all this, including the heart-wrenching possibility that a few more years might have lessened or even eliminated your particular dilemma.

The individualization of the sickening, recovering and dying processes thus introduced will not only guarantee our constant chafing at the restrictions and cookie-cutter categories of homogenized health care systems but further facilitate another process which I believe is inevitable, indeed, already well underway: the pluralization of therapies. Why shouldn’t the government or insurance company pay for, say, Native American cures? Because they haven’t been scientifically verified? You would have to have a very naïve faith in public confidence in the modern cult of professionalism and expertise to imagine that answer will hold the fort for long.

At the same time, such a process will generate, in the short term and perhaps longer, inequalities and mistakes that will seem monstrous to many. There will be plenty of cases of people purporting to fix backs breaking them, of con men hawking fake treatments without fear of the regulator or licensing board, of new, prohibitively expensive treatments conspicuously available for a while (a long enough while to count the dead resulting from “health apartheid”) to only the very wealthy. And the question for us, as a civilization, will be: can we abide that? Health problems, today, have come to be experienced less as “acts of God” or the inevitable workings of Nature than as a kind of violence, uniquely, unpredictably and terrifyingly directed at individuals, violence to which we are all ultimately equally vulnerable—violence from private and public greed and callousness (insurance companies, doctors driving Mercedes, companies pumping carcinogens into the environment, pencil-pushing bureaucrats putting rules over compassion, etc.).

We can use the word “community” very loosely here, to include neighborhoods and federations of neighborhood (and federations of federations, etc.), schools and school systems, businesses and networks of businesses, on-line and intellectual communities, military alliances, and so forth: any grouping with terms of membership. The terms of association would constantly be subject to negotiation, and each community might allow for various levels of citizenship and rights, as individuals decide where they would like to commit the most resources. A neighborhood might permit families to buy homes and offer them basic property rights (otherwise who would buy homes there?) but only allow voting rights to those who join some association that helps keep the neighborhood running (neighborhood watch, PTA, volunteer fire department, etc.)

(Free speech rights may have to defer to the increasingly difficult to control communicative capacities of individuals—but the right to speak in specific, consequential, ways could certainly be calibrated.) A federation of neighborhoods and the businesses operating in them might establish various categories of aliens, for those whose work is valued but have families and friends in other communities established upon different value and whom those individuals don’t wish to disown, and who therefore can’t be completely trusted. Federations can be as large as they need to be, as large as today’s nation-states or larger, and the issues of self-defense, military establishments and war might not be all that different from now, except that the demands and conditions different political entities seek to place upon each other are likely to be much more minimal and transparent.

The traditional, or archaic, gift, excludes strangers; the market economy connected strangers, which is why the carriers of the market were strangers to all. But in modernity we gift to strangers all the time, through charity, blood and organ donation—even, as George Gilder argued thirty years ago in Wealth and Poverty, entrepreneurialism can be seen as a gift to others, one which one can never assume in advance will be reciprocated. In a post a while back I explored what I called a “politics of redemption,” drawing upon the notion of redeeming, or buying others from slavery. This politics of redemption, in turn, seems to me to overlap the “exodian” politics I have argued for more recently, in which one buys out one’s owner (the state, the ultimate owner of us all) and thereby lays the precedent for buying out others, redeeming them from less free communities.

The pernicious influence of public employee unions upon the political process makes the lobbying efforts of large corporations look amateurish. Public employee unions are by definition monopolies, and the union fees which are automatically deducted from each employee’s payroll check serve to feed a huge political machine. Those public employees who negotiate with the public employee unions have no incentive to drive a hard bargain, since the government has no bottom line of profit to worry about, and the ability to tax is virtually unlimited.

The problem is that the government does not itself produce wealth; it can create a limited number of jobs; but such job growth is not sustainable, not efficient in actually producing anything, and must be paid for by the taxpayers. All the government can really do, economically, is to take money from one pocket and put it in another, or borrow against younger generations and ransom our future to the foreign nations who are our largest creditors. Economic growth is created by people and businesses which produce items or services for consumption. The government’s role in this process is to protect private property and prevent monopolies.

Hannah Arendt, in fact, gave us a minimal definition of the public sphere which can allow us to compress the two meta rules into one: the public sphere is where what is done and said is seen and heard by everyone. Of course, this can also sound a lot like the sphere of celebrity, and it’s no coincidence that those respective spheres have come to approximate each other, so let’s mark the difference by completing Arendt’s definition: the public sphere is generative and infinite, while celebrity is monopolistic: public displays of defiance on the part of Iranians to their regime doesn’t detract from our ability to engage publically here—quite to the contrary, in fact; while there is only so much attention to be paid to celebrities and some must get more of it than others.

