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"I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization."
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I’ll offer this rather dense definition that I think covers the phenomenology, and unpack it through the rest of the post.
Hacking is a pattern of local, opportunistic manipulation of a non-disposable complex system that causes a lowering of its conceptual integrity, creates systemic debt and moves intelligence from systems into human brains.
By this definition, hacking is anti-refinement. It is therefore a barbarian mode of production because it moves intelligence out of systems and into human brains, making those human brains less interchangeable. Yet, it is not the traditional barbarian mode of predatory destruction of a settled civilization from outside its periphery.
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This compounding rate is very high because the longer a system persists, the more tightly it integrates into everything around it, causing co-evolution. So eventually replacing even a small hack in a relatively isolated system with a better solution turns into a planet-wide exercise, as we learned during Y2K.
Isolated technologies also get increasingly situated over time, no matter how encapsulated they appear at conception, so that what looks like a “do-over” from the point of view of a single subsystem (say Linux) looks like a hack with respect to larger, subsuming systems (like the Internet). So debt accumulates at levels of the system that no individual agent is nominally responsible for. This is collective, public technical debt.
"We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives."
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But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary. These preferences are reflected in what the polities do, how they behave. They swoop in with incredible speed and force to bail out the financial sectors in which creditors are invested, trampling over prior norms and laws as necessary. The same preferences are reflected in what the polities omit to do. They do not pursue monetary policy with sufficient force to ensure expenditure growth even at risk of inflation. They do not purse fiscal policy with sufficient force to ensure employment even at risk of inflation. They remain forever vigilant that neither monetary ease nor fiscal profligacy engender inflation. The tepid policy experiments that are occasionally embarked upon they sabotage at the very first hint of inflation. The purchasing power of holders of nominal debt must not be put at risk. That is the overriding preference, in context of which observed behavior is rational.
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That’s true. But the revealed preference of the polity is not balanced. It is not some cartoonish capitalist-class conspiracy story, where the goal is to maximize the wealth of exploiters. The revealed preference of the polity is to resist losses for incumbent creditors much more than it is to seek gains. In a world of perfect certainty, given a choice between recession and boom, the polity would choose boom. But in the real world, the polity faces great uncertainty. The policies that might engender a boom are not guaranteed to succeed. They carry with them a short-to-medium-term risk of inflation, perhaps even a significant inflation if things don’t go as planned. The polity prefers inaction to bearing this risk.
This preference is not at all difficult to understand. The ailing developed economies are plutocratic democracies. “The people” do have power, but influence is weighted in a manner correlated with wealth. The median influencer in these economies is not a billionaire, but an older citizen of some affluence who has mostly endowed her own future consumption. She would like to be richer, of course. But she is content with her present wealth, and is terrified of becoming poorer. For such a person, the depression status quo is unfortunate but tolerable. The risks associated with expansionary policy, on the other hand, are absolutely terrifying.
"As Morton points out, in the age of ecology there is no clean transaction you can walk away from. The fact that everything is connected isn’t something you can turn off when it’s inconvenient. There’s always something still owed, a remaining debt. Morton describes this as the viscous quality of the hyperobject, the more you know about it the more it sticks to you. And as Graeber shows, capital fails to capture the full extent of a transaction because it doesn’t fully represent the object. In the social context of the transaction, there’s always a remainder, the market never fully clears. At the level of capital and pricing, the numbers always add up, but the object of the transaction is broadcasting on multiple frequencies. And if you hold the concept of capital in abeyance for just a moment, you’ll find there were many more parties to the transaction than you had assumed, and if you listen closely, you can hear that the non-human has continued its relationship with you. "
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One of the laugh lines in Morton’s talk is “anything you can do I can do meta.” The idea behind this quip is to characterize the move to “undermine,” or in Graham Harman’s phrase, to “overmine” an opponent’s position. Either some atom is the basic building block to which all things can be reduced; or some system is the foundation from which all things extend. Generally what is taught in the Academy are the particulars around these atoms and systems. In his talk, Morton reviews the historical progression of these “particulars” in an effort to get to the present ecological moment. The strange thing about Morton’s talk is that he’s not trying to lay out a new complex conceptual framework that wraps up everything that precedes it. Instead he brings up a series of examples of the rift between appearance and essence—the remainder that each of these conceptual transactions always generates as it tries to snugly fit around the contours of the real. For students trained in memorizing and recapitulating particulars, the process of discarding conceptual frameworks to see more clearly must seem counter intuitive. In a line of thought that operates in a space without a center or edges, sometimes it’s difficult to know when it’s arrived at it’s topic. And further, once there, what is the listener meant to take away? What kind of transaction is this?
