Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

But wait. Surely people can decide to drink or not to drink. No, no, say the intellectual elite who tell us constantly of the “myth of choice” in the market. We are swayed by weird forces outside our control. We fear that if we don’t drink Coke, we will not be part of the mainstream of life, will not fit corporately imposed expectations for how we are supposed to behave. Instead we are pawns in a game in which this scary company is king.

Well, think again. It turns out that the real power is in the hands of consumers after all. Stop drinking the stuff and the stuff goes away. That’s how markets work. Not even a 127-year legacy and a seemingly unstoppable cultural tradition are able to override the basic decision to buy or not to buy.

No, the company is not king. This is a profound misunderstanding of what the "myth of the commodity" and the "myth of choice" are. Coke can certainly fade away and disappear... because it's been replaced by a different object of our affection. The apparatus isn't Coke itself, but the techno-media sprawl behind the commodity; what channels our libidinal drives onto certain fixations, what trends catch on, what fads twinkle like ecstatic starlight, what fractals draw us into the spiral.

The disappearance of Coke doesn't disprove the myth of the commodity in any way, shape, or form; and it doesn't prove the power of choice.

The cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives. That we cannot do otherwise is a mark of our unfreedom. Choice has become a fetish; but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen.

 

[Dak]

Must improvise or must improve? Odd word choice. I see the argument for "freedom from choice", but when that freedom is imposed, it becomes its own unfreedom.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think it's easiest to just admit that there is no freedom of choice; or, rather, choice isn't something reducible to a "self." And Gray's original statement says improvise. He's commenting on the Enlightenment turn in which things such as Fate and/or Providence no longer play a role in people's lives. We aren't heading toward a predetermined conclusion, but improvising the entire process. Such a "fact" leads to what he calls the "cult of choice." We project free choice into our lives in order to make sense of its meaninglessness.

 

[Dak]

We project free choice into our lives in order to make sense of its meaninglessness.

Isn't that the "vulgar nihilism" perspective?

 

[Einherjar86]

No. Ultimately, it's simply a natural fact that life is meaningless; it's an accident. Within our given socio-cultural circumstances and conditions of coexistence we might create contingent meaning (to specify the difference between these words yet again), and this is certainly not "unreal."

When I use the term "vulgar" I merely mean that it's a non-intellectual nihilism in that it wallows in the easy apathy of total abandonment. So a vulgar nihilist wouldn't consider the projection of free choice, whether she understands the notion or not.

It is not "vulgar nihilism" to admit that "meaning," and especially "free choice," does not exist in the world - this is a simple, cold, desolate fact of existence. It would be vulgar to admit this and nothing more. A more complex, intellectual nihilism admits that meaning does not exist, but that it emerges complexly from conditional situations. Meaning exists as a fantasy, and in that it wields significant influence.

The purpose in making the distinction, as Gray does, is to put pressure on the pseudo-mystical concept of "Free Choice" as an ideological justification for certain behavior.

 

[Dak]

If life is not an accident, meaning is imposed upon us. If life is an accident, we impose the meaning. It doesn't merely cease to exist.

Coincidently on commodities, fetishizations of choice and things,etc:

http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/why-we-should-love-material-things-more/

Could it be that the problem with our whole neo-liberal experiment, championed early on by Augusto Pinochet, is not that it values material things too much – but that it doesn’t truly value them enough?

 

[Einherjar86]

If life is not an accident, meaning is imposed upon us. If life is an accident, we impose the meaning. It doesn't merely cease to exist.

This isn't true though. Do dogs impose meaning? Do spiders? Life does not equate with meaning. Furthermore, human life does not equate with meaning; meaning derives from consciousness, and consciousness only coincides with language.

Coincidently on commodities, fetishizations of choice and things,etc:

http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/why-we-should-love-material-things-more/

I saw this. It's an interesting article.

 

[Dak]

This isn't true though. Do dogs impose meaning? Do spiders? Life does not equate with meaning. Furthermore, human life does not equate with meaning; meaning derives from consciousness, and consciousness only coincides with language.

But where does the language come from. I'm really curious about why social interaction is so important to brain development and health in social animals, but only humans have developed language in the form and degree that we have.

http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/what-solitary-confinement-does-to-the-brain/

I saw this. It's an interesting article.

It backs some of my longheld beliefs to a degree. The disposable society has always been somewhat repulsive to me. The degree to which people accept things like electricity, controlled climate, water (even hot!) on demand, hit-it-and-forget-it laundry cleaning, refrigeration, long distance communication in all forms, and of course motor vehicle transportation as part of the natural landscape grinds on me.