In the political economy of signs, then, we would perhaps look for which entrepreneurs can conquer territory within the division of labor by introducing an ostensive or imperative dimension to a primarily declarative medium; or a declarative overlay to a primarily ostensive or imperative medium. The conservative media seems to me particularly advanced in this regard, with its dense network of TV (FOX), talk radio, blogs, websites like Pajamas Media, Hot Air, and Breitbart’s sites, which all interact and intersect with each, deploy all the media and all the resources of all the media, are populated by a core of personalities and thinkers who move from one site to another while continually bringing on board new voices.

The attempts by an insurgent conservative movement, through the 80s-00s, to resist the installation of this order (based upon the alliance between big government and big business), have only succeeded in slowing it down, and that only temporarily. It seems to me clear, though, first, that Progessivism has reached its limits, that is, it generates more resentments than it can recirculate, and it now threatens to swallow up the market order upon which is has been merely parasitic so far; second, that its adherent are nevertheless determined to continue pushing through to the definitive and irreversible establishment of that order, by any means necessary—indeed, they can’t imagine a life worth living under any other order; third, that a majority of Americans wish to retain the benefits, real and perceived, granted to them by that order, without supporting its continued expansion; fourth, that the wishes of this majority cannot be met, since progressivism must continue to grow or wither away; and, fifth, that a growing minority of Americans are coming to feel that they can’t live under the Progressive order at all, even in its present form, and that they must resist, at all costs, its further expansion.

It was not very difficult to bring big business on board, as the new administrative state gave them a seat at the table and protects them from competition. Resistance was bribed and suppressed when necessary, and, to be fair, there was no interest in taking away more freedom than necessary—I suspect the mistake had a lot to do with the need to package constitutional government for export, but this history has been written many times and does not need recounting here.

The location of cultural exemplars among the upholders of everyday middle class values and common sense patriotism, and the social prioritization of such values might prove even more difficult than rehabilitating the figure of the entrepreneur. Without such a cultural turn in which we come to see entrepreneurialism and normalcy as the modes of deferral they are rather than as exploitation and indifference to the other, though, anti-semitism will continue to attract and direct the resentments generated by the world market.

As Gans noted, if you invite me to dinner this Friday night, I’m expected to invite you, not Saturday night (which would make it look too much like a payback, or like I’m trying to free myself of an onerous obligation) but, perhaps, next Friday night—but gift exchanges go well beyond this into emotional, cultural and intellectual areas of existence: where else but in a gift economy does my writing of this blog entry belong, as the only exchange I can hope for is a comment, a reference on some other blog, or a more general diffusion of my ideas? Within any large company, for that matter, employee survival and advancement depends largely upon the effective calculation of whom and how much one should gift—helping someone else develop an idea, taking someone else’s place when they’re sick, doing a bit of overtime for the boss, etc.

We–most of us as individuals, and in our policy preferences as a society–would rather see high paying jobs disappear because the companies in question go out of business rather than take pay cuts, leaving jobs intact at what would still be much higher wages than those for the jobs that will come in place of those lost. This is very interesting.

Here, I would like to draw upon the notion of “originary advertising” that Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll suggested at the latest GA conference. The only real contribution made by the Left to contemporary politics has been in its pioneering use of boycotts—whether it be the strike, the Montgomery bus boycott, the boycott of South Africa in the 80s, and, more recently (and, of course, far less obviously virtuous), attempts to gin up shunning campaigns against “socially irresponsible” companies like Wal-Mart.

If you tell me that you need to mind my business, just this once, because there’s emergency, I might be able to see the immediate benefit or necessity, but I will never know what I have lost by letting you do so —I won’t know, first of all, what immediate solutions I might have improvised on my own and, more importantly, what capacities and possibilities I will have surrendered by losing the habit of minding my own business. Similarly, we will never know what we have lost by letting our fear of unemployment or a credit freeze lead us to give politicians the right to determine terms of trade, to benefit one market competitor over others, to regulate the internal operations if businesses, and so on.

