​Psycho-politics attempts to understand how power works under neoliberalism and in our world of network technologies. Foucault’s biopower analyzes a disciplinary society with industrial modes of production—subjects under industrialization were subjectified into norm-following, obedient units of production to be fitted into a machine (e.g., Chaplin’s Modern Times). Under these conditions, biopolitics regulated the population, or specifically, “reproductive cycles, birth and death rates, levels of general health, and life expectancy” (p. 21). However, while the disciplinary society stretched into the subject’s physical and mental sphere, it did not reach into the unconscious, the psyche.
 
Han’s Psychopolitics addresses a new regime of power under neoliberalism that reaches into the psyche—psychopolitics. We move from the disciplinary society with its prohibitions (cannot’s), repressions, and allo-exploitation to the neoliberal achievement society, where achievement subjects auto-exploit themselves, motivated to fashion themselves into projects. The latter subjects are better suited to the post-industrial, immaterial, and networked forms of production of our contemporary world.
 
Technology plays an important role in this transformation and the longest chapter in the book is devoted to an analysis of Big Data. Contrary to discourses of “dataism,” which predict the end of theory and the end of ideology under the absolute illumination of massive quantities of data, Han points out that Big Data does not think, it only offers correlations, which are a lower mode of analysis than relationships of causation and reciprocity. As such, Big Data is blind to the future as it is blind to the Event; it cannot comprehend contingencies and unknown-unknowns that are wholly outside of its purview.
 
Despite writing this, Han has a certain respect for the psychopolitical potential of Big Data. With the Internet of Things, 5G technology, and as processing power continues to advance, Big Data will continue to quantify human bodies and store the data in a permanent database. With massive amounts of data, Big Tech is able to make targeted micro-interventions (Zuboff details these interventions in length in Surveillance Capitalism), predicting and perhaps steering behaviours through the unconscious. Han provokes the reader: “digital psychopolitics manages to intervene in psychic processes in a prospective fashion. Quite possibly, it is even faster than free will. As such, it could overtake it. If so, this would herald the end of freedom” (p. 63).
 
Han ends by considering human freedom in our psychopolitical times through the figure of the idiot. The idiot is outside the realm of communicability and is unable to be integrated into the smooth flows of communication in a network. The idiot is a source of negativity in Han’s terms. Only the idiot has access to the Other, and as a “modern-day heretic,”—Han notes that “heresy means ‘choice’” (p. 83)—only the idiot can exist without becoming a subject under neoliberal, psychopolitical structures of domination.
 
Additional note: The essay also contains interesting discussions on emotional capitalism and gamification, which occupy a chapter each.
 

​A delightful study on delightfully strange people. I thought myself an eccentric at some points in my life; I now know myself mistaken—the eccentrics in this study are truly strange. Weeks and James litter the book with dozens and dozens of curious anecdotes from both historical sources and primary sources alike.
 
EX1. “Norton discovered his true vocation: ruling an empire. He began confiding to his friends that he was really Norton I, emperor of California. In 1856, the same year he filed for bankruptcy, he also issued his first imperial edict, imposing a monthly tax of fifty cents on sympathetic merchants in San Francisco to bankroll the fledgling empire…” (p. 4).
 
Who are eccentrics? Weeks and James offer a list of terms in their search for a definition, including “nonconforming,” “creative,” “strongly motivated by curiosity,” “idealistic,” “intelligent,” “opinionated and outspoken,” “noncompetitive,” “single,” and “unusual in eating habits and living arrangements” (p. 27-28). Eccentrics are present in all areas of creative human endeavour, often making significant contributions to science, the arts, and music.
 
EX2. “Erik Satie, whose compositions are spun from the gossamer of whimsy, exhibited a whole panoply of eccentric traits. He first came to prominence as a member of an occult society, the Rose + Croix, which was led by a mage named Josephin Peladan… in 1914 the publisher Lucien Vogel tried to commission Stravinsky… Stravinsky refused because the fee was too small. The publisher approached Satie, who turned it down, although desperately poor, saying the fee was too high!” (p. 82).
 
While eccentricity shares some of the characteristics of mental disorders (e.g., neurosis, schizophrenia, etc.), it is a different phenomenon. Eccentricity can be confused with the latter given its near non-existent in modern medicine; their study is the first on the topic. They verify this using the Present State Examination (PSE), which is designed to test for mental illness. They found that “our results were tangible proof that the mental life of the eccentric is unlike anything that psychology has yet described” (p. 143), and that there is no connection between eccentricity and mental illness.
 
EX3. “One of the classic instances of an eccentric scientist having his ideas at first ridiculed and then ultimately vindicated is James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-99). Lord Monboddo was a Scottish jurist and amateur natural historian and linguist who published a learned, six-volume treatise called The Origin and Progress of Language, the first scientific work to suggest that man is descended from the apes…” (p. 102-103).
 
I found particularly interesting their notes on eccentric speaking patterns. Eccentric thinking is expressed in an original manner of speaking; eccentrics are idioglots.
 