 

[Einherjar86]

But where does the language come from. I'm really curious about why social interaction is so important to brain development and health in social animals, but only humans have developed language in the form and degree that we have.

You should read more about language theory and its place in evolutionary development. It's commonly accepted that children don't learn words by assigning a particular term to a kind of object. There's lots of evidence that language doesn't work by "meaning" in the sense we understand it. Language is more like a system of suggestions; as it develops and we devise more complex systems of written language, the concept of meaning arises.

Meaning isn't necessarily inherent in consciousness or language.

It backs some of my longheld beliefs to a degree. The disposable society has always been somewhat repulsive to me. The degree to which people accept things like electricity, controlled climate, water (even hot!) on demand, hit-it-and-forget-it laundry cleaning, refrigeration, long distance communication in all forms, and of course motor vehicle transportation as part of the natural landscape grinds on me.

I'm not quite as invested in this as you seem to be...

 

[viewerfromnihil]

You should read more about language theory and its place in evolutionary development.

Do you have any recommendations?

 

[Einherjar86]

Philosophy of language, I should say.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, for starters! Not the Tractatus, but the PI; that is, the Philosophical Investigations. It opens up with a refutation of Augustine's claim that children learn words by assigning terms to objects/things.

The tradition inaugurated by Wittgenstein has done the most in suggesting that there is a fundamentally non-interpretive component to language. To put it another way: language works, but not by "mean-ing" things. Donald Davidson (who argues for semantics, in fact, but does so elegantly); Saul Kripke, who wrote Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, which basically argues that language (as it pertains to meaning) is something like a guessing game, albeit a very complicated one.

On the construction of meaning as an ex post facto phenomenon, check out Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, or Thomas Metzinger's Being No One.

As John Gray puts it, even the most rudimentary forms of communication found in animals and plants still count, in some sense, as language. Human animals, at their earliest stages, engaged in this form of communication; but this doesn't mean that meaning existed at that point. Meaning doesn't coincide with consciousness. Meaning, in an interpretive sense, arises after the systematization and codification of language into written forms. This phenomenon has been with us for so long that we can no longer fathom what language in any kind of pure, direct form must have been like to experience. So we persist in the myth of meaning as the basis of communicative action between humans.

We have to codify language before we can come to the self-reflexive concept of what "meaning" is.

 

[Dak]

We covered letter blindness in Neuro today. Very interesting phenomenon, and seems completely entangled in consciousness and language.

 

[Dak]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-05/behind-kiev-snipers-it-was-somebody-new-coaltion-stunning-new-leak-reveals-truth

The last time a leaked phone call out of Ukraine was released about a month ago ostensibly by the Russian NSA equivalent, one between US assistant sec state Victoria Nuland and the US envoy to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, it was revealed that the real puppet masters behind the Maidan movement, and the true instigators of the Ukraine "revolution" were none other than the "developed" world superpowers, lead by the US. Also revealed were tensions between the US and EU strategies on how to overthrow the current government, culminating with the infamous "Fuck the EU." Needless to say the US, which implicitly confirmed the recording, was angry at Russia and accused it of using dirty tricks.

That's ironic, because when it comes to "dirty tricks" what is about to be presented, blows the top off anything Russia may or has done to date.

Earlier today an even more shocking recording has been "leaked" this time one between the always concerned about human rights EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet, in which it is revealed on tape that all those photos of horrifying deaths of Ukrainians by snipers during the last days of the Median stand off, were in fact caused not by Snipers controlled by Yanukovich, but that the snipers shot at both protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly hired by Maidan leaders!

No surprise here.

 

[Blind Guardian]

Yeah the new regime in Ukraine seems shady, they have also recently removed laws protecting the Russian language in Ukraine so Putin has a lot of incentive to intervene. On the other hand Yanukovich was also a crook to say the least so there's no clear good guys in this mess.

 

[Dak]

Yup. Meet the new guy, same as the old guy.

 

[Einherjar86]

This was interesting (for me anyway):

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-bitcoin-bubble-bad-hypothesis-8353?page=1

In the case of Bitcoin, there is no source of value whatsoever. The computing power used to mine the Bitcoin is gone once the run has finished and cannot be reused for a more productive purpose. If Bitcoins cease to be accepted in payment for goods and services, their value will be precisely zero.

