The Coming Authoritarianism.

[luka]

Very soon society will go cashless and all transactions will be monitored and recorded. This may well go hand in hand with UBI and social credit.

Supermarkets are promoting unscientific anti-cash propaganda. And the banking sector is loving it - Positive Money

While science suggests that PIN pads are more dangerous than cash, the retail sector continues to spread fear about it. Is this just a naive mistake, or are there darker motives? This article was first published on alteredstatesof.money and is written by guest author Brett Scott. Brett Scott is...

positivemoney.org

 

[luka]

Supermarkets are promoting unscientific anti-cash propaganda. And the banking sector is loving it - Positive Money

While science suggests that PIN pads are more dangerous than cash, the retail sector continues to spread fear about it. Is this just a naive mistake, or are there darker motives? This article was first published on alteredstatesof.money and is written by guest author Brett Scott. Brett Scott is...

positivemoney.org

At best this anti-cash stance is well-meaning but misguided and irresponsible. At worst it’s a push to force people to use digital payments for profit-seeking reasons, disguised as a concern for public health. For the last several years I have been investigating the ‘war on cash’: banks and payments companies – who run the underlying digital payments infrastructure – have a huge interest in seeing the demise of the cash system and have actively tried to nudge society away from cash, constantly telling us to ‘prepare’ for an ‘inevitable’ end of cash whilst eroding the cash infrastructure to make it harder to use, and while publishing sob-stories about the need to ‘save’ those who will be ‘left behind’ by this imagined inevitable trajectory that they engineer.


While the banking sector and fintech industry clearly have a commercial agenda in demonising cash, many chain stores do too. Over the years they have tried to automate as much as possible. They invest in self-service checkout systems as a way to automate away their staff, and digital payments is how you automate the money section of a transaction. Big tech firms like Amazon have made no secret out of how they hate non-automated offline payment – they tried to stop pro-cash laws in US cities that would require shops to accept cash – but big supermarkets also prefer to deal with banking giants than to handle physical cash.

 

[version]

this imagined inevitable trajectory that they engineer

This is why I'm reluctant to go down the route of discussing capitalism as though it's some sort of supernatural entity or organism with its own desires and not a system built and run by human beings. It absolves us of responsibility and encourages inaction. Likewise automation. It doesn't have to happen. The governments of the world could just say no and put a stop to it, but everyone treats it as though technology and progress has a mind of its own and isn't just thousands of people actively deciding to push things in certain directions.

 

[luka]

that's also why im suspicious of all these university graduates with the flouride stare using words like 'systemic'

 

[constant escape]

This is why I'm reluctant to go down the route of discussing capitalism as though it's some sort of supernatural entity or organism with its own desires and not a system built and run by human beings. It absolves us of responsibility and encourages inaction. Likewise automation. It doesn't have to happen. The governments of the world could just say no and put a stop to it, but everyone treats it as though technology and progress has a mind of its own and isn't just thousands of people actively deciding to push things in certain directions.

But does it not seem like these alternative routes - as welcome as they may be - involve grinding the breaks on a certain acceleration? A technical, capitalist acceleration?

Even in a more materialist sense, what little I know about global financial trading indicates that the vast bulk of it is automated, with decisions being made at speeds that are orders of magnitude beyond human capacity. Someone (I could probably track down who, if need be) said that a real life meatspace human, in a scenario in which they are tasked with overseeing/regulating such high-speed tradings, would be quite justified in forfeiting their lower-order decision-making sovereignty to a computer that can veritably outpace them in almost every important metric (except, say, ethics). Instead, they would assume a higher-order - and higher-pressure - supervisory responsibility.

That is, if in some kind of potentially cataclysmic global trading scenario, where millisecond decisions (if not faster) determine whether or some kind of market meltdown happens, the human is relegated from the front line to the generals seat, and in doing so you lose a vast degree of nuance. The sheer span of command-chain below you leaves plenty unaccounted for. Please, anyone with knowledge of how these things work (unlike myself), shred this apart.

That is my attempt at a materialist answer, and I can hardly claim to be a materialist or even fundamentally appreciate materialism. I can drone on incomprehensibly in more idealist/abstract terms. I'm always excited to, actually. I probably will.

 

[constant escape]

that's also why im suspicious of all these university graduates with the flouride stare using words like 'systemic'

I'm way past flouride. But you're right in that "systemic" is a blurry blanket term people throw upon hideously convoluted matters.