EX4. “I have since resolved to actually Sherlock Holmes a manuscript, anticipatory, of many practicing psychiatry, this conjectural profession, none to date have concentrated their probes into the mind’s cognitive faculties, which… I suspect…is… as it were, a high-octane, rather than the typically average petrol…that circumstances, IQ and health, is responsible for neurosis. Is it a key to the wonderful fulfillment of this gift of life? Whiter light needs darker shadow. The grayest gap in psychiatry is that it must accept creative individuals are left to stew in their own portentous juices to work out their eccentricity unaided” (p. 202).
 
Weeks and James write their study not to pathologize eccentrics, but to celebrate them. They venture to suggest that eccentrics are necessary for a healthy society; their originality offers a flow of new ideas into the social body. There is a lot that “normal” people can learn from their example: eccentrics are more joyful, happier, healthier mentally and physically, and live more fulfilling lives. 

​Great edition of Utopia—it contains an introduction by China Miéville and complementary essays by Ursula Le Guin. The latter was particularly revelatory. These essays are my introduction to Le Guin, and I found in them a polymathic thinker who traverses from Lao Tsu to Levi-Strauss in a single paragraph. In “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” she thinks through the dominant Utopian fantasies of progress and hyper-rationality. This is a society driven by yang: “Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot” (p. 180). In its place, Le Guin attempts to chart new utopian paths; her process of thinking while doing so is revelatory.
 
It could be said that all works of literature and art operate in the subjunctive—they construct “as if” worlds. Even so, Utopia is a singular event and a model of emulation for its powerful critique of the present (More’s present) and how it opens up of new paths for the future. As Miéville writes, “[w]e can’t do without this book. We are all and have always been Thomas More’s children… That we must keep returning to the text, with whatever suspicion, is to honour it. It gave us a formulation, a concept, we needed” (p. 6). Through the “other”—Utopia and the Utopians—More critiques his society; there is an unstated, unextinguishable optimism in this project. In Utopia, instead of wealth and luxury-obsessed princes and elites who appropriate the wealth of the public for their own gain, there are magistrates and princes who take seriously their role to serve the public. Instead of More’s world, a world of gross inequality and suffering, Utopia is a post-scarcity society where everyone is equal and lives diligently and decently, allowing everyone to pursue their own interests and to pursue happiness through the pursuit of truth. More expands on other aspects of Utopian society by elaborating on their system of religion, commerce, family structure, etc. Through this demonstration it becomes evident that another world is possible—we who are hopeful are More’s children indeed.
 
Formally, Utopia seems to owe its debt to Plato. The treatise is written in the form of a dialogue. Raphael, the primary interlocuter, is a philosopher who had been to see Utopia. He is a wanderer whose wisdom distances him from political power and the favour of the princes of his day. (Socrates also talks about this in The Republic.) If we appropriate Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Raphael is like the man who has left the cave and has seen the sun-lit surface-level world—a Republic operating based on reason—he returns to share what he has seen with those whose world is the play of shadows.
 
Utopia provides the compass towards better futures, but it is still a product of its time. There is an unabashed and uncritiqued colonial impulse in certain passages of the book. When faced with overpopulation, Utopians send their people over to the neighbouring continent to form a colony, with the expectation that the land’s original inhabitants will enculturate themselves in the Utopian mode of life. However, “if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence” (p. 87). These Lockean justifications cast More’s critique of idleness (which I suppose is also a legacy of the Protestantism of his time) under a troubling light.  

On the surface, The Birth of Tragedy is a study on Greek tragedy, “one of the most suggestive and influential studies ever written” (p. 3) as Walter Kaufmann writes in his introduction. It is at the same time (and perhaps more significantly) a study on the ancient Greeks faced with the problem of existence, as well as an early investigation into scientific optimism embodied in the figure of Socrates.
 
Nietzsche identifies a basic duality embodied in Apollo and Dionysus, a duality that is the “artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist” (p. 38). Apollo is the “ruler over the beautiful illusion or of the inner world of fantasy” (p. 35), the God of dream worlds that float calmly above the mundane and everyday. He is also the “glorious divine image of the principium individuationis” (p. 36), who contemplates the world, separate from it. Dionysus is the antonym of Apollo, the breakdown of the individual in metaphorical intoxication and self-forgetfulness—the return to communitas; Dionysus is the over-full lifeforce that breaks down boundaries, societal structures, barriers between human and human and human and nature: “nature, which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man” (p. 37). This is a state of enchantment, of connection to the sacred, where in “song and in dance man experiences himself as a member of a higher community,” and “he is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art” (p. 37).
 
The Greeks resisted the Dionysus and Dionysian festivals in their environs until an eventual reconciliation. And with this “reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of the Greek cult…” (p. 39)—for in the reconciliation “the destruction of the principium individuationis for the first time becomes an artistic phenomenon” (p. 40).
 
