Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality (Session 2)

Hello and welcome to the new Center for Research and Practice on Quornomics, Path Dependency and Semiotic Fatality with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him now. Thanks Nick. Thanks, thanks Theodore. Okay so So I'm going to try very quickly, I won't say very quickly, fairly quickly, to actually take us back to kind of before, but just in a slightly more organized fashion and in the

hope of getting a little bit more purchase on some of these basic philosophical and and political economic questions about economics and I've I've got a kind of meta question that I think I'm having the relevance of this question to what we're doing will consolidate over the next 20 minutes but but this meta question is what is the contemporary core proposition of the critique of capital um and i've sort of

organized a sort of elevator of responses to this in descending order of right-wing curmudgeonry from from the most cum cummage in russ to something that I think hopefully melts into a kind of open and flexible discussion so the most the most curmudgeonous stage of the elevator ride the most cynical is to say that the critique of capital at this point if not before is a culture and not a thesis so that what the arguments involved are primarily shifting rationalizations and the conclusion alone is axiomatic so these

Arguments then take the form consistently. Given that capital is horrible, why? That is to say, there's something like a cultural market for anti-capitalist arguments rooted ultimately in what are biological predispositions. It's part of what we are as a species that we demand them. And it's something like species being, to use Marx's term, and I think used not so very differently. And this meta political theory is what very secretly of course I think is true, but it leads medical pessimism at prospects for ideological argument and So since lapsing into the silent Zen of cosmic war would be an excusably bad

pedagogy pedagogy I think we have to take the next elevator stop down into a zone that is extremely large and demanding and would be a whole course on its own so I'm going to have to truncate it massively and probably get back to it but I think I need to touch upon some sort of basics and this is concentrating on what Marx himself is doing in his critique of political economy and the fundamental claim that i want to make here is that that the critique of political economy in his sense is strictly a critique in its rigorous kantian sense

um he's saying in the capitalist social process the conditions of possibility for objects is treated as if it were itself an object that's to say it's a displacement an entirely philosophically legible displacement of kantian critique onto the social field in his sort of concrete terms as as they're applied socially in that saying the historically materialized version of metaphysical error labor power is traded as a commodity labor power as the condition of objects considered as commodities treated as itself being an object i.e a commodity and that is the critique

of political economy in its Marxist sense in a in a nutshell so i think there's a lot going on in in saying this and I just point out a few things that I think are really crucial I think the first point is to say that modernity promoted Marxism because it was structurally Kantian so that so that you know the the the success of Marxism and its purchase on on on on the modern mind was was due to its Kantian structure its critical structure and this so there is a there is a a necessary format in modernity of

critique that is already defined by Kant and if something is not susceptible to that format it just doesn't work in modernity at all and that even includes what is taken as a radical critique of modernity in certain senses such as Marxist and the second point which I think is going to then drip across into into what we need to talk about and is I think a really important set of questions um concerns the materialization of critique you know put it in a question what is the target of marxing critique is it the canon of classical political economy

capitalist process and i think it's obvious sleep we're not going to just decide it's obviously in some crucial sense um but it's very easy to to slip on this, I think, back one down another notch. But I'm going to take it, and I've already taken it in this definition that when Marx says the essence of capital as a metaphysical error of labor power as if it were itself a commodity, This is obviously something that goes beyond the text of classical political economy and

into a zone where metaphysics is identified within the social process. So as I say I think this is going to really come back as an important issue. But it's the next, sorry I'll just refer that quickly back to the original question in terms what is the contemporary core proposition of capital the role of this second elevator ask well what has happened kind of critique there still is there some new updated rectified corrected form of the marxian critique that still has a recognizable critical structure and the reason to think

that this is expectation is the fact that I think in to really a large extent I mean to take what is perhaps an overly narrow sense of what they're doing when they say schizophrenia is socially processed as a clinical entity that equally has obvious translation protocol back into recognizable Kantian structure of thought but then we have to proceed to where I think we are now because you know the label the theory of value is very rarely defended it's not that no one is defending it there are some

interesting defenses of it but I honestly think it's like not the major terrain anymore and in my understanding the the main thread for instance is just talking about left acceleration and I think the left acceleration is generally have abandoned labor theory of value as a as a as a terrain image to do this stuff so the the next phase then the face we're in for various reasons of the critique of capital, I think can be characterized, and I expect this to be controversial,

or again, it's what we were just talking about before this started, something like the claim that capital is incompetent at global optimization. This is a claim, usefully, that is I think entirely compatible with the Keynesian macroeconomic regime that has has displaced economics within Western societies and I guess globally now it's compatible with the complexity economist types or far from equilibrium thermodynamics applied to political

economy and I think that people are not quite as interested in this as me but you know it that is it also applicable to the left accelerationist critique of capital I yes but we'll come to that I guess so we probably it would be digressive to get too deep into Keynesian macro I think it would be hard to justify it in terms of the agenda of this course but I think it is important to say something about it it obviously is the regime so it's very definitive of where we actually are it

as we had this Krugman article hopefully circulating where which is obviously a bridge precisely between Keynesianism and the complexity people quite explicitly and that bridge is not hard to build and we know that the Keynesian critique of market economics is exactly that it is incompetent at global optimization that it gets trapped in a local bad low employment equilibrium so So the question that then is forced on me at least with this is then can can can can

can'tianism be rigorously constructed as a critical argument in the Kantian sense? You know what is the process of objectification that is at stake in can'tianism that is systematically misapprehended as an object within the social process? And there's a crucial clue to this, Keynes' description of gold as a barbarous relic. I think that what we're seeing there is he's building the link across to the critical tradition. and he's suggesting that the process of objectification that he's concerned with

is that of economic values no longer narrowly the commodity in in in the marxian sense because i think keynes keynes thinks that labor theory of value has been devastated by the austrian critiques of the late 19th and early 20th century. So the process of objectification now is that of economic value and the and the it's driven with what replaces Kantian marketing labor power for Keynes is aggregate demand.

So the confusion that now he is saying, the metaphysics he is seeing in the social process, is the confusion of aggregate demand with particular objects of value. is just a stick icon is gold as an intrinsic um object of value so i'm not gonna i'm not gonna push into this because it's perhaps slightly added at an oblique to the to the main chronomics thing but it's but it's being i'm saying in order to kind of preserve the critical question and to apply it to what I think is the overwhelmingly dominant contemporary matrix for

the for the critique of so then the question is well when we move on to the complexity people and we have to move on to them because they're the people directly invoked in the David article and people directly being drawn upon as an inspiration for chronomics in its in its in a form in a critical using critical in its colloquial sense first of all that David is promoting so how are the complexity people engaged in a critical argument and this is the stage that I takes us to where I want to really jump off from I

think it's an important question and I think that there's certain at least tentative structures that we can put together that help feel with it let me i'm just going to bring back a quote from david that i think is really important to this i've already quoted it but and i and i publicized it and generally pushed it a lot but i think it's extremely helpful because it's his most his overview theoretical comment i think it's basically right at the start of his paper and so i apologize for the repetition but he says a path dependent sequence of economic changes is one of which important influences upon the

eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally remote events including happenings dominated by chance elements rather than systematic forces. Stochastic processes like that do not converge automatically to a fixed point distribution of outcomes and are called non-ergotic. in such circumstances historical accidents can neither be ignored nor neatly quarantined for the purpose of economic analysis the dynamic process itself takes on an essentially historical character refers to brian arthur as his as his kind of a inspiration for this for this insight and Brian Arthur is obviously the key Santa Fe Institute entered complexity theorist so

the one thing to draw out immediately from this from this quote is he is he says that what he is doing um what a path dependent economic processes are are non-egotic and so this I think this notion of the ergodic and a non-egotic is our sort of absolutely crucial clue to how we can conceptually put this stuff together

