Infrastructure as Critique

<p>Whenever we are talking about planning, we are talking about infrastructure as critique. What we have in mind here was best encapsulated in a diagram Pierce Myers posted on Instagram. In it, he swapped the left vs right axis with emergent distributional communism vs planned hyper-capitalism—in other words, he combined various supposedly contradictory elements and made a convincing case for how the battle between communism and capitalism will take place in the 21st century. On the one hand, Myers switched the emphasis from Soviet-led central planning to a decentralized cybernetic version of it, and on the other, shifted from neoliberal consensus of market efficiency and equilibrium to mechanism design and the new role of economist-as-engineer. What this diagram does best, then, is that it decodes the idea of what communism and capitalism as two different models actually are, and thereby challenges the various preconceptions of what is efficient and necessary in the current system.</p> <p>This enables us to think differently about ideology as well. As Mckenzie Wark wrote in <em>Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene</em>: “Ideologies are not so much ‘false consciousness’ as the ‘true’ limited consciousness of particular modes of organization.” The same can be said in relation to planning or infrastructure as critique. We can put forth a different measurement of ideology, where ideology is measured as the ability of a group or a collective to pursue and implement different societal mechanisms that increase the degree of societal complexity and the ability of self-determination. If this sounds abstract, let us give a further example from RadicalxChange founder Glen Weyl. In a rather Marxist-Spinozist way, Weyl points out various internal inconsistencies between capitalism and its own theory: what he suggests is to critique capitalism at its very roots, through the parameters capitalist economists take for granted, but which don’t actually lead to the benefits supposedly characteristic of a capitalist society…</p>