Justice Is an Option by Robert Meister;

Author:Robert Meister; [Meister, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000 Political Science / General, POL010000 Political Science / History & Theory, POL007000 Political Science / Political Ideologies / Democracy, BUS069030 Business & Economics / Economics / Theory, PHI019000 Philosophy / Political
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

When applied to politics and daily life, financialization introduces a schism between those who can benefit from assuming risks through effective self-management and those who fail to do so—the populations considered to be at risk.22

For Martin, as we have seen, the “financialization of daily life” provides an epistemic framework for capitalist exploitation in the twenty-first century, in much the way that the commodification of labor time did in the nineteenth century. He locates something like a class divide between those who benefit from heightened volatility (the “antifragile,” in Nasim Nicholas Taleb’s sense) and the “precariat” (in Judith Butler’s sense), who are admonished to be more realistic in managing the options before them.23 Exploitation of the precariat by the antifragile through the production and sale of financial products places us squarely in the realm of class struggle in something like a Marxian sense, even if such struggle is now conducted in a different key. The question is how to proceed from here.

* * *

The significance of security for the liquidity of financial markets, as I have outlined it so far, is a symptom of the degree to which these markets are already interoperable with both cloud computing and state surveillance and control. From the recent literature on this topic, I surmise that a contemporary anticapitalist politics must politicize the cloud to create virtually public and potentially oppositional spaces within it. 24 Perhaps anticipating such thoughts, Randy Martin and I used to say, mostly to each other, that nationalizing the Internet is not what we want, but neither do we want to keep it private. We were thus concerned, like libertarians, with the Internet becoming overtly what it already was potentially—an intrusive tool of government surveillance and control. But we did not see a path to justice in the outsourcing of data mining on the Web to corporations and consultants. For us, the only difference between nationalizing and privatizing data mining of the Internet was whether the results are shared with government by command or through a cash nexus.25

In carrying our project forward on my own, I have focused more directly on the social properties of cash itself (or “currency”), as distinct from Randy Martin’s notion of “derivative sociality”—and thus on what makes data not just monetizable, but monetary. The question is posed neatly in Finn Brunton’s recent history of cryptocurrency:

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