One thing from sort of kind of the philosophical side that people might click onto, which I think is obviously helpful and sort of is some kind of confirmation that these things have to click together, is the fact that the ergodic and non-ergodic very, very tightly resonates with the distinction between molarity and molecularity in the Deleuze and Guattari. capitalism schizophrenia discussion of capitalism and and so I think we can be confident from that that there's going to be some critical structure that we can draw on and we can ultimately identify in this and so what is what is

ergodicity now I think it's a notion it's extremely widely used technical notion it's a so it's a sort of important term in this straightforward sense that it's put to a lot of use it's got a lot of sort of scientific it seems to be kind of rigorously intelligible from a mathematical and scientific point of view and as we've seen it's what negatively David uses as his as his way of defining path dependency

I think it's reasonable to define it that ergodicity corresponds to tractability to statistical analysis. So if a process is a Godic, it wanders across a global space at least quasi-randomly. So if you sample in time and space across this process, you are not going to have significant heterogeneities. The the model of it and how it gets its mathematical form is obviously from and again

We're back now to to the complexity people Near equilibrium thermodynamics, but that if you take a gas tank And You've got a set of molecules distributed in this gas tank The ergodicity of that system is is defined by the fact sampling different regions of that molecular system in time and space should be statistically homogeneous. like you're not going to find significant distinctions that that have any consistent

sense about how many atoms are going to be in some portion of the gas tank or and you shouldn't across time um once it's in its equilibrium statistical state find temporal differences either like if you the the chance of a particular molecule being in one point in space at a particular time is exactly the same statistically as finding it in the same space at another time um and this is relevant to a discussion about economics because um the connection has been made by the complexity people I think very persuasively that the classical

classical canon of political economy assumes equilibrium model of they're not talking about thermodynamics but that their process is isomorphic with a near equilibrium thermodynamic model which means concretely in terms of the issues that we're talking about that um it's able to roam freely across a global space so so the solutions it will find are not significantly obstructed by either spatial or temporal heterogeneities

and obviously this is totally crucial to the equonomics argument and that the the argument that David is attributing to his opponents who he's seeing as, I'm putting these words in his mouth, so again, it might be kind of strong or anything, but he's sort of seeing as market fundamentalists of particularly recognisable form, is that they think technological innovation is freely mobile across a global space. And therefore, what it is competent to do is to find a global solution.

and the introduction of the notion of path dependency is to is to criticize this notion that uh there is a there is a competence to the discovery of a global solution in the market process and the reason and the whole of as we've seen the whole of his paper uh is fleshing out that argument so what i'm trying to do at this point is just is just provide the the philosophical translation protocol for that like why is this a critical argument in a in a form that is philosophically recognizable and I don't think this is a

particularly straightforward kind of easy question I mean I I find it complex fittingly or whatever it shouldn't be too hard because as we've seen you know it's it's obvious that the lesson Qatari think that they're making a critical argument they're completely upfront and explicit about that and and they use the same distinction between the molar and molecular the ergodic and the non-ergodic it as as a fundamental conceptual uh tool and i think taking their usage of this of this conceptuality as a starting point the the transitional point concerns standardization

that's a kind of a vocabulary that gets us from a to b from this from the question of the critical structure of this to its application to concrete issues of political economy and and historical economic analysis because an agodic system represents a certain kind of spontaneous standardization that's to say it's assuming it's assuming standard parts now obviously there's no there's been no process of standard

standardization behind this like if you're treating every molecule in a gas tank as basically interchangeable with any other molecule as being standardized and considering their molarity precisely in the standardization it's not because you're saying that there has been some process of standardization it's rather that it's rather that the standardization or something that is the equivalent of standardization is assumed and and path dependency is exactly the calling into question of that assumption of a an original standardization of parts within the system considered that by by raising

standardization as a historical question of past dependency one is immediately distancing oneself from from this notion of a kind of standardized array a standardized or molar multiplicity towards what is being advanced as a more realistic notion of the of the elements of the system and of the search procedures available to the system. So, I think we can, we can, we're building a bridge between philosophical critique and

this mode of argumentation insofar as we are talking about standardization as a process. And 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.

um this is obviously what david is saying in the essay we've been looking at like um if you have his version of the of the of the free market argument then you're dealing with a universe of products distributed ergodically in a in a in a global space and you have a market search procedure that can freely hunt for the best products um in this space it's not inhibited

in its search procedure across this across this range of products um 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 ergodic

process it's been freely wandering through the whole range of possibilities and 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 an interesting, fascinating thing we... I'll come back to that but the for David is obviously a trap

and so model of QWERTY as a market failure is extremely general failure because if it failed in a way that has failed then we can say in general it's demonstrating incompetence of global optimization therefore we have an actual concrete example failure that provides a kind of

dispensable building block a temporary critique I've sort of inherited from last week that I've seen as a as a as a controversial is 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 it is flawed but no but the way in which David and far from equilibrium complexity theory guys have said it's a problem can be be improved upon by some other critical framework that that's a you know in theory that's a that's a response and others they'd like to see what that would involve the I've sort of come slightly confusing myself at this point let me just try to end on a point that isn't an absolute ragged edge of

confusion so okay my my guiding question what is the contemporary core proposition of the critique capital I'm one I'm wanting to say here that So, QAnomics, as David understands it, adequately captures what a contemporary critique of capital in its core consists of.

I'm you know if there is something if there's a if there's another step on this elevator down one stage this 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 platforms capitalism and the massive emphasis on platforms that we're seeing and I think all of these contemporary left critical discourse is to mention of the fact that when we have basically arrived in the zone with this

ensure 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 into the internet back into the counter argument Leibovitz among all this at this point because I think that their argument, however persuasive it might be, a defense of global equilibrium.

you know they simply are arguing yes capital is competent at global optimization I'm not saying that that's not an argument one could make but I think that the line the real line of issue that I'm wanting to pursue that isn't by simply backtracking from what David is saying and and thinking that the whole notion of a set of specifically far from equilibrium concerns is simply mistaken or misleading and and in some ways the assumption or the implication and of what the implications of what libefitz margolis is saying is that that we should simply back out of

this we should simply return to the kind of notion that the market process is reasonably modeled as a search procedure as an ergodic um yeah so i shouldn't chime if people want to do that but it seems to me that's not the most uh dynamic path we can follow on this so okay i'm going to stop now um yeah and uh and open it up Let me, I'm just going to spend a little bit of time in the sidebar until people start

talking. The question I was asking in the sidebar, just as a clarification, are you kind of getting at this idea that ergodic conditions are understandable as totalizable and as an extensive space, whereas non-negotic would be closer to something like an intensive quantity in its heterogeneity and you know unmappability. Yeah I'm sure I need to just mentally track through this but it seems that that must definitely be right. That was just how I was kind of trying to make sense of it.

extra system of translation here which is like really interesting yes that must be right so the whole of this could have been pursued in this language of a of a contrast between the extensive and intensive um there's no one else's talking the question that came into my mind that was a really great introduction to any other time is sitting think about that one I'm more conscious but in the Krugman article he mentioned something he just makes a passing allusion to the

epistemology of the two fields that he's talking about and I feel like this is also really deeply at stake in what what's going on here with this idea of being able to model something and then pull out a kind of a global optimal system or whatever. The kind of the real thing that we're talking about is the fact that there isn't a possibility to model something. So there's an epistemological problem. And that's the main kind of of maybe that's a question on what's the what's the status of epistemology in this particular way of understanding the two opposing ways of talking about the market that we're looking

is that a relevant point no it's definitely it's definitely a relevant point um i'm trying to think you know what's the best relay for this question because i think the obvious one to me would be to run it through some of these kind of hayekian questions where he obviously is sort of concretely in very much the same space but also is trying to um cast it in epistemological terms um and it's and there there is obviously this this uh suspicion about the pretense to a global epistemological stance so i think

you know we have this we have this uh you know one one set of vocabulary here is this whole kind of distinction between global and local where from the ergodic point of view locality is very fragile and easily diffused and even can be kind of in a certain sense kind of um bracketed as something that isn't a kind of deep problem health dependency people are obviously wanting to say locality in any farm locality is a problem that can be bracketed

