This project explores themes around computing and economies in the so called anthropocenes. Through conversations with 7 people, including family, friends and acquaintances, I engaged in discussions and reflections about our multiple entanglements with economic modeling and computational ontologies, as well as personal ways of participating, resisting an understanding these entanglements. The conversations were the source for a diagramming process and the making of an oracle deck to communicate and share these reflections. The oracle deck is proposed as an artifact to at times account for our own entanglements, at times obscure and disaggregate ontologies based on rationality, and at times propose alternative possibilities to re-perform ourselves in computational and economic environments. I approach this process of conversation, drawing, making and reflecting, as an exercise in ontological design to support alternative world-making capacities at the intersection of computing and the economy.
Description
Computation, the economy and the anthropocenes of late capitalism have become a massive and messy entanglement, as globalized infrastructures transform social and political pace, places and spaces at different rates.
The changes in technology and governance are co-created with cultural transformations, carrying with them ways of understanding and pushing understandings of what the world is, who ‘we’ as individuals and social bodies should be, and how we can know ‘it’. These onto- epistemologies of computing, economics and the anthropocenes are shaped by discourses of domination, extraction and colonialism, oftentimes collated with dominant scientific paradigms like information science, econometric modeling and behavioral economics. In turn, these assemblages become articulated by technocratic institutions to optimize processes in order to maximize profit first and foremost, further depriving communities of their autonomies already constricted by colonial structures, driving environmental destruction and exploitation, and fostering hypercompetitive individualities.
Given this background I asked:
How can I understand and be accountable for how am I embedded in these ways of life? How can my process of understanding be shared and collectively-created? How can I transform my bodies and entanglements through a process of making and reflection?
Initially, I set out to find theoretical frameworks of mainstream and alternative economic models created by feminist economists, Global South economists, philosophers and design scholars (see document). The readings provided me with rich concepts I could draw from to advance my questions about social-bodily transformation, such as excess, economies of care, post-growth.
In order to emphasize the role of "agency" and agentic modeling in many of the economic theorizations, I decided to use myself and my agency as a material in this process of reflection. I incarnated a persona, a sort of affective aggregate from which to diagram (thinking through iconographic and gestural practice). This encarnate is a witch-like, amorphous trans-feminist being circulating through my designerly body and across the paper, colors, signs and concepts shared by my interlocutors.
In addition to the references to design techniques or personas and archetypes, this agency and personhood were inspired and counterposed with the specific historical counterpart of the Mount Pellerin Society. When discussing neoliberalism, they are oftentimes pointed out as clear political actors that shaped national and global economic policy, along with the "makers", Reagan and Thatcher. Despite various levels of engagement with criticism and resistance, many of us are deeply involved in these structures in our day to day lives.
By reaching out to people in my environment that work in these intersecting spaces, I seeked to establish a visibility of my variable embeddings in these networks and conversely allow my co-agents to shape the reflection process. I established conversations with seven people among my family, friends and acquaintances, and condensed their positions, references, ontologies and responses to my research on diagrams that later took the shape of Oracle cards (see the people section).
Among the subjects frequently touched upon, many mentioned issues of modeling, predictions, risk and fluctuation. At this point, I became interested in the ways in which scientific rationalism has been articulated as coupled with secularism and rejecting magical or spiritual ways of thinking:what has been termed disenchantment. On further readings, I was amused to find about the obscure and spiritual beliefs of many modern scientists and scholars, and I became interested in the ways divination and fortune-telling practices incorporate and disseminate ways of thinking, perceiving and acting. In addition to this, the growing questioning of the bias and obscurity of algorithmic and machine learning techniques used by institutions to predict and control social and financial behavior aligned with the exploration of modeling and algorithmancy as a sort of divination. The artifacts created are a contribution to transformative research that promotes social and environmental response-ability.
Link to Project Research and Process: