Re: <nettime> Live Your Models

[Rob Myers <rob@robmyers.org>]

On Tue, 3 May 2016, at 01:31 PM, Florian Cramer wrote:

>    [...]
>    Bitcoin repeats the history of so-called "neoliberalism" precisely
>    because it _is_ neoliberalism (in the sense we understand the word
>    today), in its most extreme form of libertarian anarcho-capitalism. In
>    fact, it is based on the very same economic theories and theorists.
>    All of it can be read up in Hayek's books.

This is true but the dynamics of Bitcoin *adoption* and of Bitcoin as a
technological and imaginative *resource* for non-Hayekians cannot be
reduced to it.

There's a lot of technological determinism in left critiques of
Bitcoin...

> [...]
>    I was referring to Srnicek/Williams, Graeber (and implicitly: Bob
>    Black, the Situationists and other leftist thinkers) who still believe
>    that automation will abolish work and hence capitalism. From my
>    perspective, this expectation is based on naive cyber utopias; the
>    same naive cyber utopias that are nowadays propagated by the
>    'Singularity'/transhumanist movement and popular figures like Jeremy
>    Rifkin

Srnicek & Williams are calling for full automation and (welfare state)
UBI precisely because they know that automation as currently pursued
*won't* abolish work and therefore capitalism. It's an attempt to seize
the initiative (as part of a wider project).

Nick Land regards this kind of thing as an off-ramp on the way to the
Singularity, so these ideas cannot be lumped together too neatly.

The realization of a right-Transhumanism is pretty much inevitable
thanks to the US Military's emphasis on NBIC. And we're all cyborgs now
anyway. We just live in a naive cyber dystopia.

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