It's so locked in irreversibly that the notion that it can be you can back out of it in the direction of some sort of global we've seen this language of phase spaces is absolutely right and helpful and you know into some kind of notional global face base is is an illusion and this is obviously a an epistemological illusion of a certain kind it's the notion that there is some ready access a global epistemological

perspective rather than sedimentations of knowledge that are radically localized by path dependency and so this is obviously the hayekian argument where he's saying you know if you look at the diffusion of knowledge in society it's totally it's totally localized it's totally based on local expertise and there's a very thin fragile level of kind of global universalizing rationality that is itself a peculiar social specialism you know and and and it should be reduced in this um sorry i don't know i'm sorry i'm getting a thing to repeat yeah i you're clear

now but there's right when you started talking about locality you cut out of it right um yes okay I'm not it's sorry I put I apologize but I'm not really quite sure from my babble that I'm wanting to say really that I think Hayek works as a translation protocol into this epistemological language roughly. Now obviously it's like the kind of you know the kind of you know most people are basically coming from the left and and Hayek is a kind of you know release sort of riotous yeah sorry is

that people not hearing me repeating Hayek but it's just that I honestly don't think that that needs to be a big distraction at this I think because I think the crucial the crucial issue is about the intrinsic locality of knowledge um that um yeah is Adam saying the economy is a calculating machine which is right but I think it we can be more specific because what what is the issue for us right now is this question about about knowledge and globality and here I'm sorry if I'm repeating what people have heard I don't know where this is

bit that blank does not but but hayek's point is that is that all knowledge socially localized and even those knowledges that make the most emphatic claim to global authority are themselves specialisms you know they are they are to be found localized within certain niches of the social process they are part of a kind of overall social distribution a claim to somehow be able to extract themselves from their own locality and and provide global oversight of the whole social entity is a

form of illusion now i think this criticism whatever it's kind of ideological conversations is not very different from what's being said. At this most abstract level, it's not very different from what's being said by the complexity people. That the notion that you can extract a perspective from its pathway, from its history, is a form of illusion. And, you know, I think then the things Amy was saying before, the studies course about Zalamea and about the constitution of of universality actually belongs

in this in this context I mean this is the context in which that arises as a as a as a procedure that you say well given given the fact that knowledge is intrinsically globally distributed localized path dependent um you know consolidated in these particular regions of expertise with their own uh their own local conditions of cultural production um that sets the problem that then these neo-rationalist attempts to construct a universe or I think accept and say okay so given that given this kind of original state of distributed path

dependent localized knowledge is how do we actually realistically approach approach a universal perspective because a universal perspective is not something that is just given to us Yes, like I'm sorry I'm agreeing to over three kind of people at the same time Yeah, I both to with Chalkius point and Amy's point I think I Think totally I don't I mean again people you know I welcome I welcome come back on this if people think I

this is just not not right but i'm seeing an extreme compatibility with with the kind of sociology of knowledge and uh the complexity theorist oriented historical um economics that we're seeing in a mature form or a certain branch in this david piece from which derives and it's it's based on a critique of the assumption of original global of an original global perspective that globe anything approaching a global perspective has to be

produced and it's produced under these conditions these non-ergodic conditions where freely roaming over a global space but instead are locked into these particular trajectories by very strong cybernetic processes yes so when you know if we can do it all in phase space that all of this stuff is utterly vivid in phase space because because the godic process in phase space will just tend to take the form of a if you're converting it into into math of a space filling curve

it will just simply you know you you allow one a godic particle to wander in a phase space and over an arbitrary period of time it will tend to just color the whole of that space homogeneously whereas if you have a long-range pattern in phase space you know the sort of things that obviously then people describe in terms of attractors and repellers and these various this kind of ontology of phase space entities it's a sign that you have some kind of non-agodic path dependent process sorry I think I'm not quite sure I'm understanding your question when you see

the question of perspective is with us under path determinacy though too what can you can you elaborate on that Yeah, I'm trying to formulate it actually more in my head too. It seems like the question of the social knowledge perspective is just part of the conditions of the entire... That seems like an initial condition.

um the initial condition being to be localized wait what is the initial condition you're saying maybe continue I'm going to try and formulate it more before I okay okay come back when you're when you're happy to do that yeah .

Sorry, I'm not ... Wanyang was making this point about reduced mobility, but I'm not sure I quite follow the connection with reduced mobility. I sort of get the point about global rules right and the global rules may not exist right. In an ergodic system you can you can treat you can do statistical sampling and you can do new statistical techniques as the techniques you can do a sample and treat that as representative of anything from the space but in non-ergotic systems there's conditionality inherent to it you know

you can't select arbitrary in that same way arbitrarily in that same way in some sense you have a structure you have to deal with it right so maybe that's a great software centric way to think of it um and then you get the sort of path dependent historic aspect often associated with those complex systems but I don't quite follow the connection with reduced mobility but I get that there's a different rule applying in different parts of the system can I try to translate and then if one thinks I'm not getting her point right she can correct me but i i think that it's helpful to think about it in terms of a search process

so that so that um the in the agodic system your search is untrammeled like you start searching through the space say there's some solution waiting for you randomly somewhere in the space or a bunch of solutions that can be graded in terms of comparative optimality. So we have this kind of model of the near equilibrium. The rigorous translation protocol that can go from that into a certain type of market philosophy

or market ideology or however we want to talk about it and in that model because it's a go deck your search is uh is randomly moving across the space so in that sense it's like there's no there's no part of the search space of the global search space from which it's inhibited or excluded and therefore it will eventually find optimum solution in that space. Whereas obviously path dependency localizes search,

seeing its access to the whole of the search space. and it simply it simply is no longer um it no longer has that has that complete mobility that you know there'll be a certain sort of um territory of the search that is that has been decided by history and the process up to that point and within that territory you can engage in in a search but but if the solution if the if the optimum solutions lie radically outside of that local patch of the of the search space in which the

path dependent process has constricted you you simply will not find it you know this is where this is the this is what the kind of critical edge of this is you know so so um you know once you're in the qwerty determined path then superior solutions that are just part of a completely different historical process are just inaccessible to you and and so your your search in that sense has been realized and what path dependency does is is simply um you know back to our face space model it produces a pattern in face space and that

pattern comes precisely from the fact that your search is not any longer you know any that's a really bad way of saying it because you know it's not at all it's not in accordance with your assumption freely wandering across the whole of the of the face space it's it's it's it's within this kind of fuzzily bounded these solutions that are available in that zone which are likely to be only local rather than global optima are accessible right okay so it's lack of mobility because you're stuck in a local optima and yeah the larger more global optima you're stuck in this on the small

hill instead of yes yes now so so the global the global mobility is totally notional I miss I'm taking it I mean maybe I don't know whether one is wanting to agree or argue with that but um it's not as if there was some globally untrammeled search procedure that then simply got constricted I mean i'm assuming like it's not there was some zero point before path dependency and and you know you lose that the sense in which um entering into any particular path is being conceived as a kind of process of constriction

why this language of traps is being used so for instance in the in the QWERTY example I think implicitly there's a notion that there was at least notionally before before QWERTY was locked in there was at least sort of a as if I'm sorry I'm just repeating this word but at least notionally there was a possibility of searching for different keyboard layouts, that any all kinds of different keyboard layouts could have been settled upon, but that once you're locked into QWERTY, then you're not going to get out of that very specific local.

And it's highly constrictive in the sense that only minor rearrangements are going to any longer be entertained by their system. OK. I don't know. Does Chuggis want to make this point verbally? Do either Chaggy's or Wan Young want to come in with their comments on sidebar?

