Play at the End of Currency

A common despairing observation on the left is that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Since what gets counted as the right is anti-communist, imaging the end of capitalism is unthinkable there as well since any gesture towards end of capitalist thinking is deemed communist; even the kind of nationalization, corporatist scenarios proposed by some on the nationalist and fascist right are not really post-capitalist—they’re more attempts to preserve what are seen as the good parts of capitalism while eliminating the bad. But this very difficulty seems to me to make this a worthwhile endeavor, one I have been undertaking for a while, hypothesizing the end of money, and therefore monetized debt, through the conversion of assets into data and the conversion of all exchange into data exchange.

I’ve also adopted the slogan heisted by Marx and his followers, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” asserting that if you simply consider that the able might have needs far exceeding those of the “needy” it becomes the least “communist” slogan imaginable. In general, such thought experiments are valuable, if for no other reason as a kind of stress test of widely taken for granted doxa, which easily calcify into stone and block off avenues of thinking even beyond the particular thesis in question.

I’ve emphasized the last half-century of England’s 1600s as a crucial turning point in the emergence of capitalism and the political order predicated upon it, based on a rotation in power of the defanged opposing sides in a civil war. Nothing I’ve come across leads me to change this emphasize, but this is of course an open inquiry and along with learning about some subtle changes in credit culture in 18 th century Britain which would lower the importance of the founding of the Bank of England, there is of course a wider trail leading up to the transformative British 17 th century which takes us back to the Dutch Republic displaced by England in that later 17 th century and maybe most foundationally, the Renaissance Italian city-states, and especially Florence.

It is in 15th and 16 th centuries in Florence, in particular, where a new notion of temporality is created, where cyclical and providential views of time are replaced by a notion of the future as ruled by chance and probability. An intense gambling culture indulged in by the Florentine nobility and which became a crucial way of demonstrating one’s composure and self-control in the face of adversity and rapid reversals, seems to have been a significant element of this new understanding of time, in the context of a very unstable, risky and competitive environment more generally. And, of course, thinking in terms of probability is constitutive of the emergence of capitalism in Bichler and Nitzan’s account (and others, of course), since how could one discount the value of one’s assets against expected future earnings without being able to weigh various possible future earnings against each other and constantly reassessing their respective probabilities through the most advanced mathematical and now computerized methods?

I suspect that much of the hostility toward Anglo-modernity is due to this entrenchment of the future as chance, which seems to signal meaninglessness but also an opening to the values of the financier rather than the warrior or industrialist. But the future as chance has opened up new worlds of thought and therefore speculation and action that even its most inveterate opponents must participate in. Above all else, in our capitalist abolitionism, this concept of time is to be carried forward and refined; indeed, made into the source of meaning and the basis of exchange.

A while back already I played with the notion of a kind of subscription system that would organize exchanges at scale through an increasingly monopolized productive order. The supply chain is already highly organized and significant planning takes place within firms on the expectations of a stable supply chain. I don’t know this to be the case, but it’s certainly conceivable that very little money changes hands between firms that have developed a deep reliance on each other—all transactions can be handled through balance sheets. Every individual would be a member of various coops at the end of different supply chains for the necessities of life and so firms would always have a rough estimate of what they need to supply at each point along the chain.

I think there are already strong tendencies in this direction, and not that much would be needed to subscribe people up all along the line. Greatly enhanced data security and AI would facilitate this process. Even certain parts of the economy trending in this direction would, if successful and including the largest firms, establish models and infrastructures to be followed.

But what about prices and the Hayekian problem of distributed knowledge? This is addressed by the possibility of defections from and mergers of firms—if one firm along the supply chain is dissatisfied with a supplier it can propose switching allegiance to a new firm formed by current subordinates in the existing firm who would be offering some new system that would address the dissatisfaction; even prior to this, though, would be supporting the promotion of those potential defectors within the firm in the form of what I have referred to as a kind of controlled usurpation exercised by firms upon each other. In this case each firm would have to be transparent to other firms, included a full audit of all internal hierarchies.

Prices as signals then get replaced by the ever-shifting hierarchies across firms and viewed by all firms. This would create a much more “public” form of what we take to be “private” cultures. Let’s take the next step, then, and see these constant contests within firms (as such they would surely become) as being formalized on prediction markets. Being able to bet and see the odds on any given changes in the hierarchies across various firms would certainly enhance one’s ability to engage in controlled usurpation. So, the prediction markets provide the information otherwise supplied by prices. What, then—what kinds of tokens—is one betting on these prediction markets? Remember: we need it to eventually convert into nothing but data, making more explicit the way prices and interest rates serve as data presently.

I’ll address these problems by retrieving some recent discussions ( https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/totally-datatized-tributarianism ; https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/tokenizing-succession ) regarding currency as taking out options on succession. I’ll make a familiar move here and insist that this is already what we’re doing under capitalism: any expectation of future earnings you enter into your valuation of assets you own takes for granted, on the most general level, a sovereign who will preserve the juridical order on which those assets can be held and exchanged. Nothing would be worth anything if we all expected the states of the world to collapse into some neo-tribal order tomorrow.

So, we’re all already betting on a reasonably steady succession process. More specifically, investors are weighing the “turbulence” and “volatility” of less dramatic oscillations between political leaderships and policies—this hardly needs to be said: assets will be valued differently depending on whether your expectations are that either JD Vance or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the next US president. And the reasons for this will always bring us back to the maintenance of a juridical order in which one can expect certain rights of possession and exchange to be protected, certain obligations upheld and enforced, including by the state itself.

