Economy – Digital Anthropology

The ‘New Economy’ discussed here is not a proposition for radical discontinuity, and still less an artefact of wishful thinking.

Whatever the urgency of a transition to an economy that interacts healthily with the biosphere, no proposition for this transition can succeed that does not present as a beneficial ‘adjacent possible’ for some significant fraction of the billions of pragmatic economic choices that are made each day by people with perfectly reasonable desires for security, dignity, and agency.

Much ‘New Economy’ thinking is infected by ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’; these translate, crudely speaking, into moralising pressure and policy impositions. These are of course valid social mechanisms, and have their place, but when we look at the context of those daily billions of choices, we see that they are conditioned most immediately by the underlying protocols around how money works – both as a means-of-exchange and as a store-of-value.

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“The Revolution of Everyday Life” is the english title given to Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 major contribution to the body of Situationist work – the late-modern strand of left anarchist thinking that so perfectly nailed post WWII capitalism as ‘The Society of the Spectacle” – the title of Guy Debord’s book of the same year.

Where Debord analysed and criticised, Vaneigem moved on to proposition: only by reclaiming the immediacy and agency of daily life as the space of creation of social relations, he suggested – by wresting these away from the reified and spectacular re-enactments of roles through the determined creation of ‘situations’ – encounters within which people find it impossible to play the parts which their society has prefigured for them – could we break free of stultifying and deathly grip of the relentless dollar maximiser that is developed capitalism (see also).

All of this was great stuff, which fuelled not only the widespread youth revolts of 1968, but also the iconoclastic whirlwind of british punk (both Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes were active Situationists) – a whirlwind which was the ‘situation’ which woke me up and has not since ceased in its requirement of me to take responsibility for my whole self – for which I am profoundly thankful.

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