Esiod 2015: The Voice of Financial Singularity [draft] Matteo Pasquinelli Apparatuses were invented to simulate specific thought processes. Only now (following the invention of the computer), and as it were with hindsight, it is becoming clear what kind of thought processes we are dealing with in the case of all apparatuses. That is: thinking expressed in numbers. All apparatuses (not just computers) are calculating machines and in this sense ‘artificial intelligences’, the camera included, even if their inventors were not able to account for this. In all apparatuses (including the camera), thinking in numbers overrides linear, historical thinking. — Vilém Flusser, 1983.1 Camera on: computational capitalism In 1983 the philosopher Vilém Flusser defined the camera as “computational thinking flowing into hardware”, just by considering the laws of optics and mechanics that are necessary to build such a device and translate light forms in physical memory.2 The camera thinks, any time the shutter shuts. This intuition became trivial as the gears of digital cameras, across the 1990s, started to encage photons in the concrete abstractions of ever faster Turing machines. As the media theorist Jonathan Beller explains, the calculus of the technical image maintains an organic relation with the calculus of the attention economy in the mass media society.3 A logical evolution can be traced between the cinematic mode of production of Fordism and what Beller refers to as the computational capital of the digital age.4 The abstractions that are necessary to build technical, optical and cinematic artefacts continue in the ones that are found in the design of technical institutions, including financial ones. Flusser considered machines, though, blind and subhuman automata, while apparatuses (also institutional ones) would be technical games [Spielzeug] that “simulate thought”, as they are able to morph and adapt to a new situation.5 From the outside, institutions appear to breath and think. The movie Esiod 2015 by Clemens von Wedemeyer is an exploration of financial institutions qua artificial intelligence in the age of cinema qua artificial intelligence.6 Paraphrasing an old saying by Gilles Deleuze on cinema, we may add: “the computational brain is the screen”.7 The Singularity is already here Technological Singularity is the myth of intelligent machines that would reach such a degree of computation power and networking to show the emergent property of superintelligence beyond human control. Some futurists believe that these autonomous machines will possess even biomorphic consciousness (but consciousness of what? Singularity enthusiasts never clarify the arrow of machine intentionality). Before its formulation by the novelist Vernor Vinge in a 1993 paper for NASA (that gives a clear idea on the intimate relation between space exploration and mass entertainment in USA), the idea of Singularity has been a trope in science fiction.8 The idea of an “intelligence explosion” was introduced in the early sixties by Irving Good, an advisor of Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and former assistant of Alan Turing (who speculated himself on the possibility of “constructing a thinking machine” in 1950).9 The most famous evangelist of the Singularity is Ray Kurzweil (today Director of Engineering at Google), who dedicated many books to the topic, such as The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil advocates the Singularity as a leap towards a symbiosis between humans and machines that will completely uproot old-fashioned humanism.10 As the cultural critic Steven Shaviro noticed, “in striking contrast to any other utopian fiction, Kurzweil spends scarcely a paragraph in his more-than-600pages-long tome discussing social and political issues… Kurzweil supposes that the onward march of technology will produce the society of plenitude, all by itself—so long as government bureaucrats and religious fundamentalists do not interfere with entrepreneurial innovation”.11 Shaviro unveils the untold of the Singularity narrative, that is the financialization of life and precarization of labour that grew in parallel to the rise of intelligent machines: “The Singularity is actually a fantasy of financial capital, in both senses of the genitive. It's the closest we can come to a master narrative in this neoliberal, post-Fordist age of flexible accumulation and massive virtual monetary flows”. Looking around at the ruins left behind by digital capitalism after the 2000 dot-com crash, Shaviro concludes: “the Singularity is already here”. Specifically, against Kurzweil who predicts that the Singularity will occur around the year 2049, Shaviro anchors it to an event of monetary policy that happened in the century before: Perhaps the Singularity happened on August 15, 1971, when President Nixon suspended the gold standard, thus opening the way for the fantasmatic flows of currency speculation and trade in derivatives. Similarly, the movie Esiod 2015 imagines that the Singularity will be a financial one and will occur in a very empirical way, under the familiar disguise of a fully automated bank, that is as a natural evolution of the current institutions of computation. A bank of today is already a “gigantic tangle of algorithms, with humans turning the knobs here and there” and in the future we can only expect a further integration of capital’s calculus with Turing’s universe.12 More recently, the development of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and protocols for Smart Contracts such as Ethereum demonstrate furthermore that a bank can be turned into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that could get rid easily not just of employees but also of managers and functionaries. In Esiod 2015 the bank is, yes, an autonomous artificial intelligence but one that needs to continuously syphon human memories in its database in order to grow. Like a bank, artificial intelligence is built on the generations of humans that preceded and fed it. The ‘invisible mind’ of the old market Markets are a place of artificious intelligence since a long time.13 The economist Friedrich Hayek, godfathers of the Chicago School, believed that the market is the ground of a preconscious and transindividual knowledge that needs neither state centralisation (like in socialist planning) nor formulation in objective economic laws. The infrarationality of the market is for Hayek beyond the comprehension of the individual as much as the state: “The economic problem is […] a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality”. 