"And yet: human beings (not just economists), when called upon to explain how society works, have a strange tendency to reach first for efficient market hypotheses, and to hold on like grim death. Natural or even cosmic orders of orderly payback. That’s the ticket. We are ‘in debt’ to the gods, or our parents, or society. Graeber is quick to point out the inadequacies of these metaphors."
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Graeber appreciates that you find this sort of thinking everywhere, at all times, but he also wants to hammer home that the tendency of economists to think this way is blinkered and parochial. And bourgeouis and modern. It’s not exactly a contradiction to have it both ways. It may be perfectly true that this style of thinking is highly characteristic of economists and the modern, commercial bourgeoisie. But this isn’t a distinguishing characteristic. What Graeber thinks is that everyone is wrong, not just economists in the grip of the myth of the double-coincidence. Folk thinking and econ thinking are the same. And wrong, according to Graeber (and Plato before him).
"The book is difficult to characterize. It's about debt and money through history, but it's really not a work in economic history. It offers a lot of ethnographic detail about borrowing, lending, gifting, and reciprocating, but it's not really a work of anthropology. And it offers morally valenced language to describe debt and credit, but it's not really a polemical critique of the present financial system. It is certainly an engaging, interesting, and thought-provoking book, and Graeber appears to know a great deal about the social and institutional histories of the main civilizations of Eurasia."
"Almost all of the $8 in added debt since 2000 can be traced to policies enacted under the cover of post-September 11th nationalism; these policies cemented the transition from neoliberalism to full-blown neoconservatism. Nothing more accurately illustrates the contradictory movements of the neoliberal project than the biography of the fundamentalist son of an American-owned autocrat, who spent millions of American dollars expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan, then bankrolled and organized September 11th, then was assassinated by the US and dumped into the ocean."
David Graeber reflects on writing a big question book for a popular audience.
"Colin Crouch – The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism "
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Instead of governments taking on debt to stimulate the economy, individuals and families did so, including some rather poor ones.
Crouch argues that this explains why workers in the Anglo-American world were willing to maintain consumer confidence when their equivalents in many continental European countries were highly unwilling to spend. Rising house prices allowed the former to borrow money. At first this was accidental – it soon became a necessary condition for governments to do what they wanted to do. In a key paragraph, he argues:
The dependence of the democratic capitalist system on rising wages, a welfare state and government demand management that had seemed essential for mass consumer confidence has been withering away. The bases of prosperity shifted from the social democratic formula of working classes supported by government intervention to the neoliberal conservative one of banks, stock exchanges and financial markets. Ordinary people played their part, not as workers seeking to improve their situation through trade unions, legislation protecting employment rights and publicly funded social insurance schemes, but as debt-holders, participants in credit markets. This fundamental political shift was more profound than anything that could be produced by alternations between nominally social democratic and neoliberal conservative parties in government as the result of elections. It has imparted a fundamental rightward shift to the whole political spectrum, as the collective and individual interests of everyone are tied to the financial markets, which in their own operations act highly unequally, producing extreme concentrations of wealth.
More succinctly financial “irresponsibility became a collective good,” albeit a perverse one – no-one wanted the party to stop or the bezzle to be revealed.
"More than three years after the financial crisis struck, the economy remains stuck in a consumer debt trap. It's a situation that could take years to correct itself. That's why some economists are calling for a radical step: massive debt relief."
The smart money says the U.S. economy will splinter, with some states thriving, some states not, and all eyes are on California as the nightmare scenario. After a hair-raising visit with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who explains why the Golden State has cratered, Michael Lewis goes where the buck literally stops—the local level, where the likes of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and Vallejo fire chief Paige Meyer are trying to avert even worse catastrophes and rethink what it means to be a society.