In a sense, the reconciliation of Dionysus to the Apollinian Greeks was a foregone conclusion. Apollo, being the God of measure who delineates the individual, is in opposition to the “overweening pride and excess” of the Titans, the barbarians, of Dionysus. However, Apollo’s “entire existence rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge, revealed to him by the Dionysian. And behold: Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The ‘titanic’ and the ‘barbaric’ were in the last analysis as necessary as the Apollinian” (p. 46). Dionysius as chaos, the uncategorized excessive vitality of reality, is inevitably prior—it is the source from which Apollinian order draws, and against which the Apollinian is in a constant state of tension: a “permanent military encampment of the Apollinian” (p. 47).
 
Nietzsche elaborates on the effects of the Dionysian-Apollinian reconciliation on art through the lyricist. The Dionysian artist is caught in the rapture of primal unity, which is produced as music. The Apollinian dream-image then intervenes to transform the music in a symbolic dream image, and “the image that now shows him his identity with the heart of the world is a dream scene that embodies the primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure, of mere appearance” (p. 49). For this reason, and following the dependence of Apollo to Dionysus, music is the sovereign, the prior, and the Apollinian form, image, and concept are secondary: “language cannot adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the hear of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena” (p. 55).
 
The lyricist is swallowed up by the Dionysian in the process, and the lyricist’s “I”—the first-person—does not speak to a specific biographical individual; instead, it is a temporary manifestation, reflecting a multiplicity of first-person projections of the “only truly existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things” (p. 50). And following this Nietzsche makes a provocative suggestion: “we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art—for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified…” (p. 52). 
 
After establishing this conceptual apparatus, Nietzsche moves to begin his exploration of the origins of Greek tragedy. The origins of Greek tragedy are found in the tragic chorus—the tragedy was once only the chorus. Caught in the power of the chorus, Nietzsche ventures that the Greek spectator felt negated in its overpowering presence, and the effect is a rapprochement of the Dionysian reality and everyday reality and the feeling that “life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable…” (p. 59). After the state of rapture and intoxication, when the everyday returns, Nietzsche writes in a remarkable passage that the result is nausea (one can see how Nietzsche influenced Sartre here). To quote the passage in full: “In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man” (p. 60). Art intervenes to help the affected live with the nausea of existence as a “saving sorceress, expert at healing” (p. 60). Through art the nauseated overcomes existential pessimism, nihilism.
 
Nietzsche remarks that “for a genuine poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a vicarious image that he actually beholds in place of a concept” (p. 63) and the transformative process of the tragic chorus shares these capabilities with the crowd, who escape their individuality and enter into other characters. Apollo intervenes in the transformative “dramatic” process with an external image and we see now how the Greek tragedy operates: it is the Dionysian chorus that “ever anew discharges itself in an Apollinian world of images” (p. 65), bringing forth the dialogue and the stage.
 
The Apollinian aspect of the Greek tragedy, like the dialogue, may seem “simple, transparent, and beautiful” (p. 67), but the Dionysian foundations remain, as if “luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night” (p. 67)—in this way, Nietzsche explicates the concept of “Greek cheerfulness.” He takes the case of Oedipus, whose transgressions against “every law, every natural order… produce a higher magical circle of effects which found a new world on the ruins of the old one that has been overthrown” (p. 68)—this is the cheerfulness of the Dionysian creator, the artist, who breaks apart sacred Apollonian structures and categories. Nietzsche’s analysis identifies the unity of the two energies in Aeschylus’ Prometheus; Prometheus exemplifies the Dionysian by breaking the sacred Olympian laws, while exemplifying the Apollinian in his striving for justice. As Nietzsche summarizes: “All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both” (p. 72).
 
Greek tragedy suffered a premature death at the hands of Euripides and Socrates, who brought on a revaluation of previous values by valorizing conscious and deliberate reason. Euripides and his New Attic Comedy used the stage to reflect everyday life and everyday people, quieting the Dionysian chorus. With this, “the Hellene had given up his belief in immortality; not only his belief in an ideal past, but also his belief in an ideal future”, and Greek cheerfulness transformed into “the cheerfulness of the slave” (p. 78). This shift brought on a new relationship between the artist and the public, the former who created to the tastes of the latter. However, Euripides did not create for the demands of the public, he created for Euripides the critic. With his great critical talent, Euripides the critic sought to intellectually grasp the tradition, to find “something incommensurable in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive distinctness and at the same time an enigmatic depth, indeed an infinitude, in the background” (p. 80).
 
Yet Euripides was only “a mask” for “an altogether newborn demon, called Socrates” (p. 82). It was Socrates whose aesthetic values overturned the ancient art, whose supreme law reads roughly as follows, “‘To be beautiful everything must be intelligible’” (p. 84). Euripides, following his master, brought his critical facilities and “audacious reasonableness” to the art, measuring “all the separate elements of the drama—language, characters, dramaturgic structure, and choric music—and corrected them according to this principle” (p. 84). It goes without saying that by intellectualizing and reordering the art in such a manner, this overturned the Dionysian foundations of tragedy. In place of Dionysian drunkenness and unconscious, instinctual creation, Euripides became the first sober artist who created consciously: “his aesthetic principle that ‘to be beautiful everything must be conscious’ is… the parallel to the Socratic, ‘to be good everything must be conscious’” (p. 86).  Socrates’ revaluation set in motion towards the antithesis of former values: “instinctive wisdom appears only in order to hinder conscious knowledge occasionally. While in all productive men it is instinct that is the creative-affirmative force, and consciousness acts critically and dissuasively, in Socrates it is instinct that becomes the critic, and consciousness that becomes the creator—truly a monstrosity per defectum!” (p. 88).
 