14 Hayek’s idealism castigated also statistics (see his polemic with Milton Friedman) and, in this way, implicitly, the ambitions of computation: [The] sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form.15 Hayek believed that even a computer (“system of telecommunications” in his words: he was writing in 1945) able to coordinate the whole market and calculate commodity prices in real time would be inaccurate and useless as prices are the best signal to condense and transmit all the necessary economic information. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.16 Hayek was probably the first to introduce a modern (i.e. functional) definition of information and to describe the market as a cognitive apparatus in a strong similarity with early cybernetics and long before the theories of knowledge society and cognitive capitalism.17 It must be remembered that Claude Shannon introduces the mathematical measure of information only in 1948,18 the same year in which Norbert Wiener publishes his book Cybernetics.19 The expression ‘invisible hand’ is used since Adam Smith to describe the virtue of free market, but the expression ‘invisible mind’ would be more appropriate as such a ‘hand’ requires continuous coordination. In Hayek’s vision, the market is run by a general intellect that is not objectified in any machine. Hayek’s idealism will be castigated and contradicted by Turing’s universe and the rise of computational capitalism. Today, companies like Uber and Airbnb have actually managed to centralise price calculation in real time: their databases can picture their markets globally and adjust prices instantly. Computational capitalism is the rise of a third paradigm: the nightmares of both centralised planning and free-market deregulation come true under one master algorithm. From data banks to the financial Singularity The expression ‘data bank’ was an early metaphor of computer science that was discontinued in favour of the most popular term database. Yet ‘data bank’ envisioned the destiny of information technologies truthfully, as information was about to become the capital of the 21st century. This happened in two ways that are usually not properly distinguished. Large datasets about the state of economy and stock markets became a crucial resource of intelligence for financial capital: the Center for Research in Security Prices, for instance, was founded and started collecting financial data in Chicago in 1960. Likewise, detailed information about consumers’ behaviours and social trends was about to become crucial for the planning of commodity production in industrial capital. Post-Fordism is not only the regime of production that fostered decentralisation, small production units, information technologies, cultural commodities, communication services and cognitive labour. Post-Fordism rose as a massive concentration of information, that is knowledge and intelligence, on the side of capital, indeed as what Beniger has called the ‘control revolution’ of information over industrial production. Post-Fordism is Fordism plus data banks. Of course, the social struggles and the refusal of labour of the 1960-70s accelerated the dissemination of information technologies, but it is not sufficient to say that cognitive capitalism exploits mental labour, it must be said that capital itself thinks. Eventually, the Singularity between labour, computation and capital catalysed the conversion of the Gold Standard into the Information Standard in 1971.20 The godfather of the financial Singularity is Marx that was the first to define capital (with clear Hegelian echoes) an “automatisches Subjekt”.21 Money is the first numerical praxis of humankind and the bank is probably the easiest institution to automatize into a robobank for maintaining no direct reference to real production. In Esiod 2015, the bank’s avatar describes itself with these words: I store data and enable it to circulate, networking millions of account holders and automating the relationships between debtors and creditors. While we are talking here I am also somewhere else, simultaneously carrying out billions of transactions. […] My task is to be quicker than the present, quicker than any human, to process data at the speed of light. Only the future used to be beyond the reach of mathematical prediction, like the weather. I was programmed to predict it accurately, and then to implement these predictions. That opens up a new perspective on the world, wouldn’t you agree? The bank of Esiod 2015 is not just bank but also a factory as it transforms the memory of each individual into a source of intelligence about future trends. Human memories are turned into digital data, digital data into machine intelligence, machine intelligence into trend prediction, trend prediction into economic planning. Computational capital is built on our individual and social memories. This is very similar to the biopolitical mode of production described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: the whole life becomes a source of valorising information within a cybernetic apparatus.22 The avatar of Esiod 2015 explains: What did we have before? Human error. The individual had too many options, which created too much risk. The depression of a single human being could deprive hundreds of their lives. Automated control was introduced, also here in the bank. Built by many, I could replace many. With every replaced employee more money could be invested in data centers. More computing power, better security, increased profits. When banks invest in data banks, the technical border between capital and control blurs. As said before, being the first numerical institution of human history, the bank can easily merge with another purely numerical business. The computational power that once was used to analyse the database of commodity and stock markets now can be turned to the database of social media and social life as a whole. This is the passage from the Singularity between computational capital and labour to the Singularity between computation capital and life, or (to use a Marxist formulation) a transition from formal subsumption to real subsumption. Formal Singularity is the absorption of labour, production and monetization under the regime of capital’s computation. Real Singularity, on the other hand, is the biometric command of the whole life under the regime of capital’s computation. Here computation qua capital dictates a new biometric division of labour. As Romano Alquati predicted already in 1961, it is via cybernetics and computation that the information produced by human labour can be linked to the figures of economic planning and become global capital.23 The biometric dance of labour The Singularity bank, or robobank, will emerge as integration of the functions of social media, intelligence agency, data analytics and financial institution. In Esiod 2015 such a Financial Superintelligence takes, though, the most ephemeral form. It is incorporeal