Learncoin

Back to the question of pedagogical practices as currency, posing the problem of “units” of learning. Money is a bet on the future; more precisely, it is a partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center, what in capitalism takes the form of discounting against expected future earnings. Money assumes the continuity of the world and then relies on that assumption to introduce discontinuities that the holder of money will be likelier than others to receive a return on. Orderly succession lies in the background of money—if anyone could seize power at any time then it would be impossible to rely on money—it wouldn’t work. The outside spread relies upon the continuity of power, to serve as debt forgiving and collecting agency; the outside spread is product of central power, so as to enable central power itself, or that imperial power best positioned to instigate and control discontinuities across the world, to bet on futures itself, on itself as future. So, the default mode is singularized succession, transmitted vertically and horizontally, with government debt introduced so as to fund and hold in reserve outside options, at home and abroad. The thinking of singularized succession, then, must involve thinking the abolition of money; discontinuities, on the terms of singularized succession, are initiated and monitored by the occupant of the center for the purpose of creating pedagogical platforms (mimological impressments) that replenish the centered ordinality. Thinking the abolition of money means thinking the retraction of the system of betting on the future into the accumulation of centered capacities not so much to control or predict the future as to staff it. I’ve come back a few times to the problem of the two centers, i.e., the center as generative origin continued through the occupied social center, on the one hand, and the center as anything upon which joint attention is exercised and which therefore sustains the most trivial conversation, communities large and small, scientific inquiry, and pretty much everything. The conclusion I’ve reached is that the “centripetal” centers, with the emergence of imperial systems, draw our attention away from the social center towards samples, ultimately samples of scenes iterating the originary scene, and we serve the center and donate our resentments to it through the curation of those samples as data that, I can now say, would be suitable for data exchanges in the juridical field. So, you make your actions such as clarify the imperative of the center by obeying the best version of the commands issued within your team; you make your speech free of slander, fraud and incitement so it would be of value in any proceeding; and so on. The next move, then, is to say these samples are units of currency, abolishing money from within, insofar as each of them represents a pedagogical increment; you learn and you teach how to fill the imperative gap, you learn and you teach how to scour your discourse for inclinations to indulge the “evil tongue,” and these learnings and teachings are idioms that have their value in the conversions in the actions and speech of others that only make sense by reference to them. An idiom marks, commemorates, a scene of learning, and insofar as that scene of learning is transferable it is transmitted to other scenes, infiltrating and converting them.

Removing traces of ever not having known something is a mark of having learned it and only deliberate resistance to forgetting can undo the mimetic incentives (the shame of learning) to do so. But this resistance involves assembling those traces so you can help others expedite an otherwise haphazard learning process. Learning always involves rising above some threshold at which single practices come together in a new whole—think, for example, of knowing all the allowable moves of chess without knowing that winning the game meant capturing the king; once you realized that, all the “pieces” would come together. To stick with this example, teaching someone is like telling them from the start the goal of the game so that they don’t have to figure out through experience that this is the only “logical” purpose of moving all the pieces around—but, then again, maybe not always telling them from the start because it is often necessary to be familiar with some of the operations in order to understand the goal (especially when it’s not as simple as winning a game). The learning threshold is like, maybe even the same as, the self-dissolving thresholds I examined a few posts back. The perfection of ritual turns the world into a site of ritual observance and thereby abolishes ritual, the perfection of the juridical would make crimes, transgressions and infractions instantly and commensurately answerable thereby making such acts impossible and abolishing the juridical, immersing ourselves in data by supplying it in treated form seamlessly to ritual and juridical sites would make each of us self-studying carriers of actionable data, thereby abolishing the disciplinary.

I’m drawing here upon a line of thinking I’ve had recourse to before, including Gaston Bachelard’s projection that rather than society containing the school, the society will become the school, Marshall McLuhan’s prediction (joined by aligned thinkers like John Cage and Buckminster Fuller) that in the future we will be paid to continue learning, and the artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins who seemed to think that the way to eventually make dying “illegal” was to compose the entire social and technological order as a kind of obstacle course requiring us to study and revise each and every movement as we made it. For center study, this means drawing on the infinite resources of the originary hypothesis, and decomposing and recomposing all of our gestures as possible means of deferral under more or less likely conditions that we are always not only imagining but building infrastructures to test and so reveal more elements of the infra-human. Everyone is working on the stack, trying to elicit some new way of seeing, hearing, recoding, remixing, reordering—some new way of sampling—that will become extremely desired for an extremely short period of time because it will significantly advantage some team but then for that reason be rapidly assimilated by other teams. The value will reside not in some patented technique or blockchain protected diagram but in the skills, cooperation and devotion of a team that will be as a result elevated within the subscription circulation system. This is what money is to become: the idioms produced by such teams, measured by their reshuffling of the subscription system, driven by leading teams maximizing their gestural economy within that system. The preferred idioms will not just be immediately advantageous but immediately advantageous as initiating modifications in the entire succession process, factoring into the selection of candidates for recruitment and promotion, with the down stream effects infinitesimal insofar as they operate within a system hardened by increasingly perfected imperatives but also infinite because such systems will be exquisitely sensitive to the slightest modifications. That is learncoin.

