Finance and Society
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Teslaism: Economics at the end of the end of the future
Get PDFTeslaism: Economics at the end of the end of the future. 4K Video, 27’ 2’’, sound and colour, Germany and UK, 2022. View in full here: <https://vimeo.com/724894515>. Password: Giga.
Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present
Who can exercise the option of justice?
Get PDFRobert Meister’s book is subtitled ‘A democratic theory of finance for the 21st century’. At first glance, there are odd juxtapositions expressed in the title: justice and democracy on the one hand; finance and options contracts on the other. How can they be integrated? That is the challenge Meister sets. It isn't an easy read – the richness of the analysis requires that it be digested carefully – but it will, for many people, change the way they understand the political meanings, and potentials, of financial analysis
Platform economies: Beyond the North-South divide
Get PDFPlatform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices. However, different assumptions are made about the effects of digital platforms depending on geographical location. While digital platforms are approached as inherent to processes of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the ‘Global South’. Analyses of financialization as a one-way-vector – Global North to Global South – overlook the variability, the limits, and responses to financialization. In contrast, a focus on market devices illustrates the specificities of value creation. An example of this is ‘the float’, a form of financial value generated by mobile telecommunication operators, mobile money issuers, and commercial banks in Africa. Through this lens, we see instances of both value subjugation and autonomization, evidence that the fault lines of value production generated by ambiguous market devices are obscured by the Global North/Global South frame
Varieties of volatility
Get PDFThis article explores the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of volatility and their implications for cultural analysis in a range of fields. From quantitative finance, it takes the notion of ‘delta-hedging’, the suspension or neutralization of directionality to get access to volatility, and applies this to qualitative areas such as surfing, dance, cinema, and language
Volatile properties: A Modest Proposal revisited
Get PDFIn our 2018 film, A Modest Proposal, we proposed to financialize the assets of public museums, their collections, and buildings, and distribute the generated values for the benefit of the producers of those values: the artist community. Reality seems to have caught up with our proposal. In the wake of the pandemic, public museums started to sell NFTs of their master pieces. But this did not inspire any new form of mutualization. In this text, we question whether blockchain infrastructures can be considered a public good. The individualistic logics that pervade the crypto sphere consider human relations in transactional terms and the enforcement of property rights as the only valuable governance principle, defining property as the basis for representation in many of the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The trust placed in automated processes might lead to ‘governance by algorithms’, making the ‘Leviathan’, the sovereign machine, a frightening possibility. Other blockchain infrastructures may offer more inclusive alternatives. Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCOs) acknowledge the need for the individual to sustain her/himself and yet also create a solidarity economy by the mutual distribution of collectively generated values among all contributors. We focus on the above questions on property, public goods and governance using our home in Brussels, which we have defined as an artwork and framing device. It is the ‘house as artwork’ that helps us evaluate how these concepts play out in an accelerating world in which blockchain and other technologies might equally generate emancipation or new enclosures
Pandemonium (do androids dream of?)
Get PDFPandemonium (do androids dream of?) VR and sound work, 2021. A 360-degree capture from inside the VR (player POV) is available on YouTube. For the 3D experience to work, please view on the YouTube app downloaded onto a smart phone with the sound on. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3RbhqOB7HA/>.
Ami Clarke works with art and technology, critically engaging with the complex protocols of surveillance and disaster capitalism in everyday assemblages, with a focus on the inter- dependencies between code and language in hyper-networked culture. Clarke utilises various digital media, with aspects of live programming, to produce video and sound, sculpture, and virtual reality works that often come together as installations.
Pandemonium was produced during a Beyond Matter residency in 2021 at ZKM Center for Media and Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, and a ‘risk’ related residency at Radar, Loughborough University, in 2020. The work consists of a virtual reality environment with sound work, an online dashboard, and a Twitterbot.
For more information on the project, visit: <https://www.amiclarke.com/pandemonium-do-androids-dream-of/>. Credits and acknowledgements are detailed in the PDF file
The social determination of monetary value: A response to Ecks
Get PDFEcks is disappointed that Inventing Value (2022) does not develop a comprehensive, essentially ethical, theory of the value of things based in the materiality of human need. But this is not the objective of the book. Instead, the book seeks to examine how value, as we assess it in specifically monetary terms, functions in the economy. Assessments of value in both the commodity and asset sectors are the focus of enormous social contestation backed by considerable social power, and the book focuses on how this shapes our valuations
New perspectives on private equity and impact
No full textTwo new books, Jeffrey Hooke’s The Myth of Private Equity (2021) and Laura Olson’s Ethically Challenged (2022), address the private equity business model as one avenue through which the financialization of our societies is occurring. While based on US data and examples, they provide lessons for those in countries around the world who are concerned about the antics of global finance that often skirt existing regulatory frameworks
Globalizing financial valuation: International property consultants in São Paulo
Get PDFInternational property consultants (IPCs) have become key intermediaries in the globalization of property markets by providing a range of services that generate transparency and comparability in land and property-based investments. While their role in generating standardized information on local markets is well known, what is less is known is how IPCs help turn property into an income-yielding asset in less developed economies. This article investigates the contested diffusion of financialized valuation approaches in São Paulo’s local property market. Through a qualitative inquiry into large IPCs and their main clients in the city, we show that IPCs have promoted valuation approaches that are tailored to the needs of financial market investors, thus affecting key investment decisions taken by diverse actors. Though these financialized techniques have at times clashed with more traditional views of property ownership prevalent in the country, we show that most often they co-exist with long-established valuation techniques that reflect the social and economic circumstances of Brazil’s economy. The socially contingent nature of property valuation raises theoretical issues concerning the complexity of attributing value to fixed capital, as well as several policy issues
The void in finance
Get PDFThere is no proper place within economic thought for the void. It appears nowhere in the canonical texts of political economy, let alone the discourse of conventional economics. Yet one cannot shake the sense that it is implied in most if not all financial commentary. At the very least, the void exerts a magnetic pull on a range of related terms in the lexicon. Could it be that through these it grounds the financial imagination in fundamental ways