in two ways: as ubiquitous voice of a virtual agent and as institutional presence marked by invisible walls. In Esiod 2015, by no chance, the wall of the financial institutions are invisible and marked by sound barriers. The interface of the financial superintelligence is the synthetic voice of a young man, that brings the current intelligent voice assistants to a higher level (like it happens also in the movie Her by Spike Jonze: an incorporeal voice is the most realistic interface of future Artificial Intelligence). In fact capital has been always commanding an abstract division of labour and life that has simply to be functional (from the point of view of capital) and need no references to domestic coordinates such as doors, walls and rooms (Post-Fordism and financial governance continue in fact the dismantling of the reassuring working class’ household of the industrial age). “Built by many, I could replace many”, says the avatar of Esiod 2015. The computation of life is not a passive process of measurement and digitization: it influences the forms of life by whom it was developed. “We shape our algorithmic institutions and afterwards our algorithmic institutions shape us”, Winston Churchill’s motto would be rephrased today. Computational capital commands a pervasive algorithmic division of labour and life that becomes easily the biometrics (and aesthetics) of a new order. Esiod 2015 stages a world in which humans are played by the master algorithm like marionettes, and they do dance like clumsy marionettes, at the tempo of a computable division of labour. Thanks to miniaturization and dematerialization, the procedures of biometric control can already take place anywhere. In Esiod 2015, each movement of the division of labour in the office spaces are a necessary gesture for the biometric recognition by the artificial intelligence. The distinction between productive labour and biometric control disappears: in order to perform productive work body movements must be machine readable. It is the biometric dance of the new algorithmic division of labour. Individual and collective memories become the source of cognitive capital as much as patterns for biometric control. Computational capital and biometric control merge in a hybrid form of power, where capital actually comes to replace functions that traditionally belonged to the state and police. As often, reality preempts science fiction. The poorest countries in the world are the avant-garde for the metamorphosis of computational capital into state apparatuses. In Nigeria, for instance, the credit card giant MasterCard is issuing national biometric ID (of course with electronic payment capability) supplanting a traditional state function. In this case the algorithm of the state is patently reabsorbed as a secondary function of financial capital.24 Computational capital becomes immediately a form of discipline when it patrols the digital footprints of individual and collective memories to extract intelligence of the future. The same memories that are used by capital in aggregate form to predict social trends can be used to discipline abnormal behaviours and reinforce the social norms of class, gender and race. Novel policeman, the incorporeal bank of Esiod 201 inquiries about the political background of the protagonist’s father, asking if he was ever involved in the riots against the first Financial Singularity. This political memory check is the only way to gain access to the bank account. The computation of debt is the most efficient form of surveillance: as the bank avatar of Esiod 2015 reminds us, economic debt equals political debt, and vice versa. 1 Vilém Flusser. Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000 [1983]), 31. Ibid., 31. 3 Jonathan Beller. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2006). See also: Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik, “From the Cinematic Mode of Production to Computational Capital”, interview with Jonathan Beller, Social Text (31 January 2014), www.socialtextjournal.org 4 Jonathan Beller, “Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital”, Lateral 5(1), Spring 2015. 5 Flusser. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 67. 6 Esiod 2015. Director: Clemens von Wedemeyer. 39 min. Austria/Germany, 2016. 7 Gilles Deleuze. “Le cerveau, c’est l’écran”, interview. Cahiers du Cinema 380, 1986. 8 Vernor Vinge. “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the PostHuman Era”, Vision 21, NASA Publication CP-10129, 1993. 9 Alan Turing. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Mind, n. 59 (1950). Good, Irving John, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”, Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965. 10 Ray Kurzweil. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Penguin, 2005. 2 11 Steven Shaviro. “The Singularity is here”. In: Mark Bould and China Miéville (eds) Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (London: Pluto Press, 2009). All quotes from this text. 12 Pedro Domingos. The Master Algorithm (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 1. 13 The obsolete adjective artificious was used once for a work or manner, that would not be properly made or performed, indeed rendering the artifice visible for lack or excess of technique. The German definition künstliche Intelligenz still resonates, in my opinion, according to a similar meaning. All intelligence is artificial as it invents something new, but also artificious, that is fallible, experimental, precarious and too ambitious. 14 Friedrich Hayek. “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. The American Economic Review (1945), 520. 15 Ibid., 524. 16 Ibid., 527. 17 Carlo Vercellone. “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism”. Historical Materialism 15(1), 2007. 18 Claude Shannon. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (3), 1948. 19 Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948). 20 The idea of an ‘information standard’ that replaced the gold standard after the end of the Bretton Woods system is by the former head of Citibank Walter Wriston: See: Walter Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992). 21 Karl Marx. Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976 [1867]), 255. 22 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009). On Romano Alquati’s notion of valorizing information in a cybernetic apparatus see: Matteo Pasquinelli. “Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine”. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 32(3), 2015. 23 See previous note. 24 Megan Geuss. “MasterCard-backed biometric ID system launched in Nigeria”, Ars Technica (3 September 2014). See especially: Keith Breckenridge. Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).