Yeah, I mean, this is sort of a rhetorical question, just sort of restating where we're at so far. I think we're all pretty clear on the sort of idea of local dynamics. and, you know, just the extensive and the intensive and sort of – I'm just sort of restating what we were saying. I said, does fetishism force us to become aspiring capitalists and violate our immediate needs, i.e. the needs satisfied in the local dynamic processes of evolution? So I'm kind of – I know that we see with Dawkins that the genes are selfish, but in a way there is this idea that I think in evolution that maybe we are satisfying our needs as species beings. And Krugman seemed to be focusing on not the models,

but possibly investigating through pen and paper the dynamic processes of evolution and how that might bring us closer to a species being. And so my next question following from that was, should we bring the markets back into phase to satisfy our immediate interests as species beings instead of pursuing the cause of finalists of the market yeah I mean it's very I find shoot questions very hard to process in a way like um yeah I don't mean it like ought we to right I mean I just um certainly that's you know an

ethical question yeah again it's more rhetorical than anything else really I mean what do you what do you think is meant by bringing markets back into face I'm kind of kind of building off of some of the stuff I'm reading with Colosiva that, you know, through fetishism, like you said, that there becomes this sort of concept that alienates us from our immediate needs and that brings us out of phase with just sort of like the dogma of philosophy

and the dogma of the market. And in that out-of-phazeness, we're not acting in the myopia that Krugman seems to be talking about in this article, where we're just sort of stuck outside of our immediate interests. and I'm trying to tie this I'm not really too familiar with economics at all but I'm wondering how from a microeconomic standpoint fulfilling our immediate interests might function in I don't know maybe some sort of like non capitalistic mode or something like that yeah I sort of feel that there might

be some Translation To get across I'm just trying to think about like these notions of Immediate need I mean, you know, is it cool with you to try and like translate this stuff into Into their terms of this Quartinomics questions worse so I mean You know what would what would be what would count as immediate needs In those terms, I mean last week we were sort of saying okay, there's They have certain criteria of what would be a

How would you decide what was a globally optimum keyboard layout as opposed to this path dependent? Layout that we've got so you know so this question if you're going to say we haven't found The best possible keyboard layout and I'm saying all this Very hypothetically. It's this isn't something I'm wanting to endorse. It's just this is a structure if we if we accept that we haven't found a That we've that we've settled on we've been locked into a highly suboptimal from a global point of view keyboard layout how do you actually sort of rigorously decide that or persuasively argue for that case you

know you people obviously don't want to fall back on completely fuzzy notions about aesthetic acceptability they want some what they hope will be persuasive criteria for what is a good or bad keyboard layout globally considered and sorry let me just I need to just open up open a file again I should I should have copy this but i did it

oh sorry uh Yep, sorry, here we go. Okay, so we have it here.

so this is obviously from the fable of the keys evidence from the ergonomics literature ergonomic not to be confused obviously with a go day and so the criterion he they're settling on here that they and i don't think they're being in any way tendentious in this this is something that they're just trying to be cooperative with with david really for optimal typing speed keyboard should be designed so that a right and left hands equalize b the load on the whole middle row is maximized c the frequency

of alternating hand sequences maximized and the frequency of same finger typing is minimized so in this context that's that's a way to describe how you would judge what is a global act yeah absolutely good great no no so sorry I'm not going to get lost in this too much but in terms of your question then I think if we want to raise the questions that you're asking in terms that we can translate backwards and forwards then we have to have something like this some sort of actual uh set of definite criteria that

will allow us to judge the deficiency of a local optimum you know if we're going to say saying where we've ended up under the market process is in some generally persuasive, rigorously persuasive sense, suboptimal, then we need something like this that would be a hopefully minimally controversial set of criteria which will allow us to compare different outcomes or sort of evaluate the inadequacy of the outcome that we particularly have so this is so this is

then my come back to you on this on this question so how you know how what are we what are we talking about in this in this sort of terms you know we obviously i think we probably have to be specific about particular market outcomes of some kind or if if there's some very general market outcome that can be sort of you know analyzed in in the same into the same type of criteria then that that would obviously be great Adam I'm wondering if you can

sort of bring in what you're saying from the sidebar into the video regarding Ladyman's seven properties of complex systems and then I think you said beneath that one or two of these is enough to violate organicity, non-liminarity. Right. So, and again, I would have tried to find a highly technical definition before the class if I realized it would come up. But my understanding of organicity in the sense of predictable through is really about this very technical sense of predictable through statistical sampling, right?

So if we go to complex systems, one of the reasons you can't use techniques like that straightforwardly, and I was going back to one of these papers characterizing complex systems, so Ladyman is in the complex city science area, and he has these seven properties. And there's another property which Crutchfield determines, which is a great one, which is about historical information storage. So non-linearity is basically enough to break ergodicity, right? Because as soon as you say in this part of the system, you follow this rule, but in this other part of the system, you follow another rule, your statistical sampling is broken.

But you can still formulate a general rule, right? You can say exactly following the structure that I just followed, you can have an if condition, right? It's just no longer, you can no longer use these sort of classic statistical techniques around it. But, you know, the sort of information demands of these things sort of multiply rapidly. The more of these conditions you add, like feedback, spontaneous order, you know, hierarchical organization, et cetera. So you, you know, numerosity is another one, right? So three, you know, a system with three things in it behaving very differently to a system with 3,000 of the same things in it.

It's one of these radical breaks with ergodicity. But there's still techniques for modeling it. Yes. Yeah. So this is obviously, sorry to interrupt a bit. By just giving up on, but by just saying, well, these are non-ergotic systems. It's more that this structure sort of mirrors a structure at another level of abstraction, right, about whether you can ever get to a global optima or get a model of this system, I guess. I guess it comes back to modeling. And this is why the Krugman article is really interesting to me, actually, if we could circle back on that. So his argument is, you know, it's two things. He says, actually, if you look at evolutionary biology, they're doing neoclassical economics type stuff all the time.

They're saying, look at this system. Now, let's assume that it's perfectly optimized. Then what does that imply? and that's that is exactly the technique that you know austrian classical school like economists do all the time they're like what if this was totally rational what if we privilege the subjects here and say they're doing something that makes sense and it's and it's completely optimized what they're doing what does that imply about their motivations let's analyze from that perspective right and his critique is actually not that he says that's an incredibly valuable perspective and it's made me famous and successful and stuff but in evolutionary biology they say they have they're really comfortable with the idea that that's a modeling technique

an incredibly powerful modeling technique and that it has limits whereas in economics the much more dominant scholastic view is that's it that's how the world works that there's not limits to that model at some level, that that is how things are. And his critique of classical economics is not of the techniques, it's of the underlying philosophical position that the model is how it works, basically. Yeah. another model at stake here being the assumption of competence to arrive at global optima

that through these localized processes that you do as well as you can get right so through these localized processes of optimization as in evolution or through rational actors, that's the solution, basically. I mean, Dawkins has got some interesting stuff about this. One example that he uses that I think has really stuck with me anyway is he says, about a particular structure of the nervous system of a giraffe which is it

which was it is a nerve that goes it passes through the neck of sort of mammals sort of in the lineage of the giraffe or whatever in a way that's sort of relatively makes relative sense whether you've got a short neck but in the giraffe this nerve you know has to go right up and loop around some vertebrae at the top of the giraffe's spine and then loop all the way down and it's an extremely inefficient pathway see from some perspective of sort of global biological optimization if you

were designing a giraffe from scratch you would have just rooted the nerve directly you know across the neck and it would be vastly more efficient but because of the history of the giraffe because of the fact that this nerve pathway just sort of followed the historical process of the extension of the giraffe's neck it's ended up with this you know incredibly inefficient solution from a global point of view so I think it's like this connection you're making with by you know evolution apologies it is totally totally right and path dependency should say that you should not expect a naive notion of

global optimization biological systems because because the actual process of development has been obviously incremental and piecemeal and path dependent and you know you you have to always go from a to b through to said even though there might be some route a to z that you can notionally see from a transcendent perspective that would that would be vastly more efficient I mean then I feel like the economists have one assumption that they can bring to bear that the evolutionary biologists can't or one more perspective and it is about

humans as intelligent agents right which you know bounded agents but it makes this idea of much richer information availability I think more plausible and the sort of idea that the economy is you know through the actions of people is more plastic then right then you know yeah enemy that you know the anatomy of a giraffe um and and that's but I'm not sure where to point out in the literature to see if that comes to the fore but yes I mean those two I think

those two points about sort of um in a sort of informational commons it takes us back to this epistemological issue doesn't it and it's obviously complex because partly it too is historical so the way we might want to have conceived informational locality at the beginning of the 20th century can't simply be translated through to the beginning of the 21st century without recognizing that you know there are the historical conditions involved in it that that give you what at least are plausibly substantially different substantially different

situation but the plasticity thing is the absolute core of the question isn't it because I mean lock-in lock-in really is just tea you know I mean as a definition that's not it's roughly right isn't it that that you can't necessarily see where the anti plasticity comes from I I mean, part of the thing we talked about last week with Quidditch, it's not that there's some easily identifiable mechanical infrastructure that is locking it down, although that has to be entertained as a possibility in some cases. It's rather that there's this culture,

this kind of widespread set of habits and also expectations that mean that there is a radical inflexibility in the options available to the sort of development of the keyboard and the choices people might make about it. So I'm sort of assuming in terms of these last two points that David would probably think that would probably identify them with the other side on this that maybe they're sort of Leibovitz and Margolis paper would be more accepting of that then then and