“Death panels” is just a common sense way of compressing this understanding into maxims—and I, for one, couldn’t care less what the Democratic legislators (or, really, some combination of their aides, lobbyists, assorted activist groups, etc.) really “meant” when they put a particular provision in the 1,000 page long bill (a provision that will, later on, be interpreted by one of their experts). And we don’t know what innovations in the complex relations between patients/consumers, care givers, insurance companies, medical technology, etc., will not take place because of this dramatic shift towards central planning.

But knowledge of causal relation, that is, the application of science to production, has a more complex relationship to the entrepreneur. For a long time, in Marxist circles, there were arguments regarding the long-term effects of capitalism on scientific “labor”—the most politically appealing argument was that scientists would increasingly be reduced to wage laborers and supervisors of wage laborers, with intensifying specialization making it impossible for them to protect their interests as a group or individuals, leaving perhaps a few very elite scientists who essentially join the “ruling class.” And, certainly, scientists, and especially those responsible for important technological innovations, have been among the most important new members of the economic “aristocracy” over the past few decades.

The form taken by this guilt is, interestingly, not to continue the thankless and hopeless task of a general unmarking (perhaps we should use the term “bleaching” to describe the goal of a “color-blind” society); rather, it is to seek to establish an orthodox, ritualized system of marking, in which markers of exclusion are both tabooed and assiduously collected and in turn reversed into markers of privilege—the easily parodied and inevitably rough attempts to arrive at a hierarchy of victimage is the result. The consequent scapegoating of the gift of firstness which, in a sense, restores the old scapegoating of the powerful to its originary position, reflects the realization that the capacity for freedom, for starting over, continually threatens to undo what has become a system of insurance (chock-full of mandates, naturally), of reciprocal indemnification from risk: we have almost, in the minds of those self-appointed to construct the rituals of White Guilt, arrived at a new social contract everyone could sign onto (the unmarked are ready to follow the new rules of marking and the marked are willing to accept the payment of victimary blackmail in exchange for a relief from their infinite demands), and only the permanence of the capacity for freedom and responsibility threatens to undermine all that labor.

We can think about this on the model of “matching funds,” the principle grant-giving agencies often use to provide incentives to recipients to raise as much resources independently as possible. When I invest, I can anticipate “matching funds” in the form of the investments and future consumption of others; or I can anticipate “matching funds” in the form of future devaluations which will lessen or eliminate my obligations. We should be able to identify the limits within which the proportions of these respective expectations fluctuate within a given political economic regime, and account for the actions of economic agents, and the probable consequences of those actions, accordingly.

We also have thirdness, though, the totality of dispositions that allow for the welcoming, circulation and modification of the transformations introduced by the entrepreneur. All the forms taken by everyday resentments and desires comprise thirdness, and originary economic thinking should seek to put some order into this area as well. I would suggest three categories of thirdness: common sense, habit, and idiosyncrasy. Common sense is the ongoing checks and balances of immediate resentments, issuing in maxims of human nature or mimetic regularity. Common sense leads us to establish some balance between spending and saving, short term and long term expenditure, desire and need, and so on.

But the readiness to disobey “legal” declaratives–in the broader sense I have been giving it, of stabilizations of declarative-imperative convertibilities, not just the law–might also be incorporated into politics in a systemic way consonant with the advanced market order so as to further undermine the remaining distinctions between “marked” and “unmarked” constitutive of White Guilt; and, beyond that, to establish a new regime to replace the decrepit post-World War II welfare state. I have spoken in previous posts of boycotts as such a politics, insofar as it involves a suspension of normal transactions in the name of revising the terms of such transactions (and very rarely for the purpose of destroying them)–furthermore, calling for a boycott will provide you very quickly with very reliable information about where everyone really stands on your “issue.”

Now that the adminstrative, regulatory and welfare state has become large enough, and judicial understandings of the Constitution malleable enough, it is possible to make substantial changes simply through staffing decisions. If the “Fairness Doctrine” is resurrected, a couple of appointments to the FCC determine what counts as “fair”; a couple of years of judicial appointments and “gay marriage” will be the law of the land; add to such appointments new “hate speech” laws and anyone who criticizes “gay marriage” (or puts quotation marks around it?) will be criminalized; appointments to the Federal Exchange Commission and of Federal Attorneys can ensure that, probably without even changing the law (as Eliot Spitzer showed, there is already plenty on the books with which to bully and bamkrupt less compliant corporations), corporations on board with the new regime will get along splendidly and those who aren’t–not.