In the place of the Greek tragedy, Socrates’ preferred art form is the moral Aesopian fables, the prototype of the novel; with Socrates, art and the dialectic come close together for the first time (e.g., Plato’s dialogues). There is an optimistic element in the dialectic that are exemplified in the Socratic maxims: “Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy” (p. 91); and the Greek tragedy dies an untimely death.
 
Yet Nietzsche foretells a rebirth of tragedy and art from the ashes of Socratic scientific optimism. Science accelerates with unwavering confidence, striving to understand and overcome existence; and it will eventually collide into the boundary points, into aporia, into Dionysian reality. And “when they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites it own tail—suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy” (p. 98). At the end of his life, even Socrates practiced music while waiting for death in is solitary cell.

​I read this earlier on in the year (January or February 2022) and put off writing a book summary until now. The book summary is not as detailed as what I hoped to write.
 
Climate Leviathan is a great work of political theory (I have absolutely no formal training in political science or political philosophy—my assessment should not be taken as authoritative) that attempts to sketch out how the concept of the political will change due to the ongoing pressures of the climate crisis. In Wainwright and Mann’s view, the most likely future is the Climate Leviathan, which marks a continuation of capitalist social relations and planetary sovereignty, justified as a “state of exception” by global capitalist elites to preserve life on Earth. This is not Wainwright and Mann’s preferred future: by writing this book, they also attempt to liberate alternative ways of thinking: “If good climate data and models were all that were needed to address climate change, we would have seen a political response in the 1980s. Our challenge is closer to a crisis of imagination and ideology; people do not change their conception of the world just because they are presented with new data…” (p. 7).
 
Wainwright and Mann sketch out four political possibilities by taking two dichotomous conditions. The first condition asks whether future forms will be capitalist or non-capitalist and the second condition asks whether there will be a planetary sovereignty with decision making authority. From these two conditions, four “ideal type” political possibilities emerge: these are hegemonic blocs with their own class and ideological bases. There is the capitalist Climate Leviathan that strives for planetary sovereignty; Climate Mao, which is a non-capitalist planetary sovereign; Climate Behemoth, capitalist and anti-planetary sovereignty; and the inchoate Climate X, which is non-capitalist and against planetary sovereignty. The challenge of climate change is so great that we cannot assume the continuation of capitalist liberal democracies as the dominant political form. These four forms will struggle to frame political responses to climate change, shaping the world along these struggles.
 
I provide a further (but still brief) description of each form. Climate Leviathan is the realization of a planetary sovereign that “is a regulatory authority armed with democratic legitimacy, binding technical authority on scientific issues, and panopticon-like capacity to monitor the vital granular elements of our emerging world” (p. 30)—Wainwright and Mann point to the UN COP meetings as an early iteration. Bounded, nation-state-based regulatory regimes are unable to meet the challenge of climate change. Climate Leviathan represents an international regime, but one that is “the construction of a nominally ‘global’ frame that is in fact a political and geographical extension of the rule of the extant hegemonic blog: the capitalist global North” (p. 31). Wainwright and Mann point out that the capitalist foundations of Climate Leviathan may prevent its emergence, given that the inequalities generated by capitalism lead to difficulties with trans-class and transnational cooperation.
 
Climate Behemoth is a reactionary movement to the climate crisis. It is often marked by climate change denial and is opposed to international intrusions into domestic politics (and by extension, it is opposed to Climate Leviathan). It has so far expressed itself in ethnonationalist and reactionary populist movements (e.g., Modi, Trump, Brexit) led by neoliberal elites and disenfranchised groups who feel threatened by climate action (e.g., Koch brothers and workers in the gas and oil sector).
 
Like Climate Leviathan, Climate Mao is also based on a planetary sovereign, but one that “wields this power against capital” (p. 38). In contrast to Climate Leviathan’s “lop-sided, elite-based, liberal proceduralism” (p. 39), which is moving us too slowly to make the systemic changes necessary to address climate change, Climate Mao has the power to make rapid state-led transformations to society. Wainwright and Mann think that Climate Mao is a uniquely Asian path given certain historical and current conditions: “massive and marginalized peasantries and proletariats, historical experience and revolutionary ideology, and powerful states governing large economies” (p. 41), along with the disproportionate effects of climate change in Asia (e.g. the floods in Pakistan earlier this year).
 
Finally, Climate X is the future in formation by the climate justice movement; it is a non-sovereign alternative to Climate Leviathan that transcends capitalism, motivated by the guiding principles of equality, inclusion and dignity of all, and solidarity of many worlds. An ever-inchoate formation, it is determined not by universal claims to a common “we,” but by local conditions, histories, experiences; it is Wainwright and Mann’s hopeful future for the troubled world to come. 