"At this point, it’s easier to understand why economists feel so defensive about challenges to the Myth of Barter, and why they keep telling the same old story even though most of them know it isn’t true. If what they are really describing is not how we ‘naturally’ behave but rather how we are taught to behave by the market—well who, nowadays, is doing most of the actual teaching? Primarily, economists. The question of barter cuts to the heart of not only what an economy is—most economists still insist that an economy is essentially a vast barter system, with money a mere tool (a position all the more peculiar now that the majority of economic transactions in the world have come to consist of playing around with money in one form or another) [10]—but also, the very status of economics: is it a science that describes of how humans actually behave, or prescriptive, a way of informing them how they should? (Remember, sciences generate hypothesis about the world that can be tested against the evidence and changed or abandoned if they don’t prove to predict what’s empirically there.)
Or is economics instead a technique of operating within a world that economists themselves have largely created? Or is it, as it appears for so many of the Austrians, a kind of faith, a revealed Truth embodied in the words of great prophets (such as Von Mises) who must, by definition be correct, and whose theories must be defended whatever empirical reality throws at them—even to the extent of generating imaginary unknown periods of history where something like what was originally described ‘must have’ taken place?"
compare and contrast to Noam Chomsky
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The best outcome, I suspect, will be a return to American realism, a determination to do the things we can while avoiding the things that will only give us a temporary hit. In this, the president's best hope is continued honesty with the American people, calm, and resilience. In hard times, radicalism appeals. But so too does small-c conservatism. In dark economic times, people sometimes keep a hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse. But all this requires a stoicism at odds with American character and history.
I guess I'm saying that the long great ride seems to be over. The question is simply whether Americans can or will handle it without losing their heads.
"You don't need look far to see that consensus in action -- just check out the current debt ceiling brouhaha. Paraded around by carnival barkers as supposed proof of unprecedented division and rancor, the moment's manufactured crisis in Washington actually exemplifies all the hallmarks of transpartisan consensus, as the Democratic president and the Republican congressional leadership essentially agree that Social Security and Medicare should be slashed, corporate taxes should be cut, taxes on the wealthy shouldn't be significantly raised and defense spending should face only minimal reductions. The only real "debate" is about the specific numbers -- not about whether such an extreme set of priorities is the proper way to balance a budget."
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Recall, for instance, recent news out of Connecticut -- a state of Big Money politics that's also home to many major multinational corporations. Thanks to intense third-party organizing and pressure by the Connecticut Working Families Party, this same corporate-dominated locale legislated the nation's first statewide law forcing companies to provide paid sick days to employees.
In New York, the home of the financial industry behemoth, the Working Families Party is now regularly billed as one of the state's single most powerful political forces. Over the years, it has played a critical role in everything from halting unbridled gas exploration to raising the minimum wage to reducing consumers' utility bills to taking on the real estate industry's most rapacious practices.
In Oregon, where the Working Families Party has only recently started organizing, the fledgling third party led a campaign to end the state's dependence on Wall Street with a proposal to create a state-owned non-profit bank. Though the bill ultimately failed, the party managed to power it through a series of legislative committees -- and the proposal will likely be back in the next session.
And, not to be forgotten, is Vermont -- the state that recently made national headlines as the first in America to successfully go up against the for-profit health insurance industry and begin legislating a single-payer system. That's the same state that is home to the Progressive Party, which regularly elects its candidates to municipal and state legislative office.
"In terms of the debt ceiling issue in specific, I feel like this is sort of the Cuban Missile Crisis of my middle-aged life and you know what? At this point I almost just want them to get it over with and fire off the policy nukes. Just go ahead and wreck it all, because if we’ve come to the point where there’s a significant political faction with real social foundations that so thoroughly hates its fever-dream boogeyman vision of “government” that nothing else and no one else matters, we’re just going to be stuck right at a perpetual blockade line, a permanent schism. "
" they've constructed a simple model for financial crises that essentially proposes the following narrative: (a) growing inequality produces less money for the middle class and more money for the rich, (b) the rich loan much of this money back to the middle class so they can continue to improve their living standards even with stagnant incomes, (c) the financial sector balloons to mediate all this, and (d) the system eventually collapses since, after all, this kind of thing can't last forever."
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