Gabriela García Mayes
Gabby is a Phd candidate in the Communication studies at Northwestern University. She studies Political Communication and Rhetoric with Dilip Gaonkar. She is an artist and now a programmer too. She is part of the Critical Theory cluster at NU where she has organized several summer seminars. We met in a Global Culture (?) class and have shared many meaningful moments since. I admire her intellectual creativity and rigor, and her abilities as a orator. Her dissertation examines the continuities and discontinuities in the notions of time during the 20th century.
Our conversations revolved around the way media aesthetics and notions of time are related. She is writing a chapter on how ‘the future’ as a concept has changed in the past. Gabby thinks the the idea of ‘the future’ is linked to geospatial terms, like ‘country’. For Gabby, the only way of resisting capitalism is to refuse productivity. She has termed this affective resistance "lethargy".
Major Arcana: Lethargy
Jernard Sherman
Jernard is a Senior Manager at Bluecross, a large health insurance company. He has a background in finance and has worked for ‘big business’ players , where he became familiar with global economic markets and their ways of being interconnected. He is Jihan Sherman's husband (thanks to Jihan for helping me out with the contact).
In his work Jernard tries to predict flows in the markets by analyzing data and economic factors. He believes that algorithmic trading has gone aloof, with time scales that efface human agency. For Jernard, these changes in temporality make previously divergent trading styles drastically homogenous in comparison. As for the anthropocene, Jernard is interested in the social justice side. He thinks algorithmic speed and scale, combined with corporate profit-driven models is a symptom of an unbalanced system. He speculates the way societies value human lives change as they realize that, much like environmental resources, humans are also not infinite. Jernard calls for a revaluation of control mechanisms, incentives and bounds to the algorithmic markets.
Major Arcana: The Judge
Ilana Milkes Espinosa
Ilana is my younger sister. She is an entrepreneur from Colombia, and has a background in business and information management. She worked in a finance firm in the US before funding a startup in Colombia that teaches adults and children how to code and other technical literacy and life skills. Ilana’s work has been featured in many fancy places like the MIT Tech review of entrepreneurs under 35, the World Bank, and Forbes. With different personalities, we have shaped each other in many ways.
She considers herself a spiritual person, and believes we should listen to other bodies within us. These bodies may promote feminist and non-binary ways of understanding systems that surround us. Currently, Ilana is interested in biotechnology and the ways getting inspiration from biological systems can provide more sustainable ways of living.
Major Arcana: The Alchemist Entrepreneur
Eric Rubiel Dolores Cuenca
Eric is a Data Scientist with a Phd in Mathematics and an activist from Mexico. As a data scientist, he has developed and optimized algorithms that improve data labeling, train public service workers with simulations and find fluffy images among other things. As an activist, he has done cultural activism with data, promoted Machine Learning for humans and organized poetry publications. We met at Northwestern in events for international students. I later participated in an art piece he was organizing about water.
Part of our conversation dealt with being in the job market for data science, where he has often found himself at odds with the ethical positions of hiring companies.For Eric, computing is a tool, in essence no different than mathematics, that simplifies the activities of information processing. He believes doing good with computing is a personal choice, albeit an uncomfortable one. Eric is an advocate for democratizing technological knowledge.
Major Arcana: The Machine Earning Scientist
Kiran Bhattacharyya
Kiran works as a Machine Learning Scientist at Intuitive Surgical. He has a background in Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience. His experience with computing and finance comes mainly from interning as a data scientist for NASA and AllState. At NASA, where he did statistical models to quantify astronauts’ health during space travel. AT AllState, he used satellite imagery to quantify the extent of flood damage. During his academic research he also was in conversation with decision-making models and behavioral economics. Much of his dissertation was computational modeling of decisions through neural imaging of larval zebra fish brains. He is my partner.
Kiran approaches computing and the economy in the context of the anthropocene through the concept of ‘Risk’. In his world, quantifying risk with computation is the driver for financial decisions of institutions and individuals. We talked about modeling across disciplines.
Major Arcana: The Risk Scientist
Grant Casteel
Grant works in Houlihan Capital’s Valuation and Financial Advisory Group in Chicago. A self described “spreadsheet jockey”, Grant says he provides transparency onto the process of valuation for the clients of his firm, which is a private equity group of digital assets. His educational background shifted from physics to economics, which influences his work as a financial advisor. He is Kiran's old roommate and friend.
During our conversation, Grant emphasized that although there is a growing overlap between computing and the economy, they are still somewhat separate phenomena. This overlap is contingent on how computing is defined. Grant does not do “sexy algorithmic trading”, but rather relies on excel sheets and traditional financial instruments to analyze investments in specific companies. As for the economy, he says it is a complex and intractable system. For him the question of computing, the economy and the anthropocene is linked to notions of time in digital currencies.
Major Arcana: The Spreadsheet Jockey
Egor Starkov
Egor is an assistant professor of Economics at the University of Copenhagen. We met at Northwestern University, where he was doing his Phd in Economics. His research is currently focused on Digital Economics, and his work deals with the intersection of Economics of Information and Behavioral Economics. Back at Northwestern, we collaborated in an absurdist critical piece where he slashed Wholefoods muffins among other consumables with a samurai sword, dressed in a power ranger suit on campus.
Our conversation revolved around economics as a discipline, the ontologies of economic modeling, and the philosophical questions of the anthropocene. For Egor, economics has always been about welfare, and regulating the market to mitigate arising inefficiencies. Orthodox economics, with its modeling of the firm and the consumer as agents, has started incorporating issues like the environment and social justice already. Environmental economics, he said, is mainstream today, with many companies and consumers caring about these issues. He said we could always ask the question: is it enough?
As for computing, he sees Digital Economics as a paradigm change where agents valuate their decisions based on indicators available online. We also discussed the limitations and assumptions of traditional economic modeling, where agents "can't be fooled" since they know the world a priori.
Major Arcana: The Rational Economist
Sara Milkes Espinosa (me)
I am a Phd student in Digital Media at Georgia tech. I was drawn to this subject initially from the perspective of alternative economic models, or even alternatives to the economy altogether. This included a handful of European and Anglo-Saxon proponents, a few feminist scholars and some Latin American scholars. I decided to follow a more ethnographic approach to understand how people around me were involved in computing, the economy and the anthropocenes. The conversations turned out to be very different, and at times the subject of the anthropocene fell behind the curtains. This was sometimes due to disagreements with the term itsef, or simply other ways of referring to its concerns without using the word "anthropos".
Major Arcana: The Mother of All Lies