The prediction market proposed by Thirdness aims at achieving learncoin through a carefully curated market, to serve as a model for other markets, to ultimately get to the point where the tacit assumptions ungirding the market and supported by its makers can become increasingly explicit so as to become something other than a market: a form of ledgering directly interfacing with singularized succession in perpetuity. I’ve been presenting this prediction market as involving a bet on the results of a process of inquiry conducted by a trained team transparent in its theoretical assumptions and reliance on available data so that a decision grounded in real uncertainty between two very clearly delineated and equally likely options will result from further inquiry carried out between the time of posting the options and making the decision. This is true, but as the boundary between those whose actions are bet upon and those doing the betting is permeable and meant to become more so, those participating in the market are really betting on their own decision processes: you come to think, once I do a really deep dive here, how might things look different to me? As you come to think this way within the confines of the Thirdness market, you come to think this way more generally, and apply the justice logic of reasoning to every choice, as every choice can most effectively be framed as one between competing claimants. Even you, yourself, are an ongoing process of settling accounts between competing claimants—this is a modification of Charles Sanders Peirce’s assertion that we are each of us an insurance company, because what would insurance companies be without independent arbiters of some kind? There then ensues competition between differing layers of the Thirdness team to make the bets better by making the decisions more nuanced and therefore less predictable, so that there remains something to bet on.

Thirdness then has a direct interest in the development of the Stack as a system of data collection and preparation and will be running askew of the originary distribution which is now, and increasingly, a matter of allocating licenses to secure financizable monopolies on knowledge. Thirdness counters the partitioning and parceling of the imperative of the center by creating new forms of adjudication that can transfer financialization and intellectual property to preliminary versions of learncoin, that is, companies that create conditions of succession. Judgments are always judgments on the continuity of the nomos or originary distribution which must be protected from judicial vendettas or lawfare by creating spaces of power as judgment. Think in terms of the original American colonies as grants by the Crown to individuals and companies of land—we could imagine that the current states would still be owned by those families and companies but over time this mode of governance would have to adapt to the proliferation of claims between subjects, actual and potential, across the governed territory, even just in order to prevent the emergence of “untabernacled” populations outside of the terms of belonging that could be leveraged by other sovereigns, leading them to eventually become data security firms anyway. The development of technology, or the technoscene, or stack of scenes, is thus monitored by Thirdness in terms of its conformity with the needs to formulate and settle cases. Thirdness brings the stack of scenes back to its origins in governance with the purpose of fully converting the stack of scenes into an array of pedagogical platforms that set up cases but always also as sample cases used to train those who will staff institutions. And this returns us to the ancient notion of the government as tutor to the people. To paraphrase the bitcoin advocate Max Keiser, all currencies should go to zero against learncoin, i.e., that pedagogical platform offering the best prospects for generating new modes of deferral into the forseeable future.

We will always be speaking in terms of deferral because deferral structures and “staggers” reality in terms of signs informing us of our distance from some mimetic crisis. We can never be far enough away from such crises, but at the same time we can be too far, so far that we see no markers of such possibilities and hence start dismantling boundaries that have served to keep mimetic crises at a sufficient distance for productive work to take place. The imperative to turn every possible rivalry into a case maintains the proper distance—the imperative can take the form of a command by those in control of a sphere of activity, or of a demand by those petitioning power to take up a case so as to avoid untabernacling some part of the population, and it can transition into a question: does this need to be converted directly into a case, just yet? Maybe the rivals can settle it by themselves, or in view of a more informal audience. This kind of judgment—whether to hear the case just yet—creates communities, because those informal means of adjudication and mini-conquests need to be studied so as to determine when the hostage taking necessarily governing such spaces is likely to erupt into a vendetta threatening some point in the nomos; meanwhile, those informal means of settling disputes have a lot to teach those situated within the formal juridical arena, who will therefore always want proximity to them. The disciplines studying such pre-juridical arenas will have at least some sympathy for the virtues they sustain and will be interested in the institutional structures strengthening the loyalties (and resentments) they depend on—above all, I think, structures of kinship, which is to say breeding. A flourishing gift economy can co-exist with the stack of scenes; indeed, judges and technicians will have their own extended families and will be the ones bringing resources into the gift economy. Whether or not a particular case will be taken will itself be a decision posted on the prediction market—does a case make the threshold to be considered juridically; do the complaints have standing? Each case decided should set a precedent—this is a precondition for posting cases, because only in this way will some learning threshold be passed and learncoin idioms mined.