Totally Datatized Tributarianism

I have written often about turning assets into data and thereby turning the “economy” (the entirety of exchanges with the center) into one of data exchange and I would like to flesh that out in the context of my previous post making an argument for tokenizing succession, which is to say, building a new kind of currency out of a very specialized kind of prediction market. My thinking about data exchange begins with the very real and often discussed situation whereby social media and other companies assetize and profit from (in fact, build entire business models on) the data acquired through the interactions between everyday users and the platform or service. I have many times seen the proposal that users should be paid for their data, which might be modeled various ways, perhaps even like the payment provided to “content producers.” Of course, the data would then have to be valued, and the value itself would have to be lower than whatever profit the company makes from its use of the data, otherwise there’s no incentive for the company to participate, making the insistence on payment for data a veiled attempt to shut down the platform or service itself. What makes someone’s data (a “piece” of data?) worth 10, 100 or 1,000$? Person A’s data worth more than person B’s? This would lead us into the question of what kinds of data AI systems most need and for which kinds of models. And this, in turn, flows into the question of what the models themselves are for—some of the answers will come from the models themselves, which might be able to tell us, more or less explicitly, what kind of data they “desire.” Perhaps a person with a very rare disorder can provide data worth far more than a perfectly and boringly normally healthy person; and, maybe, a highly skilled and trained artist can provide data worth far more than that of a hobbyist or tinkerer. Data from normal or average people (in whatever field or according to whatever measure) will surely be needed, but by definition such data will be easy to find. But once we put it this way at least one way of thinking about the terms of possible data exchanges becomes clear: what would the victim of the rare disorder want in exchange for the data he provides more than a cure or amelioration of the effects of the disorder? And what could the artist want in exchange more than data on dimensions of his art that he is still exploring? Normal and average people would have incentives to make themselves more “interesting,” i.e., better providers of data, by interacting with the world in more unexpected ways. But we’re still not talking about a data exchange that replaces the existing economy, or debt repayment to the center. To get to that point companies would fully recompense their data suppliers because the data is what they need, not some further extraction from the data. And we everyday data users and emitters would want only data, not mere money, in exchange for the data we supply.

But this formulation can remind us that money is itself already data, as are the uses we make of money. Money is most obviously a means of supplying ourselves with things we want, and so money is data regarding one’s access to various goods and services, and changes in what money will buy you is data regarding the entire supply chain and technological systems of innovation and maintenance and, as the last post insisted, therefore succession—i.e., what you can do with money at a certain moment provides you means of hedging but therefore also insuring against a decline in the predictability of succession. It might be best to say that it is the receiving of money that provides the data in the exchange, because it is there that information or knowledge is given regarding the current fluctuation in virtual succession markets, In taking a certain amount of money and giving your good or service in return I am telling you that this amount of money here and now provides a better hedge and insurance than either not taking it (and holding onto the good or withholding the service) or holding out for a better price. This raises the question of whether such information can be provided otherwise than through money—more directly or nakedly. Data that helps you prepare for future fluctuations in succession would have to be more explicitly what you want to conduct your own planning and preparations, and that planning and those preparations would have to include providing others with similarly singular data regarding succession markets. This would have to be all that we all are doing, which means a kind succession ritual governs the entire order—this is what I call “tributarianism,” or a continual donation (anthropomorphically speaking, of one’s resentment) to the center. And this in turn means that succession rituals are increasingly thoroughly saturating all institutions, which is to say, all exchanges. Everywhere we are producing candidates for succession, with many multiples of back-up candidates, but, then, also candidates for succession within the institutions ritualizing succession, which might include institutions or tributaries staffed by those who explicitly exclude themselves from orders of succession precisely in order to serve arbitration and inquiry functions that must retain full faith and credit.

I think a tributary order would consecrate memories of the horror of not just uncertain succession but of those resentful tendencies seeking to destroy succession as such, what I have referred to as the vendetta from above targeting the entire nomos. Our current crisis of succession, wherein we are approaching such mistrust in elections, the modern attempt to defer clear succession decisions and the rivalries they incite without a perpetual reordering, as to make them no longer operational, is a result of this resentment which demands that the results of past injustice cannot be allowed to stand. This resentment will have to be recognized as a constitutive human possibility, representing the resentment toward scenicity itself and the center upon which any scene must attend and append, and also repudiated with the horror and fierceness with which any “primitive” recoiled from “defilement.” Only such civilizational maturity could establish full faith and credit in data as currency in serving as tokens for the continual succession ritual that is “society.” Succession practices are the deferral of this resentment specifically, which really is Satan or Amalek or AntiChrist or any other name that might be retrieved to ensure it is commemorated with especial force.