David is. I wanted to ask you can I just go back a little bit what's the what's the difference between non-linearity and feedback? In the paper, as I recall, it's about whether it's just simply about whether you can... It's more about a modeling problem in a way versus the way that information feeds back in the system.

You know, you can have about whether there's a break in the behavior of the system versus whether information flows back into the system. I'd have to dig it out a little bit. Right. I was going off some previous notes. Yes. Rather than the direct text. But yeah. And what he does say is basically it's like a rough guy. Like he says almost no system ticks all seven boxes. You know, the more boxes you take, the more painful you are, the less prone, the more

you need to use these techniques. But almost no system except a few biological systems ticks every box. But it's basically what he says. Yeah. No, I definitely need to... Ah. um sorry theater what's this what's this link that you've just given us I just

put the ladyman article oh good great fantastic that's the one that has been referencing it's also in the classroom it's in the thread from last week but I can post it as a as a link there too okay no this is great I could anybody else but I've got it now so that's fantastic Okay, I mean, obviously my question to everyone here, which I think is where people are at

with by the end of this is, you know, to what extent is there a contemporary critique of capital that is structurally distinct in some significant way to the argument David is making in his Quartie Economics paper. Because to turn this around, I think for this module, certainly, next module we might have a whole other can of worms, but for this module, I think that why is QWERTY economics important?

important precisely because it's so perfectly epitomizes what a what a contemporary critique of capital ultimately is is saying so I'm just intrigued by whether people think it's just missing out fundamentals you know and that there's something further rigorously that is being said that we can't find in this controversy. Well, this is Michael.

I still have a hard time coming to grips with the idea that there is a position from which you can evaluate something as optimal or not that isn't also locally interested. Even the ergonomic criteria are kind of arbitrarily privileging that when people aren't buying in a market, people don't buy a layout. They're buying actual items. There's just a tremendous amount of criteria that go into that. ergonomic criteria is just one of many um so maybe just illusory that there is even a possibility for saying that something is optimal or not no i mean look i'm enormously sympathetic to that and

i think we we we we'll talk about that a lot more hopefully in the in the weeks ahead but that's That actually is kind of a, again, it had an oblique. I feel that David simply wins this argument. It's a knockdown thing. And there we are. You know, the critique has been made and it's kind of, it's utterly compelling and it leaves us with no choice but to defer to it at all. that's that's absolutely not what I'm wanting to say it's it's rather that I'm in making that argument about the

quote economics position are you not also simultaneously implicitly engaging in a systematic correction or a systematic dispute with the entire possibility of anti-capitalist critique you know what I mean like if you don't think David's critique works aren't my Mike at the most inflated my claim is if you don't think David's claim work aren't you saying that there simply is not a critique left on the table yeah I know no I'm

sympathetic to that as well yeah I think that's that's the case in so far as the any critique is going to be from a position of particular interest that's going to be as local and as path dependent as is what you're observing as what you're perceiving this obviously loops back to what a choice was saying doesn't it and his question and you know like you know there's I think the initial terms of that is something to do with it's kind of it's

it's a kind of systematic failure to satisfy immediate needs or you know it's almost I think we can be flexible about exactly what the terms of that is but it seems to me well in my response to him and I think in agreeing with you we can always translate these these types of critique into a particular interest in a a particular sense of there being some type of global optimality that is being missed by the system. You know, that's the kind of consistent principle of translation that I'm wanting to propose.

There simply is, you know, if you are saying, okay, there are these immediate human needs that are being left unsatisfied, satisfied then that is if you if you're going to formalize and rigorize that criticism you're saying that there is some uh global optimum and and if it's a serious criticism that can make sense of that we can actually define in some clear way what that what that global optimum is and then denigrate the actual outcome relative to that notion of global optimality. So I'm saying that is the necessary structure of the criticism, irrespective of whether you're going to accept the criticism or refuse the criticism

or how the actual dispute is then going to play out. The structure of the criticism itself is going to have to take that form if it is going to be meaningful at all Oh, so Wendy's putting loads of links in there. So just trying to pick up that last point about the sort of scale of optimization.

I feel like the sort of capitalist critiques, they're trying usually to not make a global claim, right? So they're trying to stop short of that. In that they're trying to say capitalism is such a local optimizer that you can do better than that with some more systemic optimization. But that may not be the perfect sort of system. You may not need like, you know, one single economic sort of calculation bureau.

that they're trying to avoid that sort of full-blown so okay but there's a question about whether there's a contradiction there but i i think that's what they're trying to thread but it's okay let's run with that a minute though if if it is possible to compare a possible counter capitalist outcome to the capitalist outcome and say that the counter capitalist outcome is uh clearly superior isn't there inevitable reference to global criteria there you know like that's that's just

you know just because it's concrete take this keyboard account again and you know um so you could say in terms of this typing speed thing well you know history is messy all of this kind of stuff you're not going to get the perfect keyboard layout but you could do one that was definitely better than qwerty um so you could improve on qwerty by by not trusting the market, even if you're not pretending that you're going to thereby arrive at a global optimum keyboard layout. But even in saying that, you have to invoke global criteria

by which you are defining the superiority even of the still suboptimal solution. Don't you? I mean, otherwise, how are you, you know, like to go back to your words on this, you say if capitalism is such a local optimizer, so, you know, you still, even if you are kind of abstaining from some aspiration to global optimum, you still are implicitly relying on that, on access to some kind of criteria that can define for you the, you know, The failure of the of the local optimum that you actually hear

Yeah, I mean I don't see how to avoid that right because because the whole sort of critique is that with Some more sophisticated application of design for right that you can get a better a keyboard mechanism, you can do something better. But maybe not every single case, but a swathe of cases that make more sense by some criteria, make people's lives better or whatever. They can type faster, they get less finger injuries

from horrifically cramped sort of weirdo keyboard layouts or something. Yeah, that's, yes. And so I guess you're sort of trying to define that criteria for some community. Yes. I feel like it sort of defines this very informal polity in a way around, you know, of like this platform users or keyboard users and sort of saying, well, this is a, this will better serve this polity, right? From design, which is where you're coming from as well, I think. well um

yeah i i don't know it's quite complicated there's this there's this uh point that i think is really germane to this in in the uh libravitz and margolis response that again i think we touched upon it last week where they say um sorry one second i think i want to do it find a slightly more extensive quick than the one i've copied um so in this just after the bit that we just quoted about these criteria for efficiency

you know they then they then say okay let's let's look at the drawer keyboard on this and they say it does a good job on these variables especially a and b six seven percent type is done on home row and left hand balances 47 53 percent although the shoals qwerty keyboard fails at conditions a and b most typing is done on the top row and the balance between the two hands is 57 43 percent the policy to put successively type keys as far apart as possible favors factor C thus leading to relatively rapid typing to factor C is this one the frequency of alternating hand sequences is maximized and the frequency of same finger typing is minimized and then then say the explanation for normal and