Mazzucato’s approachable Mission Economy attempts to rethink and reform capitalism, presenting an alternative to its current (perhaps on the sunset) neoliberal orientation. This new capitalism sees the public sector take back its role as a key partner and shaper of the economy.
 
Our current political-economic structures are unable to address the global problems facing the world today, most important of which are problems related to the environment. She identifies four sources of our dysfunctional capitalism.
 

1. The short-termism of the financial sector, which finances itself (e.g., stock buybacks, real estate, etc.) rather than financing productive sectors—in the U.S.A. and the U.K. “only about a fifth of finance goes into the productive economy” (p. 16). The system leads to debt-driven speculative bubbles, which the public has had to pay for when the bubble bursts.
2. The financialization of business, where business profits go to focusing on short-term imperatives of the financial sector rather than investments into workers, capital investments, research, etc. Cheap interest rates and debt is used to maximize short-term shareholder value, instead of investing into stakeholders and preparing for emergency situations like COVID: Boeing spent 74% of free cash flow on stock buybacks and ended up requiring government assistance when COVID-19 struck the U.S. economy.
3. The climate emergency and our fossil fuel-based economy.
4. The role of the government under the dominant economic framework, where the government is left to be a tinkerer rather than a shaper of the market. For Mazzucato, it is important to rethink the role of the government, as it is the only institution with enough capacity to spur on changes at the scale necessary to solve our current problems.

 
Given the responsibility of dominant economic frameworks on our troubled status quo, Mazzucato looks to dispel erroneous myths about the government, naming five myths in particular.
 

1. Businesses are value creators and risk takers, while the government should only facilitate and de-risk. Through investments in high-risk ventures, the government has funded numerous innovations that the private sector was too risk-averse to invest in (e.g., experimental drugs, renewable energy, and most recently, fusion technology). The private sector tends to socialize the risks while privatizing the gains
2. “The purpose of the government is to fix market failures”: in Market Failure Theory (MFT), markets fail due to information asymmetry, positive externalities, or negative externalities, and the government should only step in to fix inefficient allocation.
3. “Government needs to run like a business”: governments should reduce the scope of their activities and sell off public domain services and programs to the private sector by privatization or contracting these activities out.
4. “Outsourcing saves taxpayer money and lowers risk”: Outsourcing and privatization leads to gains in efficiency—better services at a lower cost; instead, costs have increased and the public has ended up private sector beneficiaries (e.g., consulting companies)
5. “Government shouldn’t pick winners”: “picking winners” refers to government shaping the economy through industrial policy, investments, etc., due to a supposed inability to pick winners wisely—historically, this is inaccurate (e.g., Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder).

 
In place of these myths, Mazzucato writes that value is the cumulative result of the public sector, private sector, and civil society. She asserts a new vision of the economy, one which confronts and addresses our contemporary grand challenges through collaboration and innovation—the mission-oriented approach.
 
Using the case study of the Apollo programme, which directly contradicts the aforementioned myths and put a man on the moon almost 60 years ago, Mazzucato extracts six key attributes: 1. Vision and leadership with a sense of purpose; 2. Innovation through risk-taking and experimentation; 3. Organizational agility and flexibility (as opposed to governmental siloes); 4. Unpredictable and serendipitous spillover effects (a whole host of innovations from portable computers, wireless headsets, baby formula, camera phones, and home insulation were enabled by the Apollo programme); 5. Budgets based on outcomes and not costs; and 6. Partnership between the business and the government. She then looks to apply these learnings to some of current grand challenges of today, elaborating at some length on the application of the approach on the Sustainable Development Goals, the digital divide, and health and wellbeing.
 
Mazzucato ends by proposing seven new principles to spur on the mission-oriented approach:

1. Value is something created collectively: Value is created collectively by various stakeholders in the public for the public interest, and are not the result of self-interested individuals trying to maximize utility; public goods are not corrections to market failures. Current frameworks only assign value to things with a price; in this new framework, we need to assign value to the production of public goods.
2. Governments shape markets and do not just fix markets: Contra MFT, governments should begin by asking “what sort of markets do we want? (p. 173) and design policy to shape such markets.
3. Organizations need to have dynamic capabilities: Organizations (particularly governments) should be dynamic, agile, and not be afraid of experimentation. Organizations should encourage development of internal human resources through a culture of learning.
4. Outcomes-based budgeting: Missions require a longer-term horizon; instead of budgeting based on costs, budgeting should be based on outcomes.
5. Distribution should share risks and rewards: Current approaches socialize risks and privatize rewards for the private sector; in Mazzucato’s framework, value is created collectively and should be distributed more equitably. Mazzucato calls for pre-distribution instead of re-distribution through taxes or benefits. This can be done with a public-wealth fund that distributes a citizen’s dividend, government equity in firms that benefited from public funding, conditions that come with government funding (e.g., training for employees), all which connects value creation with value distribution.
6. Partnerships benefit all stakeholders: The current focus is on maximizing shareholder value, but we need an approach that benefits all stakeholders and a new framework that benefits the common good; this is particularly important with the environmental challenges on the horizon.
7. Participation and open systems: Mission-oriented approaches require engagement with the wider public to have discussions about societal values and to get public buy-in for missions. They require active public engagement to co-create and imagine futures together. An open system needs to be in place to reflect external feedback.

