Data as Currency

Money started off as a way of managing distanced distribution from the center—providing tokens of contributions or expected contributions to the center by social participants in sustained cooperative projects (which is what any social order essentially is). Specifically capitalist uses of money result from the center licensing moneyed agents to lend money to the center, which places the creation of money in control of those moneyed agents, makes the government dependent upon the money-making capacity of those agents, and leads to the propaganda promoting self-interest as the generative logic of social order and wealth. Turning the social order back into a collaborative project, then, taking into account the technology and means of communication and information creation, preservation and dissemination now available therefore entails thinking through the abolition of money, which can only serve centripetal purposes.

This means thinking through the question of measuring and recognizing contributions to the social order by individuals and institutions. We already have a direct and fully functioning way of doing this: data collection, preservation and analysis. Data now functions, of course, in a way fully contained by the monetary system: so, we have free internet and social media because the owners of these media can make enormous amounts of money by selling our data to those who will sell us things for money. So, data is already working as currency here, in a manner subordinated to the currency generated by state-bank interactions, meaning we can pose the question of whether data can function as currency in such a way as to replace money. Let’s pose directly the kinds of questions that would need to be answered (or “disabled”) in that case: what would it mean to receive your salary in data? To save data for later use? To, say, buy groceries with data? How is data enabling one to command the use of others’ labor? How would data serve as a basis for calculating, say, the cost of an operation and hospital stay? And no doubt other questions would quickly emerge—but not, at least, how to arbitrage the use of data, or to gamble on its fluctuations.

We give off data incessantly and, of course, what counts as data depends upon what questions are asked, pursuant to what hypotheses, tied to which recording and measuring devices (that is, what will count as an ostensive sign), within what disciplinary space. So, each of us and, in fact, everything in the universe, is giving all kinds of different data simultaneously, to different recorders, collectors, archivers and inquirers. We are always donating samples, and each and every one of us is a sample, and a sample of samples. Not all data is quantifiable, and a proper understanding of data would pay close attention to the specific spaces within which data is organized—if you greet someone, you are supplying someone with data regarding your intentions, likely subsequent actions, interpretation of their greeting, etc. You probably don’t think about it in that way, but you could, and without any necessary diminishment of the encounter or relationship. So, all discourse and knowledge can be rerouted into data, which is why we can simplify things by referring to “selves” and ‘signs” as “samples.” (That there is nothing intrinsically “dehumanizing” about this is demonstrated by the irreducibly comic or satiric dimension such talk will have, along with its high seriousness.) Every interaction (even every solitary action, which must have some effect in the world) is therefore already an exchange of data—as I suggested in the paragraph above, thus far these exchanges of data have been framed within pre-datafied terms, like money, making the problem, again, how to make data exchanges all-inclusive. Since money itself is recorder and accumulator of data, it’s really a question of diminishing until the vanishing point everything in money that claims a stake external to the production and use of data (to produce data is to use it, to use it is to produce it). To anticipate, this involves the conversion of assets into samples.

I’m presupposing here an order dominated by hypotheses, pedagogy and inquiry; or, “practices” in the sense in which I’ve been using the term (a use indebted but not identical to Alasdair MacIntyre’s). A practice is “doing” something such that you can show afterwards (or, for that matter, in the enactment) that it was in fact done. A practice carries markers of its identification and assessment. If someone is “learning” something we could identify some boundary between what was known before and what was known after the “learning,” and we could point to something that was done so as to produce the difference. We might disagree, but we could agree on what we’re looking for. Practices are ultimately grounded in language, which always carries with it its own means of “authentification”: we can always discuss meaningfully what it means to follow a command, conduct a conversation, lead the way, answer a question, and so on and when we do any of things we enact a hypothesis regarding the meaning of the word, expression or discourse under the conditions of its enactment. Wherever you are, whomever you’re with, and whatever you’re doing you can always further perfect your practice and those of others. Any practice provides for its successor, he or those who will continue, repurpose, further embed and perfect that practice.