And is not the economic crisis we find ourselves in a perfect representation of this condition. Who among us is brave enough to predict where we will be 20 years from now, 10 years, 5 years, 1 year? The answer is, probably too many–but we would all be humbled if some omniscient observer were to, in a detached manner, compare our current predictions with the future reality. And yet, we all must find jobs, decide whether to stay in those jobs, buy, sell or retain our homes, invest our pension money, etc., and all these decisions presuppose some faith or lack of faith in a possible future; and, regardless of our futural incapacities, some of our decisions will work out quite well, better than we could have predicted.

And the government will be interested in such surrenders as enable it to satisfy the interests it depends upon. So, the auto companies will get money if they go Green and protect the unions, the financial institutions will be expected to lend and redistribute money in approved ways, and who knows what will be asked of the states now lining up at the trough. Chaos can be turned not so much into order as into a kind of hovering, with possible actions not so much determined as circumscribed in advance by the all the officially recognized injuries they could inflict.

Progressivism arose so as to restrain the mushrooming centers of power (corporate, imperial, and mass consumptionist) which emerged in the early 20th century West and is therefore congenitally suspicious of affirmations of the free market order. Hence, its ambivalence and paralysis before the rise of the victimary blackmail we call terrorism, and the re-energized faith of Islam, itself a toxic mix of victimary resentment and unlimited imperial ambition, introduces a stain of irrationality and violence into the Progressive world-view—a stain that it can't cleanse, because the White Guilt that so energized the Progressive project in the post-WW II world contains no epistemological terms enabling one to distinguish genuine victimary claims from false ones, and hence legitimate from illegitimate imperatives, leaving the ability to disrupt normal life (blackmail) the de facto criterion (as opposed to earlier, more "innocent" analyses which saw terrorism merely as a method used by movements whose legitimacy was affirmed through other means).

Let’s stick with the ostensive-imperative relation for a moment. If I have given an order to a subordinate, I presumably know what it would mean for that order to be carried out–if I say the “report must be on my desk by 3” I know how to tell time, have a clock available, know what desk is meant, and know what would count as an acceptably completed report; and, my subordinate knows all this as well. Furthermore, I have some idea (perhaps increasingly vague as the work done to complete the report becomes more individualized) of where the subordinate should be at a particular point in the work, and there may be all kinds of good reasons for me to want to check on those intermediate points as well (everyone has heard horror stories about the intrusive means of surveillance that have become commonplace in the contemporary corporation).

Such restraint was unlikely to survive an age of internet, You Tube and billionaire political entrepreneurs anyway. If leading Democrats and free lance ambassadors like Jimmy Carter are now free, as a self-appointed government-in-exile (the "real" government, once our "nightmare" has been ended), to confer with America's enemies abroad and undermine U.S. policy, then anyone, including private individuals and various public groups are free to support currently inconvenient allies, and promote, modify, and, most importantly, fill in the gaps of that policy. How many times have you heard someone (even yourself) say that the Bush Administration has been woefully inadequate in areas like public diplomacy?

So, another act of deferral regarding this overreaching produces the self-governing nation, intellectual freedom, and finally the modern market, which opens up the possibility of positive sum rivalries–competition for Nobel Prizes among scientists leads to cures and inventions for the rest of us, competition for higher profits and entrepenuerial pre-eminence leads to ever more diverse consumer goods, competition for artistic fame (Oscars and Pulitzers) leads to cultural wealth, and so on. Here, though, I would suggest (or hypothesize) that the narrowing of horizons implicit in any act of deferral reaches a point where dangers to the signs generated can no longer be discerned.

This raises the question of how the news media ever becomes something other than a stenographer, broadcasting the actions and decisions of government and its auxiliaries. It is the licitness spectrum that makes this possible: a government organ, or political party (or corporate, or…) decision or action might be illegal, or improperly arrived at or carried out, or can lead to consequences unanticipated by the initial act or decision. In other words, what is of interest is some kind of discrepancy. But how are such discrepancies detected? To say that a particular decision or act is “illegal” is to say that one organ of government might or should come into conflict with another organ of government (we can make the necessary adjustments in talking about other institutions, for which “illegality” means a conflict between an institution authorized by the government and the government); to say that an act or decision has been improperly carried out is, similarly, to point to possible conflicts, perhaps within the same organ of government (between superiors and subordinates, perhaps); and to say that an act or decision was a mistake or disaster is also to indicate and incite certain kinds of later, ultimately official assessments of and reactions to those decisions.