Rommel Hart's fact C is that during a keystroke the idle hand prepares for its next keystroke thus shows his decision to solve the mechanical problem through careful keyboard arrangement may have inadvertently satisfied a fairly important requirement for efficient typing so it's sort of said quite nonchalantly but i think there's a really crucial point being made there where you know the it the qwerty keyboard solved this problem that they're pointing on completely accidentally um no one designed this no one was aware of it it wasn't a kind of formal criterion in the in the design process that they it it's an accidental outcome

of solving another quite different problem and so if you sort of generalize from this what's obviously at stake in this argument on on this level is whether the very notion of deliberate targeting of global optimization is actually historically efficient and by historically efficient i mean you know it actually comes out historically with the the best outcomes um So this is like our answer you say we we say we you just have to do this and I'm just wondering whether that's true and whether that you know there's a deep structure of this discussion which is to say that just actually is a false a false objective.

and that and that the very goal of global optimization is at least questionable so that's I was reading Krugman's concern about he was saying something about that relegating dynamic processes to computer models was something that he didn't really think was a good idea and I was sort of reading that as he wanted the human to pull out the pen and paper and sort of go through the dynamic processes as well as they can you know however accurate that may be but what I'm getting what I'm hearing now from you is that possibly that dynamic process itself is non-existent

and it's like an historical accident and that possibly Krugman is saying that we should value those types of accidents or i don't know i mean i'd be really surprised if krugman is is saying that but i'm willing to be i'm willing to be surprised about it because you know how he comes into this from my point of view is that i'm treating him as an avatar of the keynesian economic perspective which is based upon a and in fact explicit criticism of capital for its susceptibility to be trapped in in local optima so from that

point of view it would surprise me if he was if he was um if he was going to defend these extremely sort of market type trial and error search processes you know without the possibility of some sort of higher level sort of transcendent criticism but I'm I don't want to be dogmatic on that oh yeah yeah Adam saying that he thinks also crickets on the design side of it I thought I was kind of reading it as something like criticism that the dynamic process is

always an historical, read as an historical accident, as if we weren't, as if the model itself was superseding the dynamic process. but just based on what you're saying now it's as if that dynamic process is occurring is not occurring it's just it there's just random historical occurrences that that and there is no dynamic process well I mean even however much chance is in it I think it's a it's a dynamic process you know in all kinds of ways I mean it's got it's got feedback dynamics lock in as a feedback feedback dynamic I think path dependency is necessarily a dynamic

process so I don't think throw out is it is it a globally optimizing process or a process optimizing in the direction of some notion global optimum I think that's a more complicated process and it's partly somewhere that I think we have to go but I don't think we're there now but I'll just guard on this it's just is the very notion of global optimization a a delusory

distraction you know is the very notion of a global optimum something that is it's actually intrinsically metaphysical and and we come out of this process just really trying to think see so radically even permit of a reference to a global optimum the very notion of a global optimum has ceased to make all coherent and so that's what well and that's kind of what I'm a certain grain of this argument is leading into.

Well, and that's kind of where at least my head is at, is that the idea of optimization tends to treat it as though, as the optimization is kind of, you're defining a vector by which which you can direct the resources toward as though there's kind of a gap between the two. Whereas I'm thinking if you look at it more as, I think what that kind of doesn't do is it doesn't permit, it seems like it's creating a gap where there isn't one in terms of all the material resources that go into all the various aspects of whatever embodiment of your system it is. In this case, it's going to be a keyboard. In which case, it's not like you can say, we'll optimize.

There's a gap between an optimization criteria, the materials to which you direct toward it, and it's just a matter of redirecting them. Instead, if you think of it maybe as there's kind of maximally dense convergence of things, and you're selecting a particular assembly that you're going to call, for example, in this case, it's going to be usability or speed of typing. It's still costly to choose that as an optimum path. You're just reweighing, in a sense, that whole structure. So it's not like there's a gap where something is going to be moving. You're moving toward an optimum. them but instead you're just you're just privileging the the one perspective on

kind of a maximally dense set of resources I'm sure if that makes sense but no no it doesn't make sense I think this is a really difficult point so I mean I'm I'm extremely sympathetic with with you know the intractability of it of of this of this thought i think it's it's it's really hard um and it's partly about then then where criteria come from isn't it like if you know if you is it the case that at the end of the day any criteria for the judgment or evaluation of the outcome of a

particular local process can be considered themselves to be I think you can say of course they they can't be considered more local but i think as soon as you try to then run with that thought to the end of the road and say so um the actual definition of optimality is already is always radically localized by the by the path that is taken um you know it's an extremely demanding extremely demanding thought to pursue

um but it seems to me that that's the that's the radical response to david not you know i i really have great respect for this libravitz and margolis paper i think it's fascinating and you know i think it's got a lot of uh valency in terms of debates that are going on and it's a it's you know a lot of market oriented responses to to various things take the same form but i think what they're failing to think is exactly this thought that you're that you're pursuing and that i'm definitely wanting also to encourage because they do they do hold on to the notion that that finally it's reasonable to

bring in certain global criteria and use them as the basis for evaluating whether or not this local process has been efficient Yeah, and with that, I wonder if the idea of efficiency doesn't suffer the same problem. Just in the sense that they're, in other words, the resources that are used in total toward whatever phenomenon you're examining are the resources that are used. I guess from the perspective of evaluating the phenomenon like the QWERTY keyboard,

if you can even have an application of something like efficiency. Or if efficiency isn't just inherent to whatever interest you're taking. In other words, as long as you're interested, it's inefficient. I mean look there's going to be there's going to be criteria for comparison of course aren't there I mean you know so just on the micro level you know when you're using a keyboard you will have some sort of private notion of efficiency

or just as a typist learns to type that that you know there is such a thing as a sort of learning to type well becoming a more efficient typist you know which will be to do with these things about you know um the movements of you know with minimal movement of your hand across the across the keyboard space you you're able to produce the the that the text or that will be correlated i'm assuming typing speed all of these kind of things so it's it's not that those it's not that those things don't exist uh or must inevitably exist and or you certainly couldn't have economics without a constant process of comparison between you know obviously cashed out in market terms between good

and bad deals at all kinds of micro levels you know so you can't go shopping you can't look for a job you can't you can't decide on the direction of an industrial process unless you're constantly calculating what is a better or worse deployment of resources so it's not that i think we can say we just collapse onto some flat plane where there's simply no possibility of comparison but all of those all the criteria for comparison that we rely upon are going to be historically generated at some level um so you know the part if you if you follow the path back enough finally you're everything that you're going to bring to bear to make sense of that path

or to follow that path or to judge which direction to take on that path is itself going to be found on the path and nowhere else you know there's only the path ultimately and and so it's it's the emergence of an illusion of a transcendent criteria that I think is at least questionable but that doesn't I don't I think it would be hyperbolic and unsustainable to say that we simply are dismissing all criteriology and and and things can somehow proceed without criteria. I think that's simply not imaginable.