Written by Nobel Laureate G. H. Hardy; a rare peek inside the mind of a genius mathematician.
 
The Foreword by C.P. Snow is a superbly written portraiture of Hardy by a man who knew him intimately; I wondered how someone from the sciences could write so well; only after Wikipedia-ing him could I confirm my suspicions—Snow has also a double career as a writer and novelist. Snow’s Foreword provides the necessary somber tint to the Apology: “…[A Mathematician’s Apology] is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again… it is very rare for a writer to realize, with the finality of truth, that he is absolutely finished” (p. 51). Reading the book alongside the Foreword, we realize that the Apology is the work of a man reconsidering his life’s work after the childlike joy of creative ability has left him.
 
As for the actual Apology itself, Hardy writes a rational justification for the pursuit of pure mathematics as a creative art, one capable of great beauty like poetry, although the association may feel alien to the contemporary mind. Where mathematics may differ is in its permanence: “The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand… so Greek mathematics is ‘permanent’, more permanent even than Greek literature… ‘Immorality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean” (p. 81). (Although it must be noted that Bachelard in Poetics of Space writes something like “the metaphor [and perhaps poetry, by extension] is eternal”).
 
Hardy provides a large number of insights into the field, valuable due to his stature and his life’s devotion to the field. In no particular order:
 

1. The best mathematics is serious, by which he means it connects several mathematical areas, advancing the field and adjacent fields. 
2. Serious mathematics contains “significant ideas,” which are defined by the quality of generality and depth, where generality means capable of extension and connection with mathematical ideas, and depth means descending deeper into the strata, given that “mathematical ideas are arranged somehow in strata, the ideas in each stratum being linked by a complex of relations both among themselves and with those above and below” (p. 110). 
3. Mathematics as a creative art has little practical applications. Usually, the most elementary mathematics has the most practical utility. Hardy was writing when the devastation of war was still fresh: mathematics as a creative art has little potential for harm compared to trivial math. 
4. The difference between pure and applied mathematics does not have to do with their utility. Instead, the difference lies in what they try to describe: the latter is related to “physical reality”—the material world; while the former is concerned with “mathematical reality,” or the Platonic reality outside and independent of our senses. Mathematical reality, instead of being created by human beings, lies waiting to be discovered, like in Meno, one of Plato’s dialogues. Hardy uses geometry to show the difference between pure mathematics and applied mathematics: “The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and ‘pure geometries’ are independent of lecture rooms, or of any other detail of the physical world” (p. 126). 
5. Interestingly, Hardy asserts that, in comparison to a physicist, “the mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality” (p. 128). This is because “neither physicists nor philosophers have ever given any convincing account of what ‘physical reality’ is, or of how the physicist passes, from the confused mass of fact or sensation with which he starts, to the construction of the objects which he calls ‘real’. Thus we cannot be said to know what the subject-matter of physics is... (p. 129). On the other hand, the mathematician is working directly with their concept of reality. 

If memory serves me correctly, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes of Kafka as a writer of the absurd, which describes the unrelenting tension between human thirst for clarity in a silent, unresponsive, and Godless world. In The Castle, K. the land surveyor is called to the Castle to engage in land survey work—the land surveyor, one who imposes rational cartesian order?—almost 300 pages and five days later, K. makes no progress towards gaining admittance to the Castle. Throughout the five days, K plods along, stuck in restless snowfall, trapped in small dark homes and labyrinthine tunnels, mired in senseless bureaucratic procedures to which, he, as an outsider, finds incomprehensible, and meeting (and engaging in relations) with the town’s inhabitants, who follow the Castle’s absurd logic.
 
To them, K the stranger is outside of their categorizations of the world, his fruitless journey is one that strives to earn bureaucratic and “categorical” recognition. Un-cultured and un-disciplined in their ways, he is dirt or matter out of place (Mary Douglas’ famous phrase in Purity and Danger)—his complete powerlessness is a source of generative power, of danger to the purity of their set categories.
 
What is the Castle? Shrouded at times in fog and snow, perched upon a hill, the Castle is an undetermined signifier, at times a metaphor, an image, a symbol; never is it the case that the Castle is a castle is a castle. The Castle is the fountain from which the bureaucracy stems; however, it is foolish to reduce Kafka and the Castle to a libertarian nightmare and read it as a critique of the government as limiting individual freedoms. As in some of Kafka’s other works (e.g., The Trial, Before the Law), transgression against the bureaucracy is also a sin: there is a layering of religious and juridical meanings. The Barnabas family exemplifies these dual meanings: they were once well-to-do family that fell from grace and repute after the slightest mark of transgression in a dispute with a Castle official.
 