Practices are always dependent upon broader fields of practices, the framing, shaping, interfering with, and interfacing with therefore becomes part of the practice itself. Your practices involve the increasingly refined collection and conversion of data, while also giving off lots of data: the more perfect the practice, the more it gives off both data that can be used to replicate and expand the practice and data that can serve the study of practices more generally. An innovative and successful military leader will produce a generation of successful military leaders, as well as a broader, more generative military culture, and also lots of material for students of warfare but also students of discipline, training, self-mastering differing levels of thinking, and so on. The leadership of any social order will want to devote the needed resources to practices like this, and practices like this will attract the most intelligent, disciplined and ambitious social elements. Other practices, institutionalized across the social order, will emulate and strive to outdo such practices. In a sense, this means a constant struggle for primacy within a social order, but since the practices are not equivalent the competition is not a straightforward one for mastery. In a few key institutions that may be the case, but victory, primacy and mastery take on different forms: let’s say the leadership of the Church strives with the military leadership for mastery within a given social order—is it to be a military aristocracy or a “theocracy”? The Church’s way of striving is not that of the military, though, and if it is to attain mastery it must be in a way that shapes and constrains the mastery striven for by the military hierarchy—ultimately creating an order in which neither military nor Church dominates, but in which a specific form of “Church militant” rules. We must, of course, factor into the analysis other elites, such as business, scientific, technological, educational and so on, so as to identify a particular synthesis in which each institution attains its form of primacy within the “stack.” Standing on top of the stack is the occupant of the center “curating” the “idiom of intelligence” that results from this specific stack (which in turn might enter into other, transnational or imperial stacks).

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. We can assume universal circulation and availability of all data—the very thing that terrifies people now within a malevolent order but would be completely appropriate, desirable and a matter of course in a society governed in accord with “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” A particular type of “needy” person would attract the interest of people with specific abilities, as even now certain students gravitate towards special education. Since everyone is formalized within various institutions in various ways (included families and kinship networks, which give off and use data in their own ways), practices of recruitment and initiation would place people more effectively than differences in salary offered. We don’t have to imagine hyper-organized social structures here: even if there were space provided for rural living, individual farming, and ways of living off the grid, sufficient data would be given off by those practices so as to acknowledge them formally. From an individual standpoint, you’re providing both inadvertent data (e.g., regarding your health, consumption patterns, personal interactions) and more deliberately produced data from those practices you’re trying to perfect as a model or starting point for others. In return, other institutions, will orient themselves towards your nutritional needs, health care needs, information regarding family formation, etc., and the data you’re provided with here is also provided to those participating in the perfection of practices of medicine, counseling, and so on, with, somewhere down the line, these being your own practices as well. Everyone supplies at least some data, and can therefore make some claim upon the attention of those whose practices rely on gathering that form of data and data in that form.

So, you don’t receive a salary and go to the store to buy things—the data you give off attracts and activates others situated within other institutions who are thereby oriented toward meeting your needs and drawing upon your abilities. Those institutions to whom you supply particularly important data supply data to other units so as to meet your needs and a range of needs “similar” to yours. You don’t save money, have credit lines, pensions, etc.—your life-long trajectory is itself a practice of data “harvesting” which designers of homes, neighborhoods, towns and cities draw upon in proposing and implementing ways of living corresponding to specific trajectories. Everyone, after all, is intensely interested in materializing life narratives. You wouldn’t have “rights” to anything—“rights” are a kind of political equivalent to “assets”—but a social order of hypothesized practices would place a premium on designing new and increasingly refined, precise and comprehensive uses of data, and this would create practices of treating people on both collective and individual levels far better than can provided by any norms of “justice” or “fairness.” I wouldn’t call this a “technocracy” because it can be acknowledged that data is always locally situated, and those “handling” it immediately are always, at least to some extent, better judges of how to assess it than those more distant or privileged to be able to second-guess after the fact. Clearly, a shift in anthropological assumptions is required here—rather than assuming that everyone first of all “looks out for themselves,” we’d need to assume that first of all everyone emulates models. And, then, we’d contribute to creation of a social order in which that assumption is fortified as fact.

