Data Exchange

If markets are made, they can be made in more deliberate and constrained ways; if they can be made increasingly constrained and purposeful, they will in effect be replaced. Money is already data, insofar as it provides us with information regarding relations of dependency and the capacity to mobilize resources; so, that data can be made increasingly explicit in non-monetary forms, in which case money can also be replaced by exchanges of data. The cutting edge of the replacement of markets and money is the already existing data exchanges that are increasingly prevalent. We all know how it works: all of our activities are monitored in one way or another, with the online activities most obviously so; this monitoring leads to massive amounts of data collection; this data it put through machine learning algorithms so that our habits can be analyzed and our behavior predicted by governments and companies for surveillance and advertising purposes. Right now, governments take our data and offer us, in theory at least, security in exchange; companies either give us nothing or allow us free use of apps and free access to sites. The exchanges with government are already non-monetary, so all that would need to be done here is make the provision of security real and commensurate to the data taken. If someone thinks that’s impossible, they can keep coming up with ideas for preserving privacy and concealing yourself from governing agencies. That seems to me impossible, so I will stick with the insistence that we must make government, or at least governance, good, and assume that we can have security agencies that focus on deferring the vendetta from below and avoid getting caught up in vendettas from above; health care bodies that can honestly look at data and keep providing us with knowledge of and access to the best conditions regarding our health care possibilities; environmental governing bodies that can seek to preserve our natural environment, keep pollution at the lowest possible levels, maybe even enhance our “communications” with nature, and so on. We give them the data they need for all that, and they provide these services. We can even, individually and through organizations, prepare and provide more useful data and in return receive access to services that enable us, in turn, to continue to present ourselves as data sources. This is really no different than the relation between a scout or spy and the larger expedition he serves.

Food may be data, but most data is inedible. The governing agencies receive the data they need to perform their functions, but how are they fed, housed, clothed, etc.; and since we consider all of us to part of the governing agencies the question is a general one of circulation of goods and services. Well, those who farm and provide food need security, health care, and a clean environment, and since all these needs can be reduced to calculation (whatever feedback is provided by the users) this is all data exchange as well: a cattle rancher needs the conditions under which he can supply butchers a certain number of cattle, so those butchers can supply wholesalers with a certain amount of beef and so on. So, if we imagine these transactions being conducted without money, are we imagining some kind of barter system? No, but if no, there must be some medium of exchange, some means of exchanging, recording and satisfactorily fulfilling promises, to speak in Brett Scott’s terms. As always, let’s try and stay as close as possible to existing institutional arrangements, in part to keep our thinking honest and in part because any substantive change we can imagine will result from turning existing institutions inside out, so to speak—making explicit and directly transferable data that is still walled up in assets, which means making those with assets officers with a certain realm of command.

A lot of exchange, and especially on the largest scale, takes place without the direct exchange of money. If one large company has steady suppliers, the movement of goods and performance of services can take place with nothing more than adjustments in bank accounts. The more reliable the suppliers in your supply chain relative to alternative sources, the less often you will need to revisit the terms of the exchange—monopolies would organize supply chains with the greatest ease. But monopolies are never sufficiently monopole, and must always keep an eye out even for distant or potential competitors. They must invest in ensuring that governing institutions due not provide favorable conditions for actual or possible competitors, and that financial institutions provide the outside spread they need to keep investing. To provide data on the position of challengers and back-up capacity to provide capacity (to mobilize credit or “confidence” on one’s behalf) money is presently necessary. The question, then, is how to provide for what is really succession in a given industry (whether it be continuity of existing large firms or a transfer of power to newcomers) and confidence in the surrounding industries without money? The answer I have so far is teams and something like a subscription system: companies are converted into teams of operators who subscribe to other teams to supply them and those teams subscribe to other teams until everyone is all subscribed up. So far, this sounds like a kind of more complex and indirect barter system, and to make it something else we need to account for the break-up of the monopolistic conditions implicit in these arrangements, something which must occur if, as the name implies, teams are free to subscribe or unsubscribe. New teams, we can assume, will emerge from split-offs from existing teams—if subscribers are dissatisfied with a particular subscriber, a “dissident” teams from within that team would propose a new set of arrangements. (At a certain point it will be helpful to imagine how all this will take place on the blockchain.)

