SteveSuggestsVictor

Project proposal

Steve comments: I may have already mentioned Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin; Baudolino and Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. These are all about how we speculate around limited evidence, how we frame an elaborate world through a limited lens, or limited information. This is totally in keeping of your interest in the performative fiction at the centre of the capitalist experiment. There is also Will Self's The Book of Dave https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119114.The_Book_of_Dave in which a cab driver writes a text which, 500 years into the future, becomes the basis for a belief system. In art there is Mark Dion's future archeology pieces https://www.kunsthallepraha.org/en/articles/artwork-from-distant-future-an-interview-with-mark-dion ; Rod Dickinson's The Jonestown Reenactment - Promised Land Project (2000). I think the proposal is a good basis for conversation during the assessment, it makes perfect sense in the context of your earlier work and it dovetails well with the thesis.

Construction site! Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited

What do you want to make?

A research project in the form of a fictional cult that manifests itself in different "artifacts" used for "rituals". The cults deities are based on the mythology of financial markets. The project will draw from economics and particular online forums dedicated to high-risk trading, to explore the relation between human psychology and (market)value, and how this is permeated by technological "advancement".

Possible topics that can feed the research can be:
human-technological interfaces that allow for participating in "free" markets.
How macroeconomic systems rely on trust and belief in order to operate.
how value is derived and transformed through artificial contracts.
…

Why do you want to make it?

Market & Value

At the surface something that intrigues me is the fact that the stock value of a company seems to dictate the how it runs. take for example intel, a company that has been leading in the production of semi-conductors due to various factors like losing to competitors overseas and being late to the Intergrated-AI-chip-party, saw a drastic fall in stockprice for the Q2 erarnings anouncment of 2023. In order to combat this, the CEO announced in the beginning of september that there will be "restructuring" - a fancy term for saying that jobs will be cut, parts of the company dissolved and production reduced. It seems like in the case of the big billion-dollar companies the most important thing is to keep the stock-price stable rather than running a company in a "good" way.

The relation between cause and effect seems very blurred. I think this resonates with me as I previously have explored how media controls narrative, or how at least how these things seems like self feeding systems: like how media protrays a certain (doomsday) reality of this world, and then this narrative is internalized amongst the populus, and becomes reality, which in turn feeds the media… Is similar to how the stock price of a company determines how well the compnay is doing, which in turn affects investors trust in the company, and effectivly how much money is put in to the company, that determines how well the company is doing.

The financial cult of r/wallstreetbets

The financial world seems like an alternative reality, a strange religion with even stranger rites and rituals. buying and selling confusing contracts, betting against each other and the market. A cynical echo-chamber where one persons loss is another ones win. A part of this cult that I have observed is the one found on the subreddit "wallstreetbets" a subreddit that became infamous in the beginning of 2021 for pumping the price of gamestop. Gamestop was steadily stearing towards bankrupcy, leading a lot of investors and the financial mainstream to short it (bet against the company, by borrowing a share and selling it at the current value, "predicting" that share to fall in value). The memelords of reddit managed to organize a socalled short-squeeze, where redditors around the world were encouraged to buy gamestop stocks and hold them (diamond hands), leading to a sharp increase in price, forcing all the short-holders to close their postion at a loss. This hurt some hedge-funds and the short sellers, a truly inspiring action against the biggest fish in the sea.

Today the subreddit is mainly people posting so-called "loss/gain-porn" bragging about how much the made or lost. It is an echo-chamber that celebrates the glorified gambling that mobile-trading platforms have fostered. In the comments you can find heaps of ironic investment advice, that tells you how you can gamble away all of your money, in the quickest way possible. Another ting you will find here is so-call D&D—duediligence on obscure biotech-companies that may strike gold at the end of the next quarter, and why you should gamble all your savings with them. Another macabre artifact of this strange corner of the internet is all the suicide help-resources promoted in this subreddit.

In this cult money becomes completely abstracted, only correlating with lines and numbers. It is completely detached from labour, and becomes its own meta game, hyper-money, hyper-value. leading to the development of some interesting conspiracies, like how certain trends of global indexes like the NASDAQ and S&P500 and combination with the trends of unemployment-rates "are EXACTLY the same as right before the 1929-depression".

S: another example is betting on the us election, and the ways in which polls bias toward the republicans flooded the zone in order to favour the preferred candidate. So in essence this is not just people propagandising something that is not real, it aims to influence the end result, to produce a prefered reality. It leans into belief and confidence.