Kafka never managed to complete The Castle, it is perhaps for this reason that, stylistically, The Castle is wordy and is full of paragraphs stretching dozens of pages—we are in a different territory from his taut and terse short stories, some of which are only a few sentences. (These short stories are potent: I watched a video of Judith Butler lecturing for 45 minutes on one two/three paragraph story.) The congested writing works for the purposes of the novel—as K. plods along, we, the readers plod along with him in Kafka’s dense writing.
 
In the excellent introduction to the novel by Idris Parry, Parry writes that Kafka “understands the Fall as a present situation, our condition of self-awareness, not as an event which took place on a particular day in the remote past… ‘Only our concept of time,’ he says in one of his notes, ‘leads us to call the Last Judgement by that name. In fact, it’s a court in standing session.’ In other words, it’s taking place now, all the time” (p. xviii). Reading The Castle is like experiencing the Fall, the state of disintegration, the loss of harmony. Or perhaps it could be read as an exemplification of the secular, God-less state, if we return to Camus’ concept of the Absurd. With the death of God, there is no more hope for the redemptive power of transcendental meaning.
 
The manuscript of The Castle ends mid-sentence: “She held a trembling hand out to K. and made him sit down beside her, she spoke with an effort, it was an effort to understand her, but what she said” (p. 297). Kafka’s unfinished manuscript denies any meaningful closure—it ends in the tritone—the readers are imprisoned without resolution just as K is trapped in
 
 

​Quite a landmark study in the literature that redirects the current narratives on automation into a new direction. I’m not sure how the “automation theorists” (as Benanav calls them) will respond to his study. I’m sure the academics will be forced to engage, while the consultants and pop theorists will continue to spew brand-market content (“research”).
 
I begin with a brief summary of the automation discourse, although it has, in recent years, been widely propagated in the public sphere: technological developments are disrupting the labour market, displacing workers, and threaten to (or promise to, depending on ideological inclinations and positionality) automate a large portion of jobs. For some writers in the field, these technological developments are exponential (e.g., Kurzweil), promising vertiginous changes in the near future. The outcomes will disrupt the basic functioning of capitalism, leading to “a new form of life that does not organize itself around wage work and monetary exchange” (p. 7).
 
Supported by data and rigorous scholarship, Benanav shows that the cause of job loss is the lack of growth in productivity, not the uncontrollable growth of productivity that is the result of technological development and automation. Benanav proposes a simple equation to capture the relationship between rates of employment growth, productivity growth, and output growth, which is true by definition: Δ output - Δ productivity = Δ employment, or the rate of growth of output minus the rate of growth of productivity equals the rate of growth of employment.
 
In the narratives of automation theorists, the rise of labour productivity was responsible for negative rates of employment in the manufacturing sector, leading to de-industrialization; in fact, de-industrialization happened due to slowing rates of output beginning in 1973. De-industrialization began as a phenomenon in the Global North and soon spread throughout the world not because of technological growth, but because of worsening overcapacity. In the post-WWII era, the U.S. shared its technologies with countries like Germany and Japan, which pursue export-led national development, leading to overcapacity in the global market, and depressed prices worldwide. In this context, firms responded by globalizing production as more countries competed to enter into the global supply chain. In an interesting reversal, the countries that have suffered less from de-industrialization are those that have robotized more rather than less—high degrees of automation have led to competitive advantage in world markets, helping workers retain their jobs.
 
The manufacturing sector is important due to the sector’s importance in the overall economy. Benanav shows that manufacturing output rates are closely related to the overall national GDP growth rates, given that “in terms of gross output—which unlike value added includes the costs of intermediate inputs (that is, the goods and services consumed by firms)—manufacturing’s “footprint” on the wider economy is significantly larger” (p. 35). The current sluggish growth in the global economy is due to the lack of another sector to replace the manufacturing sector (despite the hype around the ICT sector, I suppose). Overcapacity and decline of manufacturing output has led to a decline in levels of investment, and subsequently, a decline in demand for consumption and reduced levels of hiring. The historically low interest rates in the previous decade and a half have led mostly to financialization, stock buybacks, dividends etc., that characterize financialized capitalism. Due to the growing bubbles of financialized assets, Japanification is a looming threat.
 
With this said, Benanav does acknowledge the potential of technology to affect the demand for labour, but low levels of investment and low costs of labour in a slow economic growth environment make technological automation a secondary cause, and not the primary one. Additionally, in the current ecosystem of technological development, firms incentivized by profit are unlikely to invest in full-automation technologies. Instead, leading tech companies are driven more by the logic of surveillance capitalism—“rather than focus on generating advances in artificial general intelligence, engineers at Facebook spend their time studying slot machines to figure out how to get people addicted to their website, so that they keep coming back to check for notifications, post content, and view advertisements” (p. 40).
 