So, the prediction markets on firms proposed above would be part of this broader process of taking out options on succession. We are now speaking more directly and explicitly about a more transparent and generalized succession process in which, let’s say, the predictability of imperative exchanged coming off becomes the immediate basis for currency. Can we expect the middle-level managers at corporation Z to follow the orders of the upper-middle-level managers—which also means, understand and implement them by filling in the imperative gaps in ways that would meet with the approval of the imperators, even if the fulfillment of those imperatives looks different than originally imagined. This becomes a data point one could collect and therefore a source of value, which is to say, a medium of exchange.

We can see how this prediction market would be curated by the data security firm that ultimately ascends to sovereignty, which is to say, the final arbiter and carrier forward of the nomos. Metrics would need to be designed for measuring the likelihood of sustained imperative exchanges, involving the installation of myriad observation and detection points and the constant review of analytical protocols. As I’ve suggested many times, going back to my Thirdness post, the best way of gathering such data is through juridical framing: what would a conflict between one of the aforementioned middle-level managers and one of his bosses look like, how would we imagine the arbitration—through which sets of rights, procedures and under what authority—and how would the data be organized so as to make the case?

Again, I would insist this is the way we “spontaneously” think of conflicts under any advanced juridical order. Our notions of “fairness” derive from the most pressing and familiar precedents but, over and beyond that, a sense of “fair play,” which is very Anglo, as Anna Wierzbicka has pointed out (it can’t be a coincidence that so many sports emerged and were perfected in England). This notion of play, which was important to me in several contexts for a while, but which has remained somewhat latent, is something I’d like to revise here, inspired by my understanding of the significance of gambling in the rise of capitalist futurity, as a kind of meta-legitimacy.

Play and not games—games have clear rules and winners and losers, while play is more purely mimetic, involving the taking on of roles that change and get defined as we proceed and which I would say precedes formalized games. Being able to play together, in all the different ways in which we play, is the purest form of a “high-trust” culture.

We want to construct potential cases with such rigor and detail so as to prevent them from becoming actual cases: this is a mode of deferral. I’m not saying anything new here: the more reliable and transparent a juridical order the fewer suits there would be because the outcome could be guessed in advance; if we include enforcement, there would be fewer crimes the greater likelihood of arrest and punishment. So, we want to paper reality with 50/50 cases, across all the institutions, that are resolved (“cleared”) by a judicial firm based on or maybe even housed in the sovereign data security company. (An aside: if AI, as an argument I’ve recently come across suggests, makes the firm obsolete as an economic form by eliminating transaction costs, that poses no problem: we would just translate all of this into relations between disciplinary spaces.)

What one wins on the prediction markets, then, by tipping more cases to 50.1 to 49.9 in one’s favor (which would in a sense mean beating the house, which serves as feedback for the house) than otherwise, is an edge in directing one’s own data towards focal points of controlled usurpation. You will find that you are in a greater degree of agreement with the data security firm and your own bets are providing it with more data. (I’ve pointed out in the “Tokenizing Succession” post that most bets would be aggregated through associations since they would have greater access to advanced data analysis than any individual, but such associations might draw upon the knowledge and even hunches of its own members). Other less successful bettors will have access to information regarding the success of your bets but they will be less ready to act on it, leaving you with the edge. This, then, is what one is betting and winning.

I want to conclude here with a return to the question of the debt to the center, which Zack Baker and I proposed as replacement concept for the “economy” in our “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center.” The debt to the center is meant to be seen as originary, as in, on the originary scene, and the instigator of sacrifice, the originary form of ritual. This means we’re speaking about debt outside of (and preparatory to) its usual connection to money, and there’s not anything particularly problematic about that—it’s possible to speak about “credit,” which overlaps considerably with debt, in non-monetary terms as well and no doubt people in pre-money orders had some way of speaking about what they “owe” each other.

But if debt is on the originary terms, I would like to be able to conceptualize it in terms of originary grammar, or as part of the unfolding of the grammar. A way of doing so that brings debt even closer to sovereignty is to say that all scenic temporality can be reduced to prolonging and perfecting the imperative (both the ostensive and declarative construct presents; so, the imperative, including here the interrogative, which is a further prolonging of the imperative, is the source of human time). (And debt is certainly a way of keeping time.) But the imperative is prolonged and perfected through the sequences of inappropriate ostensives it “redeems,” which is to say, through mistakenness.

So, debt is mistakenness (which comes before anything like “sin,” “fault,” or “crime,” meaning originary mistakenness comes before and “grounds” anything like “original sin”) and the possibility of its redemption. This also places debt within the imperative gap, which is to say delegation. The Big Man was redeeming some mistake in usurping the center and placing everyone in his debt. Iteration is itself the articulation of mistakenness and redemption. (I’m using an anachronistic term like “redemption” just like we use one like “sacrality” to describe the originary scene but maybe a word like “fit” would be better, as a mistaken gesture needs to be made to fit the gestures of others—everyone is really “fitting” each other.)

Both the creditor and debtor are mistaken insofar as the debt implies the possibility of the good or service not being provided, which is to say, some imperative not being fulfilled, some imperative exchange not being completed. The debt prices in mistakenness, even pre-monetary debt, which might involve taking some possession of the other or extracting some labor or physical suffering (David Graeber excoriates Nietzsche for his account of how an animal capable of promising can be created, but, while Nietzsche’s account is obviously speculative, I do think this must have been a difficult problem). On the most originary level, someone has to make your mistake fit, although it would be equally true to say that in making your gesture fit, some other is imputing mistakenness to you.

Now we can program mistakenness into futurity—we continue to reduce it through precision of measurement (perfecting the imperative) while thereby just generating new increments of mistakenness that someone has to fit (and “fit” is very close to “measure”). The prolongation of the imperative, in its oscillation between mistakenness and fitting, and a kind of “spread” between them, is what ultimately become a kind of pricing of the debt. Converting debt back into the prolonging of the imperative, now made explicit, is the play of the future.