Digifesto

This post is merely notes; I’m fairly confident that I don’t know what I’m writing about. However, I want to learn more. Please recommend anything that could fill me in about this! I owe most of this to discussion with a colleague who I’m not sure would like to be acknowledged.

Following the logic of James Beniger, an increasingly integrated global economy requires more points of information integration and control.

Bourgeois (in the sense of ‘capitalist’) legal institutions exist precisely for the purpose of arbitrating between merchants.

Hence, on the one hand we would expect international trade law to be Habermasian. However, international trade need not rest on a foundation of German idealism (which increasingly strikes me as the core of European law). Rather, it is an evolved mechanism.

A key part of this mechanism, as I’ve heard, is that it is decentered. Multiple countries compete to be the sites of transnational arbitration, much like multiple nations compete to be tax havens. Sovereignty and discretion are factors of production in the economy of control.

This means, effectively, that one cannot defeat capitalism by chopping off its head. It is rather much more like a hydra: the “heads” are the creation of two-sided markets. These heads have no internalized sense of the public good. Rather, they are optimized to be attractive to the transnational corporations in bilateral negotiation. The plaintiffs and defendants in these cases are corporations and states–social forms and institutions of complexity far beyond that of any individual person. This is where, so to speak, the AI’s clash.