So I just want to hop in here and say that we're at the 30 minute point to 30 minutes to one. Okay, yes. um so maybe i should as a prompt thing to people like think just thinking about this module structurally and and what what today what we should try and have done by the end of today um if it's the case that we're going to at least orbit this uh this article it's about milani's

stuff so it's you know that's just the atlantic article is just the latest example of it i'll hunt around and see there's other stuff too but his basic ideas i think are communicated through through several of these channels with probably reasonable fidelity and and so that topic would be more um on questions to do with um on print on information on digitality um obviously then we of the cross cultural comparison it sort of inevitably gets into a kind of really interesting and wide-ranging discussion in his work about the contribution of mechanical writing to

modernity and the differential cultural impact of that depending on scripts so obviously there's a there's a there's a whole way one can construe this question that's called the great divergence to do with the relation of European and Chinese station process can be run in terms of these questions of scripts and and and the the advantage at a certain point of an alphabetic script for the digitization of information so those are the I think among the things that are candidate topics for next week so for right where we are now I just wonder whether people

have any points they want to make about these these kind of system theoretic question so it's it's political economy it's complex dynamics it's it's the structure of history these kind of framing conceptual structures which obviously I think we've seen sort of interlock with this chronomics debate very and specifically but this is the really the time to introduce any sort of large scale arguments about about that that level of things

or of course whatever anybody wants to say. I did have a thought about the, you mentioned about comparison, that not ready to throw out the idea that things cannot be comparable. One idea might be that if you're looking at a particular phenomenon, maybe part of the problem is it's not so much, maybe what part of the problem is having a normative position on the goodness or badness of a particular phenomenon or like a deal for example in economics rather than maybe maybe the relevant is how just definable is the phenomenon and how clearly is it identifiable

as a thing. How much is it? In other words, if we're talking about QWERTY, perhaps what's interesting is how definable it is as QWERTY. We know what we're talking about. It bleeds out at certain edges, but perhaps the robustness or the resiliency of the phenomenon is its measure. In which case, then, I'm thinking that maybe comparisons of phenomenon, or at least saying a good deal versus a bad deal or optimal or not optimal maybe there is still a possibility that is not legitimate that we can't really do that we that really what we can do is just say is there is there not a phenomenon but and by what degree is it identifiable well i think there's there's

different levels of which you know if we're just for a minute sticking with a that the sort of economic framework for thinking what's meant by comparison because it's crunchy and and socially concrete and There's been a lot of work done on it. So I think you know clarity is comparatively Easy here. There's obviously on one hand. There's the deal that you make when you buy a typewriter or buy any device with a a let's say with a QWERTY interface or any kind of a keyboard type interface. And in that case you're obviously making inescapably you're making a you know is this going to

be is this efficient it looks let sorry that's probably a good deal is it is it cheap will it lasts is it well made is it easy to use the person making the consumer decision will be asking those questions and have certain criteria and say you know this this one's cheaper than that it seems to be more or less as well made you know i prefer it i'll buy this one and then obviously there's a corresponding reciprocal sense of these kind of micro economic calculations happening on the production end where people say I think people will like this one if we make it like this we can make it cheaper and people like that you know this type of design is very fashionable so you know I think it would be a more sensible

economic calculation to to to go down this particular line in terms of design or or whatever so you know there's a reciprocity of producer and consumer economic microeconomic choices that all have criteria and I think are all totally inescapable and are constantly happening and that everyone who ever buys anything or makes any economic decision whatsoever is involved in some kind of process approximating to this but then we make this jump to saying well was settling on QWERTY was the social coordination to settle on QWERTY as a whole

as a society a good deal you know was that a good decision to make and that so it's this it's that jump that I think everything happens in in terms of this dispute I think it's an absolute classic political economic branch point that happens there yeah and there's what yeah sorry can't do yeah oh I'm sorry I think and what kind of gets confusing I think for me at least is that when we're talking about the interactions of the deals of people making the the keyboards of people buying them well there isn't any kind of pretense that it's anything other than a very interested stake and

And I think that's where the jump gets fuzzy is because, and this is the reason why I say it's hard to make a comparison, because the comparison then, again, assumes that you're able to speak from a position of being somewhat disinterested or having kind of this objective viewpoint. whereas I think that is is where there's this assumption that that isn't also an embroiled in an embedded vantage point yes I mean this is interesting I'm I'm wondering so that so this language of just of being interested and disinterested obviously latches in some way

onto the question onto the distinction between locality and globality but it but it's not it's not a perfect equivalence is it I mean you know you could say I'm adopting you just you just take it in the in say the Marxist tradition where there's there's no big commitment there that when you go to the collective level you become suddenly disinterested you know what I mean I don't I don't think there's any more pressure on a on a

socialist economist to maintain a kind of a pretense of disinterest than a then the most extreme kind of market economists both of them as an economist should obviously try to be neutral if they're going to persuade people but at the same time it doesn't require any particular commitment to the notion of a disinterested perspective in the sense obviously from the from the left they simply we're just simply talking about collective interests rather than right it is is there's a bit of a synecdoche there just because at least in terms of QWERTY, it's kind of saying that, okay, the collective interest is reducible to usability

when that in no way represents the actual interests that comprise the phenomenon, which might also be having to do with mining materials and manufacturing and engineering work. So to me, I guess I'm not saying that it's disinterested, but it's picking one thing and just refusing to be interested in anything but that. Yes, I mean, there's a really interesting, I think, based on what you're saying, utterly hypothetical text that would be a kind of Soviet version of Quirtenomics.

you know like it would be something like a kind of related in some way to to Mises is calculate economic calculation in the socialist Commonwealth paper which is were a Soviet central planner approaching the quarter in omics debate what would be the same and what would be different you know like I can see well one of the things that's maybe interesting is that you know the planner could actually agree perhaps with everything that you've just said

would say look yes from a certain kind of abstract notion of usability there are superior cable layouts but if we take this as a kind of global social calculation of utility the cost that would be good by retraining all our typists by retooling our factories by know all sort of turning around all of these kind of fixed investments of various kinds would outweigh the kind of the benefits that we would derive from the actual improvement of the user experience of typing so so what I'm

saying is you know there's a kind of the angle of this of this question of the sort of market or socialist orientation and the the the quadenomics question at a kind of slightly weird angle isn't it you know what I mean like the kind of it's kind of weird that the the critique that David makes which is a critique of the outcome of the market process is actually one soviet central planner could end up endorsing and repeating the the the qwerty lock-in rather than siding with the critique of that just

on the grounds that you've said that a comprehensive calculation of economic interests would make that the rational not just rational private decision for the agents concern yeah and if I follow you correctly that would be in the case that the the central planner in that case would be advocating for kind of a non interventionist position well I guess though I should put it this way no if they wanted to optimize for if they wanted to make the claim that it would be too costly to overturn strictly for usability because it's a bigger economic project than just optimizing for usability then they would not intervene

in that sense because QWERTY has already been optimized is that the idea? Yes if intervention is being treated as being equivalent to as a kind of anti-conservative thing but but I mean in a certain sense if you're a if you're a economic central planner with that sort of power you're intervening whether you decide to continue with the current grain of the production process or to redirect it aren't you I mean they're both they're both you're making a decision about what's the what's the plan the five-year plan in in either case it's not that you're opting out particularly and letting the market decide I mean you might say in fact you know whatever the market wants we're telling you that you have

to stick with this keyboard layout because we've done the calculations and we can tell you that you'd be wasting a lot of social resources that we could spend on other things if you move to a different keyboard layer. So, you know, I'm saying I don't think the interventionism versus spontaneity difference is able to quite capture the stake either. I don't know, it's slightly twisting my head, I must admit. I think, I assume that the philosophically minded central planner might say,

might say, we have a historical criticism of the spontaneous market process for landing us with this ridiculous keyboard layout that we are now locked into. you know so it could be on that just level of just abstract moral ideological denunciation that they could say spontaneity has landed us in a bad place even though you know when they just run the math on what the options are from where they actually find themselves you know just accepting the outcome practically accepting the outcome of that spontaneous outcome might be the decision that they're led to by their own principles.

