Digital Socialism?

tags

Socialism

Notes

Despite the growing ‘tech-lash’ against the faangs, capitalist thinkers still look to Silicon Valley and its culture with a glimmer of hope.

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once it is efficiently utilized throughout the economy, Big Data will not just reinvent capitalism—the English title is too modest on this point—but end it.

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data will supplant the price system as the economy’s chief organizing principle.

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‘the principal problem that faces the socialist ideal is that we do not know how to design the machinery that would make it run.’

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the most successful modern capitalist enterprises, from Amazon to Walmart, excel at planning

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claim that the price signals of today’s data-saturated markets, where venture capitalists, sovereign-wealth funds and deep- pocketed tech platforms subsidize services to the point where no one really knows what they cost

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relations between knowledge, price and social coordina- tion

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For the price system is a blunt instrument, the authors contend. It compresses the complex, multidimensional preferences of market participants into a single number, often eliminating nuance and detail, which can result in sub-optimal transactions.

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match-making criteria that go far beyond price

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another variation of the ‘New Deal on Data’: tech firms should be forced by law to share (some) feedback data with other startups and public actors.

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he believed that the imperative of capital accumulation in the face of constant competition was the key, not money as such.

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one would be hard-pressed to conclude that the proliferation of data-intensive digital commodities and services fundamentally alters the terms and dynamics of capital accumulation.

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lion’s share of the banks’ tech-related expenditure goes into maintaining legacy systems, rather than genuine research and development.

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books that are nominally about the future of capitalism, but offer, at best, depictions of observed regularities in how capitalist firms expand their stocks of capital to include data.

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The neoclassical framework makes some rather dubious assumptions about prices and information—a consequence of its surreal view of competition.

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it’s no longer necessary to condense information—one can just use it.

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Does the price system ‘convey’ knowledge? Not really. A more fitting title for Hayek’s famous essay would be ‘The Non-Use of Knowledge in Society’, for he insists that the price system works so well precisely because economic actors do not need to know much about the world to act effectively in it.

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this snapshot con- tains and communicates ‘knowledge’, but that ‘knowledge’ is certainly not a total sum, to be disaggregated and rearranged at will, of the individual ‘knowledges’

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Such an elegant and information-light arrangement as the price mechanism can only work because much of the actual complexity of competition is handled and reduced elsewhere in the economic system.

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broader norms, customs and rules of capitalism, long internalized by market participants

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Second, in addition to the price system, capitalist society also has systems for communicating broader non-price knowledge, which shape the dynamics of competition before market exchange takes place.

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advertising and the press, as well as more informal mechanisms.

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ensures social coordination even when our familiarity with the actual commodities is scarce or non-existent.

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digital economy simply formalizes and improves earlier processes of opinion formation

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That prices have informational meaning for market participants—meaning which is itself contingent upon them internalizing the basic laws of capitalism—doesn’t stop them acquiring other forms of information

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for Hayek, it was not just a matter of how well or efficiently each system could collect the same data. There was no equivalence between the data processed by the two systems: the price system worked so efficiently only because capitalism did the rest.

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the price system was only as efficient as Hayek had claimed under very specific conditions.

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there is a place for economists to help in understanding how to design markets’. But why bother design- ing them at all? Because, argues Roth, in real life all sorts of unexpected factors might derail the Walrasian process of tâtonnement

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It is not that price is losing ground to information; rather, solutions to social problems that are based on the logic of the law—and so on collective frameworks, subject to democratic revision—are los- ing ground to solutions based on the logic of the market, tailored to the atomized figure of the consumer.

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The rigidity of taxi fares was not a consequence of flawed assumptions about price and information, but a reflection of the legal conditions imposed on the cab owners: what they knew about passengers or changing market conditions was irrelevant, as they were legally compelled to offer the same service, at the same rates, to everyone. Solidarity for citizens, yes—but, from the perspective of startups, those were times of extreme information poverty.

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The shift to ‘governing by numbers’, as Alain Supiot describes it, reverses that drain and might even increase market efficiency.25 But this is achieved at the cost of eliminating certain rights—and, along with them, an entire mode of thinking about social coordination in terms of solidarity-based institutions like the law.

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defend the law—and the spirit of solidarity that informs it—against the assault of feedback-driven governance.

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find ways to deploy ‘feedback infrastructure’ for new, non-market forms of social coordina- tion, thus challenging neoliberalism with the very tools it has helped to produce.

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1. Solidarity as discovery procedure

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Digital ‘feedback infrastructure’ could be used to flag social problems and even to facilitate deliberation around them, by presenting different conceptual approaches to the issues involved.

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To believe that capitalist competition will always yield more knowledge than other discovery pro- cedures requires us to believe, for example, that we learn more about the world when we act as consumers than when we act as parents, students or citizens; and that our human needs are better expressed in the con- sumerist language of competition than in any other terms.

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2. Designing ‘non-markets’

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the more transacting parties there are, and the more prefer- ences they express, the greater the complexity of the matching process.

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The legacy of cybernetics is relevant here.

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According to Beer, there are two ways to tame complexity. First, one can make the internal behaviour of the vested spontaneous orders more uni- form, by way of rules, standards, ethical prohibitions and so on; Beer called this ‘variety attenuation’. Second, one can try to detect emerging complexity early on, re-engineer the underlying organizational structure to deal with it—and, instead of standardizing the responses of individual components, give them as much autonomy and power in overcoming their own local manifestations of complexity as possible.

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imperatives and prescriptions imposed on local ‘spontaneous orders’ by capitalist competition—one of the outermost layers of the total social system— could also greatly constrain the adaptive and problem-solving capacity of the local ‘homeostats’.

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Beer argued that advances in information technology could drastically amplify ‘regulative variety’ while pushing ‘variety attenuation’ to the lowest possible levels of the system, where it would cause the least dam- age.

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the ambi- tion is for radical democracy to join forces with ‘radical bureaucracy’ in order to take advantage of advanced infrastructures for planning, simu- lation and coordination.

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3. Decentralized planning

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With a different funding model, one could democratize access to ai, while also getting more value for each dollar invested. Free, universal access to both additive manufactur- ing and artificial intelligence could facilitate the production of genuinely innovative products on a relatively low budget.

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‘guild socialism’ in the era of Big Data

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At the centre of his system stands a General Catalogue, something of a mix between Amazon and Google, where producers, who are organized in guild-like ‘worker councils’— worker-run startups if you will—list their products and services

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Consumers, equipped with a unique digital id card, turn to the catalogue to register their needs

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bonuses are given for buying fewer items than the average consumer

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should not waste time debating the merits of the price mechanism in isolation from its embeddedness in the broader system of capitalist competition

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After the neoliberal turn, competition is increasingly becoming a non-discov- ery procedure.

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focus on preserving and expanding the ecology of different modes of social coordination, while also documenting the heavy costs—including on discovery itself—of discovering exclusively via competition.

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