Theories of automation predict high unemployment rates. But instead of high unemployment rates, there is underemployment and precarity as a larger number of workers crowd into the service sector. The service sector exhibits different characteristics than the manufacturing sector, as there are lower rates of productivity growth and less opportunities for expansion. In fact, only by industrializing the sector has productivity increased, demonstrating the importance of the manufacturing sector once more. The service sector is a stagnant sector in the economy, reliant on the growth the overall economy. And without productivity growth, service sector workers are forced to accept suppressed wages to work, unless there is concerted political action to change the playing field.
 
In light of his diagnosis of the under-demand for labour, which again, is due to industrial overcapacity, de-industrialization, and underinvestment, Benanav re-evaluates some of the popular policy proposals discussed in public discourse. Speaking on Keynesian policy proposals, he notes that, contrary to historical (common sense), “the era of counter-cyclical spending began in earnest in the 1970s” (p. 67); prior to this, the manufacturing sector in the post-war era was already characterized by strong labour demand. (An aside: it may be for this reason that Benanav holds an unorthodox view on financialization, particularly for someone on the left—it seems to me that in his view, financialization occurred due to the lack of productive investment opportunities, and not due to the neo-liberal turn.) He does return to Keynes and his discussion on economic maturity or the “secular stagnation,” in which “it would make more sense to intervene to shrink the labor supply rather than to stimulate labor demand, increasing leisure rather than output” (p. 69). However, this would require socialization of investment levels, as opposed to the current system where private investment can threaten a capital strike. The only way out of this conundrum would be through strong social movements, which is lacking in the current environment.
 
Benanav is also skeptical of UBI as a policy proposal. In a low-growth environment, he fears that UBI will likely take on the right-wing variant that dismantles the remains of the welfare state without reorganizing production. With current environmental problems, one is unable to outgrow the problem of labour surplus—“only a conquest of production, which finally succeeds in wresting the power to control investment decision away from capitalists, hence rendering the capital strike inoperative, can clear the way for us to advance toward a post-scarcity future” (p. 79).
 
In the final chapter, Benanav sketches out his vision of a post-scarcity world of co-operative production, where there are greater individual freedoms in the form of more free time for all. As he notes, “ for a post-scarcity society to come into being, a literal cornucopia is not required… abundance is a social relationship, based on the principle that the means of one’s existence will never be at stake in any of one’s relationships” (p. 89).
 
Additional notes:
 

1. How can economically undeveloped countries pursue development without the manufacturing sector?
2. In the post-COVID-19 world, marked by a decline in globalization and neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, there are debates about repatriating of supply chains and returning manufacturing jobs to the Global North. How might this interact with the problem of over-capacity in global markets on the national level?

 

 

​Great study exploring micro-work and a new class of micro-workers, both of which have emerged from the needs of AI, mediated by crowdworking platforms.
 
These new workers are the digital equivalents of the petty proletariat, doing all forms of precarious piecemeal work to sustain bare life. They bear the burden of stagnant economic growth, deindustrialization, and the neo-liberalization of the economy from the 1970s and the subsequent growth of subemployment and informal employment. While informal employment was the norm for the global South, it is now becoming the norm for the Global North as well, and with microwork sites, Jones writes that “platform capitalism brings both the logic and realities of informality to the very heart of accumulation as a new norm” (p. 29).
 
Micro-workers are a necessity for the functioning of AI, but are obscured and ignored beneath the glitzy, hype-based, human-less promise of AI. AI and machine learning requires a large number of data labellers to make the data legible for AI algorithms and microwork platforms step in to redistribute the work to a growing army of precarious micro-workers. A vicious cycle governs this relationship—AI automates portions of jobs, leading to a growing number of micro-workers, who are involved in the further development of AI algorithms. In the process, good jobs turn into unregulated, informal, and badly paid work that is not bound by legal frameworks.
 
The general consensus from neoliberal organizations like the World Bank frames micro-work as a developmental opportunity for the developing world—Jones’ account demonstrates that this is anything but the case. Wages are often unpaid or are gamified into tokens and rewards, long fallow periods of time are spent hunting for jobs rather than completing them, and after all of this, power asymmetries allow employers to withhold wages for workers. In some cases, unbanked workers are paid in gift cards, and “the platform comes to resemble a kind of digital company town” (p. 53).
 
In this new labour arrangement, work undergoes a transformation: just as the artisanal craftsperson in the past turns into a commodified modern worker with limited contributions to the entire production process in the industrialized economy, with micro-work, modern professions “dissipate into a cloud of tasks” (p. 59). As this shift occurs, there is hyper-alienation of workers, “divesting workers of the capacity to know what they are doing and to what end” (p. 65). A troubling conclusion, given the use of microwork platforms by organizations like the Pentagon—some micro-workers in war-torn areas may be involved in the digging of their own figurative graves.
 
Jones ends the book thinking about the form that labour struggle could adapt to in this new world, where there is “a capitalism without unions, worker culture and institutions” (p. 72) and fluid and geographically dispersed working arrangements (p. 84). To this end, he examines a wide variety of global wageless movements, blockades, and strikes that diverge in form, action, and demands from the unions of the past.