It leads to a suggestion of another possible formulation of what we might call a post-classical 20th, 21st century anti-capitalism as being something like platforms are not products. So if we take that thesis, platforms are not products, and we take this as a just straightforward translation of conditions of objectivity are not objects as a statement of the critical philosophical stance. This is obviously what David is saying in the essay we've been looking at.
Like, if you have his version of the free market argument, then you're dealing with a universe of products distributed ergodically in a global space. and you have a market search procedure that can freely hunt for the best products in this space. It's not inhibited in its search procedure across this range of products. And platforms are treated just as if they were some other product. So that QWERTY, for example, is treated as if it's one among a whole bunch of possible keyboard layouts.
The market process freely wanders among these keyboard layouts. It then subjects various products, formats to testing within the market, comes out with some optimization within the market that is therefore, in these terms, guaranteed to be something like global optimization because it's an agotic process. It's been freely wandering through the whole range of possibilities and the whole range of possibilities have been tested by the market process. And if we've ended up with QWERTY, it's because QWERTY has come out best from this absolutely untrammeled process that, you know, to go back to previous terms, demonstrates or assumes the competence of capital at global optimization.
and so david is saying no what tendency says what non-agodism said is that there has not been that free mobility of the market testing process across the global space it's been localized and path dependency is its localization and we can understand he thinks through a kind of historical study how that localization has taken place and such localization is a trap. Once you get drawn into the process this language of traps is absolutely crucial and I think really interesting and fascinating we come back to there. But the for David is obviously a trap. So model of QWERTY as a market
failure, extremely general failure, because if it's failed in a way that has failed, then we can say in general, it's demonstrating incompetence at global optimization. Therefore, we have an actual concrete example, failure that provides a kind of dispensable building block for a contemporary critique. critique I've sort of inherited from last week that I've seen as a as a as a controversial as a controversial point is to say it is tied up with is this model is the QWERTY model an adequate model of market failure for the contemporary critique of capital or not you
know is there is it that there's a whole bunch of ways one could go from this one could say Well, you know, it is flawed, but the way in which David and the far from equilibrium complexity theory guys have said it's a problem can be improved upon by some other critical framework. That's, you know, in theory, that's a response. And obviously I'd like to see my guiding question. What is the contemporary core proposition of the critique of capital? I'm wanting to say here that quonomics, as David understands it, adequately captures what a contemporary critique of capital in its core consists of. um i'm you know if there is something if there's a if there's another step on this elevator down
one stage it's kind of based upon some demonstration of the inadequacies of this of this qwerty economic critique of capitalism then i'm not i'm not seeing what that is and the whole platforms and platform capitalism and the massive emphasis on platforms that we're seeing and I think all of these contemporary left critical discourses to mention of the fact that we have basically arrived in the zone with this insure theoretical building block. So I guess, you know, that's obviously something that people might want to come back on. And I'm not going to get back into the counter-argument Leibovitz among Oles at this point,