According to the efficient-markets hypothesis (EMH), which still dominates the analysis of financial markets, this should be impossible. The EMH states that the market value of an asset is equal to the best available estimate of the value of the services or income flows it will generate. In the case of a company stock, this is the discounted value of future earnings. Since Bitcoins do not generate any actual earnings, they must appreciate in value to ensure that people are willing to hold them. But an endless appreciation, with no flow of earnings or liquidation value, is precisely the kind of bubble the EMH says can’t happen.

 

[Dak]

I see a variety of problems with that analysis.
1. There is a source of value in Bitcoin. Limited quantity, liquidity, efficient payment transaction, open source, etc. In short though, psychological value: the basis of all value.
2. Why can't the computing power be repurposed in some way?
2B. What does that at all have to do with the value of Bitcoin? Bitcoin's value has absolutely no connection to the ridiculous amount spent on computing power to mine it. LToV fail.
3. If any currency ceases to be accepted in payment, its market value can go to 0 (I say can rather than will, since even Confederate Money is still valuable for collectors). Not novel to Bitcoin (or cryptocurrency in general).
4. This potential bubble this analyst is talking about isn't happening. There is in fact liquidation value. Overall, this analyst seems to be making a false comparison between Bitcoin and stock. Bitcoin is not a share in a company. It is a currency. Like the US dollar, Euro, etc. , with value generated in a different manner than traditional national fiat currency.


Edit:

To go further:

There is a market for Bitcoin derivatives that should allow just such shortselling. It is thinly traded at present, but there is no obvious obstacle to its expansion.

I wonder why? Obviously not enough people reading Q's book.

This guy is an absolute hack on a Krugman level. I checked his book on Amazon. Keynesian (not even neo) apologetics.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think the point is that nothing can actually be done with bitcoins. People might stop bartering chairs, for instance, or even using them; but something can still be done with them.

If people stop bartering with bitcoins, nothing can be done with them. Similarly, nothing can be done with stocks. These are valuable only as long as they maintain the promise of providing one with actually valuable materials (i.e. things with which we can do things).

Also, for the sake of posterity:

The basic point that ‘value is in the eye of the beholder’ is often thought to be where the debate ends. This is surprising, because it has little to do with Marx’s main theoretical implications, which as I have noted, concerned economy-wide trends. Marx was well aware that price and value may differ wildly based on monopoly, demand and other fluctuations, but considered it irrelevant to his theory of value. He never claimed to be able to predict the day-to-day movements of prices, and purported attempts to use the LTV to do this are erroneous.

So while it may well be true that the tastes of rich people propel the price of diamonds upwards (whether this is due to the fact that they ‘subjectively value’ diamonds higher than poor people or the fact that they’re rich is up for debate, but I digress), but according to the LTV, this imbalance between price and value must be offset somewhere else, by some other commodity selling below its value. The important thing for Marx was the aggregate equality of price and value*.

 

[Dak]

I think the point is that nothing can actually be done with bitcoins. People might stop bartering chairs, for instance, or even using them; but something can still be done with them.

If people stop bartering with bitcoins, nothing can be done with them. Similarly, nothing can be done with stocks. These are valuable only as long as they maintain the promise of providing one with actually valuable materials (i.e. things with which we can do things).

Well in that sense physical stock certificates, bonds, and fiat currency have the same "true" value: various qualities of kindling. But as in most cases, we deal with both stocks and currency in digital forms, they are more akin to bitcoin in that estimation of value, that is, when they are no longer liquid or providing a return, they have zero value. Bitcoin might have issues, but not the "problems" attacked by Keynesians.

this imbalance between price and value must be offset somewhere else, by some other commodity selling below its value. The important thing for Marx was the aggregate equality of price and value*.

That might be the way Marx meant to use the LToV, but it doesn't offer any more validity. This understanding is still dependent on value/wealth/economy being a zero-sum game (which it isn't), somehow trying to assign cardinal properties to ordinal value scales, and arbitrarily assigning some value to something while remaining completely separate from all demonstrated valuations of market participants. Prices are the only approximation we have to bridging the cardinal/ordinal gap, but trying to assert a specific, objective interval between an ordinal ranking and a cardinal value is practically impossible. The complete relativity and subjectivity of value frustrates all attempts at objective approach.

 

[Einherjar86]

Its lack of validity isn't as important as what it tells us about labor under modern industrial capitalism. That is, it's a critical apparatus; not a model for functionality.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2012#comic