My analysis of Bitcoin has been published on CTheory.
What is apparent in Bitcoin is a dramatic reification of capitalist ideologies and valorization of commercial exchanges as the currency itself (new Bitcoins are mined through the exchange of existing Bitcoins) in a direct expression of the capitalist imperative to expand into new domains: the valorization of social activities -- such as friendship circles, browsing in a bookstore, or shopping without purchasing -- becomes valuable as the "authorship" already present in social media is taken to its logical conclusion as the Bitcoin.
Capitalism itself is reified in the idealized free market as the necessary (and natural) order of the world in the conception of market competition as a variant of Darwinian natural selection (evolution); agnotology is the creation of uncertainty and ambivalent fact; it is a competitive tool incompatible with the idealized free market of capitalism.
My new article "Automated Labor: The New Aesthetic and Immaterial Physicality" is now in print on CTheory.
This essay considers Karl Marx' short essay The Fragment on Machines and its relationship to digital automation. The new aesthetic described by James Bridle is a typical example of this new, automated labor beginning to impact the physical world and provides a reference point for the examination of The Fragment on Machines: Marx divided labor into three categories (means, material and living labor) that is in the process of being reorganized by digital automated systems (in both immaterial labor and physical production forms). This reorganization forces an underlying paradox in capitalism into focus, foregrounding the mismatch between a capitalist productive system and the consumer society required to maintain that system, a paradox that emerges precisely because exchange value emerges from the relationship between one commodity and anotherfrom the exchange of a commodity for the acquisition of another: human labor is the underlying commodity required by this entire system, a commodity rendered obsolete by digital automation; the new aesthetic provides physical examples of this transition-in-progress.
This is a fragment of my new essay considering the automation and automated processes so clearly on view in the collected material of the new aesthetic, James Bridle's tumblr blog. Originally I hadn't planned to write about his project, but I recently reconsidered that plan as I realized there was overlap with my current thinking about automation:
The results of this law are immediately obvious: every low skilled job that can readily be described by a limited set of algo-rules will be replaced by automation. The first stages are abundantly on view around us: how long before the iPhone's voice response system SIRI asks, "Do you want fries with that?"