Relation to a larger context

"Speculation is at the core of the financial system. (Pater, 2021 p.402)" What this means is that money in financial systems, are made through placing your money in some asset with and expectation that this asset will in the future fetch a higher price. These financial markets are usually secondary, as in the do not directly funnel the money into the production/operation of said asset, but rather entail the exchange of securities and contracts derived from the asset.

This way of anticipating the future based on profits has heavily influenced professional design, in the sense that designer is expected to anticipate trends in order to make something sellable tomorrow.

References/bibliography

CAPS LOCK: Pater, R. (2021). Caps lock : how capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape it. Amsterdam: Valiz.

(maybe this could be interesting Why nations fail Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J.A. (2012). Why nations fail: the origins of power, prosperity and poverty. London: Profile Books.)

Public moment

For the public moment a corporate seance was staged. It was comprised of a brochure, a display of artifacts that describe and predict the future, and a form to sign up for future membership.

Brochure

The brochure is a fictional fragment that presents an organization trapped in a future without past or present. The organization is interested in reconnecting their future with the rest of time. To do this they want to find out how the disconnect happened. Therefore they are studying archeological objects from the time they believe the future got detached.

The brochure then presents different artifacts the organization has uncovered, in image followed by small descriptions. The descriptions play on the inherent logic of the different artifacts (e.g. a trading card being a currency, or video game being a training-simulation), but since the organization is based in such a far future they don't have the same context and references, they understand the objects in different (sometimes comedic) ways.

Excerpt from brochure:

Organization for a unified far far future and present

Who are we?
We are an organization based in the future, more specifically the far far future. Such a far future, that it has become detached from time. In this future there is no past nor present, there is only future.

Our Mission
As you can imagine a disconnected future is very uncertain. Therefore we intend to reunite the future with time. We believe that understanding how this happened, is the key to reach our goal.

Artifacts
Our research may suggest that the shift happened somewhen around the transition between the Holocene and the Anthropocene period.

we have uncovered some artifacts, from the era in question, that we intend to interrogate.

We want to research how these artifacts were used to predict, vision and engage with the future.

Artifacts

Artifact 1 — Petrified document

A piece of a petrified document that speaks of prophecies for the future of sales and revenues.

Artifact 2 — future cone

A device for visualising possible futures. These were used for agents who wanted to promote a certain future. Here we can see that the present is a represented by a point, whilst the future is ever-expansive possibilities.

Artifact 3 — “Pokemon TCG”

People would horde them, and went to great lenghts to protect the cards and their “newness“. People would hold on to the cards for the future, anticipating its’ value to increase. It might have been used as a form of currency.

Artifact 4 — Forward-Looking Statements”

This textual device accompanied analysis and projections for the future. Giving information on how to the future should be interpreted and refferred to in writing.

Artifact 5 — Digital currency display

We are not exactly sure what this device was used for, some experts speculate that it could have been some form of storage device for digital currency, a so called “crypto-wallet”. More research is needed…

Artifact 6 — “Blackrock” document

This document explores potential futures. An interesting thing to note from this artifact is how it explains how the past is not a good indicator for the future. A testimony of the future departing from the past.

Artifact 7 — “Capitalism 2“

This device stores digital data, we are able to decode this data. Revealing the contents of to be some sort of simulation. Through these simulations you could test different futures. The device was probably used for some sort of training.

S: Derrida writes of how a nation's constitution is a performative document. It presents the ideal as a reality, it frames reality. a manifesto or blueprint has the same function (project 2025, for instance) it calls the fiction into the realm of reality. Derrida's text: http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/ENGL/5910/Horwitz/derrida.pdf is actually quite funny, or as funny as post-structuralist texts get. Central to the argument is the performative nature of THE PROMISE (a promise requires faith: faith in the one who makes the promise and faith in the one who accepts the promise; there is a paradox to a promise- it cannot be kept and it must be made; About: https://uwcscholar.uwc.ac.za:8443/server/api/core/bitstreams/81af6af6-ffee-4c25-8d53-89d684255141/content ; please consider "the declarative acts that found [your] institution" (p8 Derrida) I mention tis because your project is full of documents that offer evidence and produce evidence; they invite performative "speech acts", which is to say they describe a reality but also produce a reality. They require the participant to help construct that reality (when you fill in a form you produce evidence of something existing).

Form

The form allows you to sign up for future membership. It is comprised of a few simple questions like name and e-mail adress. As well as asking "Where do you see yourself in the far far future?".