 

[version]

But does it not seem like these alternative routes - as welcome as they may be - involve grinding the breaks on a certain acceleration? A technical, capitalist acceleration?

Yeah. Exactly.

 

[constant escape]

@version, critical point here: are you saying that treating capitalism as if it is inevitable makes it more inevitable?

 

[version]

Yeah. Inevitably.

 

[vimothy]

the computers in those scenarios don't really make decisions, they just execute automated processes. crashes are often caused by the combined and unforeseen effects of all of these processes acting in concert - e.g. "Black Monday" in '87, or the more recent flash crashes - during which time they continue to repeat their programming over and over, making the whole situation continuously worse, until someone steps in and breaks the circuit.

 

[constant escape]

It seems that opposition, in the traditional sense, is impossible, when it comes to capitalism. I think we can all agree there, but perhaps not. (paraphrase marx: each boundary is felt as an obstacle to be overcome, etc).

It seems like the only way to "contend" with capitalism is to grant its essence absolute truth, but to focus on optimizing its particular expression (that is, minimizing ethical/environmental/etc costs). By "essence", seeing as capitalism is ultimately an ideology, I mean growth for its own sake. Perpetually reinvesting, compounding, without ever cashing out - that would be pure capitalism, in this sense.

How does ideology function in relation to physics? This is what contending with capitalism entails. Any other kind of opposition is fruitless in the long run.

However, that is not to say that activism is fruitless period. Myriad of prospective ethical victories hang in the balance of whether or not people act. But that is far from being a long-game approach.

@vimothy thank you for clearing that up - does the point still remain intact, though? Even if the computers are not making the decisions, they are still executing the types of communications/deals to which real-world economic ramifications would be attributed, no?

 

[version]

My view is industrial anything is bad, but in practice I agree with Gaddis,

I’m frequently seen in the conservative press as being out there on the barricades shouting: Down with capitalism! I do see it in the end as really the most workable system we’ve produced. So what we’re talking about is not the system itself, but its abuses, I don’t mean criminal but the abundant abuses just within the letter of the law. The essential question is whether it can survive these abuses given free rein and whether these abuses are inherent in the system itself. I should think it is perfectly clear in my work—calling attention, satirizing these abuses—that our best hope lies in bringing things under better and more equitable control, cutting back the temptations to unmitigated greed and bemused dishonesty . . . in other words that these abuses the system has fostered are not essential, but running out of moral or ethical control can certainly threaten its survival.

 

[constant escape]

To be honest, the "imagined inevitable trajectory that they engineer" is only imaginary until it is engineered, which they have been doing. Effectively.

And to that quote's point: Can we design and implement a capitalism in which there is a ceiling for profit? At least for the vast majority of big-earners? I'm not convinced it's impossible.

 

[version]

No, but you can have a bit more discipline and regulate it more tightly.

 

[constant escape]

And even that can plausibly have pronounced benefits for the kind of excesses we associate with capitalism.

 

[constant escape]

The getting-aboard-the-rogue-train-of-capitalism-in-the-interest-of-hijacking-it approach is much more abstract/conceptual/idealistic, whereas the perpetual optimization of regulation is much more materialist, I'd say. In terms of what one argues for.

 

[vimothy]

How does ideology function in relation to physics? This is what contending with capitalism entails. Any other kind of opposition is fruitless in the long run.

that's the central accelerationist fallacy, in my view - the idea that capitalism is a runaway physical process, which you can study, like you might study rock sedimentation in nature, or light refracting down fibre-optic cables in a lab, but you can't really change in any meaningful way

 

[...]

It's good to have Vimothy back in board, even though he's a traitor and I don't recognise him.

 

[vimothy]

they seek him here, they seek him there

 

[constant escape]

that's the central accelerationist fallacy, in my view - the idea that capitalism is a runaway physical process, which you can study, like you might study rock sedimentation in nature, or light refracting down fibre-optic cables in a lab, but you can't really change in any meaningful way

It certainly seems to be a runaway physical process - or perhaps a process with physical roots and abstract branches spreading away from the ground - and I can see this being a (perhaps the) central tenet of accelerationism. But, I think, it doesn't necessarily follow that this process cannot be changed in any meaningful way (if by meaningful, you mean absolutely radical, then perhaps it cannot be changed - but I'd say there are an infinite number of meaningful changes to be made somewhere up in the branches).