You give others assignments—assignments to make what they’re doing more what they’re doing, to make the words they’re using mean more of what they mean, to make they’re gestures and postures indicate more of what they’re indicating. The more power you have, the more the design of assignments is indirect and distributed—even if you’re powerless, you can hypothesize assignments that might be adopted by the more powerful—maybe they’ll let you run the experiment. These practices can be scaled up or down as necessary—from a chance conversation to the establishment of protocols and a hierarchy for an institution or corporation employing tens of thousands.

If there were to be an institutional stake in GA, enough to draw in “fresh blood,” we would quickly see lines drawn over “orthodox” and “heretical” understandings of “resentment,” the “moral model,” and every other concept. Of course there need to be discussions and there will always be disagreements over any theory, GA certainly included, and disagreements, properly conducted, are generative for any discipline. But the struggle for institutional mastery doesn’t provide the field in which those kinds of disagreements could take place. I would also add that the days of grand theoretical battles in the university, at least the American university, are probably over: between victimary inquisitions, budgetary shortfalls, and the business model imposed on universities, forcing English Departments as much as anyone else to explain how they will be providing students with the kind of “critical thinking skills” they need to get jobs leaves little zest for genuine theoretical battles.

And it requires the habit of treating as data what is not ordinarily seen as such, like one’s everyday use of language, which, in a sense is where all data exchange finds its terminus. Think about what it would mean to gather, in various formal and informal ways, at different scales, data regarding what “following an order” “means” today (a very Wittgensteinian question, but one brought into history). The orders you receive and comply with or resist, and those you yourself give and find obeyed or not in varying degrees and manners might be your starting point. But your inquiry could lead you to examine the vast expanse of the current order. At stake is our basic linguistic knowledge, upon which all other data collection, curation, and interpretation depends—if we can’t say that we know what it means to follow an order, what can we say we know? Restoring such basic linguistic capacities is the first order of business in contributing to the kind of “metacosmos” Ross would have us turn our sights to.

One awaits the Jouvenelian dissection of other sacred concepts of liberalism, in particular the “market” (which Bond briefly touches upon in his chapter on the corporation, and tangentially in his discussion of the use of money in ancient Greek democracy), and one suspects that very little of what liberal citizens and the vast majority of liberal intellectuals take for granted will be left in intact.

If this highly asymmetrical omnicentrism does not lead to violence it must be because a powerful central state ensures that it doesn’t: indeed, consider how strong and centralized the state must be, and what a civilized political culture it must have inculcated, for the romanticist and later modernist cultural entrepreneurs to have flouted social norms so blatantly not only with impunity but for fame and profit. It should be mentioned that Gans does not often feel obliged to refer to the state in conducting such discussions, and in those cases rarely referring to its coercive and controlling functions, relegating it to the role, essentially, of redistribution, or addressing those resentments regarding market asymmetries that might threaten the system. Liberal democracy is a kind of replication of the market model:

The Big Man, through enterprise, discipline, and what Gans calls “producer’s desire” accumulates goods and prestige that place him above the egalitarian community. The Big Man marks the beginning of wealth accumulation, individual liberty, and social hierarchy. Even more, the Big Man usurps the ritual center of the community, taking on a sacred status, ultimately becoming a kind of God King (this is really the origin of the scapegoating phenomenon studied by Girard). Gans distinguishes “producer’s desire” from “consumer’s satisfaction” to distinguish between competing dispositions within the egalitarian primitive community: on the one hand, to imagine the community as a whole, and take the initiative to attend to its ritual representation; on the other hand, to enforce the equal distribution of shares of the community’s product. It is the producer’s desire that is manifested in the Big Man, and the “consumer” both relies upon and resents the “producer.”

For Gans, the completion of the monotheist narrative in the Christian revelation, which applies the moral model universally (love your enemies) and incorporates the Greek logos, creates a space of individual freedom and reciprocity that ultimately leads to the modern market society, of which Gans considers liberal democracy to be a part. Here is where I begin to draw different political implications from Gans’s originary thinking. First of all, I introduce the concept of “civilization” into originary thinking, because that seems to me the best way to sustain the originary concept of deferral as the primary concept of social thought.

The more secure central power is, the less our conversations would be about who really has power, or the differences between what those in power do and what they say, or which source of power to align ourselves with, and the more about how to implement the instructions of the center, how to gather information that would be recirculated back through the center, how to map the will of the center onto the moral model and how to raise the level of discipline of each and all so as to open new moral and intellectual vistas to be incorporated into the center.