Data, then, is currency in the sense of being the means of (largely indirect) exchange. We only need to make the assumption that wanting to live within our language provides sufficient motivation for participating in socially beneficial activities. The fundamental assumption here derives from the originary hypothesis itself, which suggests that participation in the paradoxicality of the utterance is the quintessence of the human—it is this assumption that enables us to consider singularized succession in perpetuity as the most promising mode of organizing order—around the emergence of new, anticipated, but always surprising successors/samples. The “miracle” that we can see and show each other same thing even though it has never presented itself before provides for the ever tended to designs for deferring violence—hence enabling the culture of emulation referred to in the previous paragraph to continue. Now, the outcome I’m presenting here only takes on its value, and, indeed, is specially designed for, the identification of such practices and data packets within the present order—the broader historical assumption, the most ecumenical one possible, which I argued for in Anthropomorphics, is that humans have not yet solved the problem created by the human occupation of the sacred center, including in its successive attempts through sacral kingship, divine kingship, republican government (the “few” organized against both the “one” and the “many”) popular sovereignty as mediated through the social scientific disciplines, and so on. We’re just joining the previous generations in trying to solve the problem of how the center should be occupied and maintained, now in the wake of ample data regarding previous attempts—and all that data is now available to us as we work to transform the energy and intelligence invested in these previous attempts and still residing in their current iterations to the provision of data for the excavation of the elements of singularized succession in perpetuity.

The basic unit of the capitalist social order is the “asset”—an “asset” is whatever can be, to use Nitzan and Bichler’s terms, discounted against expected future earnings—i.e., the difference between the money you have to spend to own it now versus the money you could sell it for at some future time. The entire social, legal, political and ideological order is organized around the conversion of practices and their products into assets and certitude regarding ownership and control over those assets. A piece of land can be an asset, a factory can be an asset, a stock can be an asset, a part ownership in the contract of an entertainer can be an asset. Assets can be leveraged so as to acquire more assets, and so as to secure the conditions under which assets in those particular forms will be more highly valued and protected. A specific kind of state-capitalist synthesis emerges in which the state mobilizes its assets to ensure a world of assetization or to survive and flourish within limits in the world dominated by states maximally exploiting the asset form. We can see the division and reduction of practices into assets everywhere—assetization bureaucratically impinges upon and deforms virtually every practice, down through the very language used to describe and. promote it. Now, assets are, of course, like everything else, already data, but the asset form prevents them from becoming fuller-fledged sources of data for a wider range of practices—whether by restricting their use and the experiments that can performed with them, or by creating forms of data that really function as data within the existing financial system. The conversion of assets into data involves first of all displaying the capital power invested and congealed within a particular asset—a song, a sporting event, a novel, a scientific discovery is real enough, and sometimes good or valuable, sometimes bad or trivial, but it is at the same time a screen against which the capital as power constraining the practice is made visible. Such a practice consistently resists capture by assetization and therefore represents one particular passage out of it.

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. 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. You could never completely evade or replace the existing form of state sponsored currency in this way, but you could put enormous pressure on it and compete with it as you seek to destroy the other parties that must associate themselves with an increasingly despised form or currency and the assetization it serves to protect. In the US, a very clear program for taking over the Republican party, already riven with struggles between the “establishment” and “American Firsters” (itself a kind of struggle of richer practices against assetization), could be designed, and one which would involve extremely productive and fraternal exchanges with the growing American First wing. All interventions and the conversations they create will be, in turn, rich sources of data for the scenic design of party practices of mobilization, intervention, demonstration, attack and defense.