Digifesto

Here’s some key things about an economy of control:

• An economy of control is normally very stable. It’s punctuated equilibrium. But the mean size of disruptive events increases over time, because each of these events can cause a cascade through an ever increasingly complex system.
• An economy of control has enormous inequalities of all kinds of scale. But there’s a kind of evenness to the inequality from an information theoretic perspective, because of a conservation of entropy principle.
• An economy of control can be characterized adequately using third order cybernetics. It’s an unsolved research problem to determine whether third order cybernetics is reducible to second order cybernetics. There should totally be a big prize for the first person who figures this out. That prize is a very lucrative hedge fund.
• An economy of control is, of course, characterized mainly by its titular irony: there is the minimum possible control necessary to maintain the system’s efficiency. It’s a totalizing economic model of freedom maximization.
• Economics of control is to neoliberalism and computational social science what neoliberalism was to political liberalism and neoclassical economic theory.
• The economy of control preserves privacy perfectly at equilibrium, barring externalities.
• The economy of control internalizes all externalities in the long run.
• In the economy of control, demand is anthropic.
• In the economy of control, for any belief that needs to be shouted on television, there is a person who sincerely believes it who is willing to get paid to shout it. Journalism is replaced entirely by networks of trusted scholarship.
• The economy of control is sociologically organized according to two diverging principles: the organizational evolutionary pressure familiar from structural functionalism, and entropy. It draws on Bataille’s theory of the general economy. But it borrows from Ulanowicz the possibility of life overcoming thermodynamics. So to speak.

Just brainstorming here.