Yeah, and I think, yeah, I see what you mean. I think in the first case, it would be the case of them privileging the one particular mode of criteria, whereas in the other, if they wanted to expand it to the entire ecology of all inputs to QWERTY and said, we're going to optimize for all of those, it happens to actually be what has actually happened. Yes, or at least sticking with what's happened. right even though hypothetically had they gone another route and they might say oh if only we'd had socialist planning before we settled on this we'd be in a better place now um but given where

we are the the socialist calculation doesn't differ from the spontaneous outcome of the market process going forward in the sense that we can't. But even then they couldn't say we'd be in a better place. Because I'm thinking that if they're going to be agnostic and kind of treat all criteria symmetrically, then they couldn't then switch and say we'd be in a better place. Because the cat's already out of the bag. You've already made your stake that all inputs are symmetrically valuable. Well, except that I'm assuming that other inputs would be kind of constant

in a hypothetical alternative where you've got a different keyboard layout. Let's just say that we agree that DeBoer is superior, and we agree, I think, I mean, that's problematic to me. we even more problematic we agree that there is some imaginable socialist planning process that would have led us to Dvorak rather than the messy market oriented process that led us to QWERTY so we would just accept those hypothetically okay um now if we accept that and and so we're in this alternative it this socialist alternative history in which they have the Dvorak keyboard then I'm assuming the other inputs would be the same you

know the amount of metal you need to make a typewriter or the amount of factory work that it requires to put a typewriter together or the amount of time it takes to learn to type I mean the these would either be the same or perhaps in the last case better from from a point of view of this kind of economic calculation global economic calculation process with that but to do that you almost always have to envision that there's a zero point at which you start that's completely a historical and other there's already capital that's already been expended so in a sense aren't you kind of off limits from ever doing that because there's always going to be a capital investment that got you to the point of whatever it is you're critiquing.

Yes, you mean that that any imaginable socialist society will inherit a history with a shape by a prior capitalistic process. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, that's never yes outside so there's never really a situation where all things are equal but for the keyboard layout No There's not a real situation Yes Yes, I totally agree Yeah Yeah Can I just I started to jump from this did about just this some

What what what is red QWERTY? Can I just ask before than me digging through the hole and That was just the nickname I gave to the scenario that you described, the Soviet central planner. Oh, okay. I've got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Linear optimization calculations to work out whether it was cost effective to switch keyboard layer. Yeah. Okay, got you. It's good, actually. In another life I would raise that banner with great enthusiasm. I know we don't need to wrap soon.

I do find it really interesting that there's a so-called lost Steve Jobs interview that's floating around. And I mentioned this quickly the other week. At the end of it, he talks about his motivation and the design motivation, and it's not at all in, he doesn't express it at all in sort of quantitative terms or sort of optimization type terms. It's, he actually puts it in terms of taste. You know, there's some sort of transcendent criteria that motivates him to make better things. obviously you can critique you can slice that up and critique it but i i think it's really interesting

i mean the design process that you go through in making things is is about well these things don't make sense and how do i solve given different design constraints and then there's all sorts of data points like the reason that linux exists as a very successful operating system was basically because people were very frustrated as engineers at some sort of aesthetic level with the way that particularly Microsoft consumer products worked. It was a very non-market sort of motivation or at least I mean you can frame it in terms of the sort of rational optimization of

the economics frame, but it's not, they didn't want to start startups or whatever and have a direct profit motive. It was much more indirect through these sorts of fairly visceral reactions in some ways to the way things work. And I just think that's, I just feel like there's a thread there that goes through that I don't want to lose. Yes. I mean, looks without wanting to put words in your mouth on this, but it seems to me that if we've got this kind of face-based framework partly to help stuff, and obviously,

in a way, lock-in is your attractor with QWERTY or something like that. you're now saying well there's also these repellers you know and um they they are just as historical just as localized just as in a way accidental and you know push the process through this through this dynamic of repulsion with the same kind of historical contingency as something would get locked in by a process of attraction So I think that's true, but then I think the argument comes down to is that inherently

expressed by the market pricing mechanism in the economy, right? Even if it's sort of there's like a local repulsor or whatever as well as local attractors, is that is it the market mechanism that is perfectly expressing that or not um and and and that's you know rather than a you know completely global transcendent criteria I think that's probably closer to where like the left accelerationist critique is coming from for yeah I'm not sure I'm totally getting this when you say the market when you

say the market process you as opposed to something else something that's not this not a global transcendent criterion but is somehow the path a local path dependent influence but not of a market type is that yeah basically that's what I'm saying so so you know complex and path dependent and dynamic but you know because of the actors involved, not really a market sort of process or short-cutting a market process. And then you can argue about whether that is actually a market process in some way.

Is it not a market process in some significant way? I mean, this is partly my question, I guess. It's just what is defining a market process such that we can introduce this disjunct and say, you know, and now we're talking about something else. And I'm just simply not clear what the definition of that is. Because obviously the, and I'm not denying there might be such a thing. i'm just saying that that our tradition has given us this set of disjuncts that are based basically on variations on this global local disjunction haven't they and the and that's

and the kind of the market is said to end at the point where it fails to resolve global coordination problems and then the the the agent that that then represents the solution to this global coordination problem is is then counterposed to the market but you're saying something but but you're saying well that isn't that isn't now what we're we're talking about when we're differentiating from a market process we're talking about something other than that I mean, I think it might be interesting to slice it another way, right? I'm not sure that I have a very strong position on it yet, but I do feel like it's rich enough to dig into.

I just put something in the sidebar, which I did want to relate to this at some point. And if we're out of time for today, that's fine. But the definition of a platform, I think, is quite important. And actually, I don't seem to see a very standard definition around the place. It's actually used in a lot of different ways. It's used, the complexity science people will use it as really big structures like language or the skeleton, right? Really big world historical structures. software people would use it for any old, you know, thing that they threw off in five minutes, right?

That's what a platform is. And, you know, there was something I was chewing on from Bratton, which I think is not a bad definition. You know, I don't feel like you need to sort of buy the whole package to use this definition, which is about the way that it centralizes certain things with standards, and the way an interface is defined, but then that interface is used in a highly distributed way by users. And I liked that distinction between types of distribution and types of centrality, um which you know in the classic sort of market versus state argument that that structure isn't

there it's like either you need the market to decide locally or you need the soviet committee to decide centrally um that's not quite what's going on with the platform i i i feel so if you I guess that's the space that I'm trying to chew on. Yes, this is absolutely what I think, you know, this week is has been about platforms, but not enough, you know, so we definitely should this whatever we do next week, we should jump up off from this platform stuff. It's utterly it's utterly crucial, obviously, to this whole discussion. I mean, I would just quickly say, because we are running out of time, like, you know, can't you construe macroeconomics, though, also in this sense?

um you know that it too you know it's not that it it does uh totalitarian soviet type control of microeconomic decisions but it sets these general um saturating parameters are inescapable but only very partially determining you know to do with the value of money you know all the parameters that are being manipulated macroeconomically seem to me to be very like these platform structures that they

involve the same weird mix of centralization and acceptance of distributed micro control i i think there's a really rich connection there or or something like the way a stock exchange works for instance where there's very specific rules but there's also very free interaction within the context of those rules, right? Yes. The fact that we talk about a trading platform in that context, there's no coincidence, is it? And it's probably a good usage of the word, actually. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you there, but I'm agreeing with you. I was just agreeing, yeah.

So that's exactly, yes. I'm not sure that it's exactly equivalent, but it's very rich connections. yeah so we actually can run a little bit longer today if people would like I'm actually okay to leave it here I yeah didn't mean to completely derail thing no no no it's not derailing it's absolutely great but I would also say you know like I think this platform topic I think what we've I think we've talked about it a bit in extremely abstract philosophical terms and we and

we should we should talk about it much more concretely and I think it's a really good transitional point if we if we promise to pick things up with platforms at the start of next week however we then I think it will actually flow actually into the Malahony stuff anyway but I but you know irrespective I think it's something we should reboot with next week for sure but let's I think it would be pointless now to try and let's not you know it's too big to try and uh to try and stuff it into whatever extra time we have at this point I think great that sounds good um do you have uh any readings that you'd like me to post

in the classroom for next week well I think in turn other than things we've got at the moment I've already put up this Atlantic article and as I say I'll add some more because I think that this is just the most recent one in terms of platform stuff I don't know that's an interesting thing I wonder whether there's a sort of is there a sort of moderately sized Bratton paper that we could add to our list um that That is from his book. I don't know if you can find that definition elsewhere. I'm going to have a bit of a look around. But yeah, that's from one of the intro chapters in this thing.

OK. Maybe I can try and hunt around for that. OK, cool. Great. Thanks, everyone. Yeah, thanks so much, everybody. It's great. And I hope to see you all next week. Sounds good. Thanks.