Capital as Computation & Cognition: From Babbage’s Factory to Google’s Algorithmic... 1/4 скачать в хорошем качестве

Capital as Computation & Cognition: From Babbage’s Factory to Google’s Algorithmic... 1/4

The New Centre for Research & Practice is a Non-profit higher-education institution providing graduate-level seminars in philosophy, art & curatorial practice, media & technology as well as transdisciplinary studies. Become a Member of The New Centre to access the rest of the sessions & the full archive of our past seminars from 2014 onwards. To learn more about Membership and subscribe, please visit: https://thenewcentre.org/membership/m... ////////////////////////////////////// Since the times of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, if not for even longer, capital has functioned as a form of computation constituted by and as a complex mathematical system. After WWII the numeric essence of capital has been coupled with the informational dimension of cybernetics and computing machines, while also subsuming emergent forms of augmented intelligence. Capitalism, as a form of accounting and as an exterior mnemonic technique, is in itself a form of transhuman intelligence. Cognitive capitalism, specifically, on the basis of its infonumeric procedures, from layman’s accounting to sophisticated algotrading, as well as from immaterial labour to scientific research, is an institution of computation. The aim of the seminar is twofold: on the one hand, it will provide a critical introduction to the notions of cognitive capitalism, immaterial labour and general intellect as developed by Autonomist Marxism, as well as those of abstraction and the automation of intellectual labour & artificial intelligence, as discussed in the accelerationist debates. On the other hand, the seminar will test these theories and hypotheses on the ground of contemporary case studies contextualized by the global networks of the Internet and social media, logistics and the internet of things, intelligence apparatuses, climate science infrastructures and the algorithmic stock exchange. Finally, each session of the seminar will be dedicated to a specific historical technological assemblage: 1) the role of information within the industrial factory; 2) the role of machinic knowledge in post-WWII cybernetic factories; 3) the role of ranking algorithms and procedures in the network society; 4) the role of algorithmic governmentality in the metadata society.