But now we have to step more completely outside of capitalism and consider how the teams are to keep supplying themselves with new “players.” The logic of providing for educational systems need not deviate from the subscription logic I’ve outlined here but I’m going to assume that the situation is complicated by the need, in an order with a constantly transformed infrastructure, to have an especially variable education system—in educating the kinds of team members who will be needed a couple of decades down the line when no one really knows exactly what innovations in the meantime will look like you would need to think in terms of targeting highly general and transferable capacities and dispositions, and some of the most interesting research in such a social order will involve which pedagogical practices are likely to yield which results. This will be especially interesting because it will be the most uncertain and risky part of the social order, and either directing or predicting which pedagogical practices will turn out the best team members will require prognostications akin to those highly refined and computational ones that currently go in to estimated the future prices of derivatives. So, teams across the board will be competing with each other in a controlled way (through the testing of split-offs) for subscribers but more fundamentally over which pedagogical practices will yield the best future team members. Indeed, pedagogical practices can be sliced up into pieces and assessed at various levels, and one could imagine a team looking forward to gaining access to some students at one institution on a particular track, and other students on a particular track at another institution, and so on. And they would mobilize the subscriptions needed to maintain those tracks, in exchange for something like “draft choices” in professional sports leagues. This would of course be an offense against the freedom of students to choose from among various possible employers but, again, the situation would not be all that different from what we have now, where the best students have many choices while still being constrained by the degree to which their abilities and interests match a few prestigious firms, while everyone else more or less gets what they can. So, money, in all its forms, is replaced by bets on the future that take the concrete form of using the credit one’s team has with other teams to channel and adapt subscriptions to the pedagogical practices deemed most likely to provide the future team members most like to increase that team’s credit. As the technoscene continues to “tabernacle” more and more of our social practices through the creation of stacks of pedagogical platforms and succession practices, not only will bets be laid on particular pedagogical practices but on particular pedagogical practices designed so as to produce other pedagogical practices, and so on. So, as a professional teacher, I have managed to propose a reorganization of the entire social order around my profession, but in exchange I propose the complete breaking up of educational institutions as such and the generalization of pedagogy as the social ordering principle. Authority, sociality, knowledge, and continuity all come together here, and provide the equivalent of currency as well. A new split-off bidding to replace an established team can offer, as something like collateral, a schema for tracking current and anticipating future pedagogical practices, offering the credit a novel and plausible approach would provide to the prospective subscriber.

Working to turn the current order inside-out, then, would involve converting asset exchanges into data exchanges by shaping exchanges, to the extent possible, on the model of extending the reach of the pedagogical derivative. How far into the future can you buy a derivative? Let’s imagine writing up a futures contract that will end in an exchange conducted 50 years from now. 100 years. For such a contract to be meaningful you’d have to assume a great deal of continuity in the institutions enabling such an exchange—that the goods or services involved in the exchange will still exist in recognizable form, that there will be those able to recognize it in a way that others will recognize sufficiently so that the exchange can be repeated, that something “like” today’s legal and political institutions will still exist (or that there will be those able to make an authoritative decision regarding the legitimacy of the exchange who can establish markers of continuity extending back to them). Would anyone accept a pension that will pay off their descendants in 150 years? But with pedagogical derivatives, such a thing is possible, if you position yourself in relation to institutions in such a way that you single out that which in the semiotics of the institution will defer the noise always on the verge of engulfing any message. Well, how does one do that? First, here’s how you don’t do it: take as given and fixed reified concepts developed after the fact to institutionalize and museumize the results of activities undertake under very different auspices. For example, “preserving Western civilization”—this is the language of mummification. The people who created Western civilization weren’t “creating Western civilization.” You must break down the “furnishings” that have been passed down into you in scenes and articulate those scenes into stacks of pedagogical platforms. The best model here is still the sequence of emergence of linguistic forms from The Origin of Language: in the midst of a not-quite-cataclysmic crisis you construct the scene by taking an inappropriate ostensive (even such as vague gesturings towards “Western Civilization”) and turn them into imperatives. You keep showing how converting all the potentially veering into the gutter inappropriate ostensives surrounding us into commands, or requests, for linguistic presence, can be done.

Fitting something that no one had realized was misfit is eminently commemorable. It’s like seeing the human world as composed of incomplete gestures that need to be fit to each other to be completed. Then, it’s a question of the scenic arrangement to do that. Such a practice is the origin of any ritual, and the only source of continuity in an order centrifugal to ritual. The best way I can think of to institutionalize this today is through the making of markets, as I’ve been proposing in recent posts, that would anticipate the dissolution of markets into pedagogical derivatives. This must involve, one way or another, setting up bets on the outcome of events that presuppose the possibility of a broker who can be trusted on all sides to name the event and constitute its boundaries—boundaries that are ritual, juridical, and disciplinary. Betting on a sporting event is easy, at least as long as we can be assured the event is not fixed—games have a specific, rule-governed structure so that, for example, when on player has won the 6^th game in a set after winning two previous sets there is no question of the outcome—we might be inclined to complain about some calls by linesmen, but that’s “priced in.” The closest thing in the social world is an election, but what would count as an economic event, a cultural event, an aesthetic event or a political event other than an election (even there the boundaries are getting frayed) such that millions of people could bet on the outcome and be satisfied enough with the results, even if they lose, that they would place future bets with that outfit? That outfit, and contenders that would emerge, are the precursors of pedagogical derivatives, as they would place all ritual, juridical and disciplinary practices in a scene that would strip all the furnishings and leave only the scenic design practices. If you interrupt the flow of some routine with a gesture of presence that can only be completed within an event joined by those interrupted, you are such an outfit. And what massive data flows you will be sending back to the center!