That data tributarianism is a producerist logic or grammar is evident in the strain it puts upon discussions of consumption. In exchange for the data I provide on eating habits, nutritional effects of food consumption under my own specific conditions, variations in digestion and the metabolization of food intake, etc., I receive—food. So, we must defamiliarize “food” a bit and view it as data that my body, as a data analyst, takes in as information that is imperative, performative and indicative in the sense of initiating those very metabolic processes that will in turn provide the data needed to food producers, nutritionists, various medical professionals, and so on. My home, which enables me to provide all kinds of data regarding modes of habitation to architects, builders, designers, city planners, etc., is also data supplied in a curated form to me, enabling me to construct boundaries between inside and outside and means of protection against the elements and live in the distinctions between rooms set aside for different living practices—eating, hygiene, sleep, work, recreation, etc.—and therefore skeletal data regarding these inherited distinctions and specializations within life that I in turn add more data to for further refinement. So, as a consumer I come to see myself as a data receptor, and my enjoyment of my possessions become the pleasures of registering and inscribing upon my body and habits this constant inflow of data, which is pre-programmed data with certain affordances of use that provide me with various means of converting into new forms of data, which is also part of the pleasure of enjoying these possessions—even if things like eating, sleeping, reading a book on the porch, making love, watching TV in the living room, getting some work done before dinner, etc., etc., don’t feel all that different than they would have without refiguring them as data exchanges. Eventually, though, I think the refiguring would change the feeling, and from what standpoint would it be possible to say it wasn’t for the better, on balance? We might develop the sensibilities and appreciation of nuance and the implications of minute swerves as a late Henry James novel and with less verbosity (or more, for that matter).

My description of all interchanges with our natural and social ecologies as data exchanges is both a revisioning of the present, what we are already, or always already, doing, as well as preparation for a transition to tributarianism, and this is in accord with what might be seen as a stylistic decision I work to make available within center study: that to the extent possible descriptions of what we should or might be doing are really just more precise, penetrating and generous revelations of what we are already doing. We always want to retrieve and reenact the originary scene or, really, extend it, by taking in all the material on desire and resentment or the possible articulations of all the grammatical categories generated in the meantime. Money and various forms of production and consumption are already data for many relevant purposes, so I’m just proposing a continual extension of the purposes for which they can be considered data to the point where it is just data and not considered as such. At that point, data would be so transparent that we could no longer see it as data, but only as various lineages and their projections within succession markets. In noticing, registering and inscribing particular events in a particular way I am directly arranging my relationships with various fields of art, science and engineering, summoning forth particular possibilities and therefore particular candidates to step to the fore in those arenas. And this summoning is a kind of petition, and being at the intersections of petitional crossroads is what it means to be fully datatized, to be like one of those ethereal images one sees in certain kinds of art where bodies or other forms of matter are laid out explicitly as or dissolved into physical and biological processes, and ultimately as numbers and vectorizations.

The succession markets I’ve been referring to are the prediction markets hypothesized in the Tokenizing Succession post, and that are to serve as currency in the tributarian order. We can add to the juridical events I’ve been centering disciplinary events, i.e., the results of experiments that would then have to be formulated and conducted with sufficient precision so that a binary or gradated result can be confirmed authoritatively and with sufficient adventuresomeness that the outcomes are genuinely uncertain and therefore staking a future on. As the results of disciplinary work increase their interfaces (of which there are already of course many) with juridical and distributary (ritual) modes of exchange to place a bet on a particular experiment, or cluster of experiments, or trajectory of inquiry (think of how such terms would need to be clarified by companies on the succession market to serve as sources of currency) would be to further bet on a wide range of other events, of scenic designings, that such a course of inquiry would incline to. And then one can direct the data one emits to that set of exchange relations and receive in return as part of one’s supply of data, one’s data portion, running results of the outcomes of trials which play into the shaping of one’s own data. The various systems can be open source because they are extremely time-sensitive so data becomes intrinsically “proprietary” without being formally so since its proprietary nature lies in in its present “pricing” on the succession market (“pricing” meaning its direct draw of data providers seeking exchanges). We become as hungry for data as the AIs are sometimes said to be because we are data, as of course we are, and some forms of data consume other forms like some forms of life consume other forms of life and we are also inscriptions of succession practices as we already are and inscriptions of succession practices and data are just two sides of the same Mobius Strip, which can provide a richer account of everything that we do and are than any other discourse.