Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“And this in turn means that the most basic form of learning, the kind that serves as the infrastructure for scenic design and idiom fluency is when and how to enforce and forgive the originary debt. Our most fundamental stance toward each other is the question: what do you owe to the center and what must the center provide you with to make that donation? But what you owe and what you ought now receive also entails a forgiveness of outstanding and even longstanding debts, and there will always be such. And this involves configuring yourself as data and initiating data exchange with the center. This must always already be technical knowledge, of the kind needed to configure yourself as data selected, curated and preserved against a broader field of data, which is also to say, everything. 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.”

— Adam Katz, On Credit and the Idiom · Dec 20, 2024 · Bouvard Substack