24/6 Computation and the Radical @ Goldsmiths

On ​Utopia & Computation

Cyberspace once beckoned as a new frontier, a zone of anarchic promise where technological cultures promised a radical exit from authority. In the decades since the internet’s Eternal September, this utopian horizon appears to have vanished, or worse still, transformed into the walled gardens of digital enclosure we are now surrounded by. This lecture traces the metamorphosis of the liberatory myths of the early '90s cypherpunks into today's techno-authoritarian moment, as the power of computational tools such as cryptography and machine intelligence become both the weapons of the oppressor and the means of resistance for the marginalised. Can we concoct strategies with which to reclaim these lost futures, through a reevaluation of our contemporary relationships with imagination, technology, and power? 

...it is clear that what structures social reality - the so-called ‘economy’ - is itself a tissue of fictions… economic and social fictions always elude empiricism, since they are never given in experience; they are what structures experience​.

​Fictions can be engines for the development of future policy. They can be machines for designing the future​ …​ Fictions are also simulations in which we can get some sense of what it would be like to live in a post-capitalist society. The task is to produce fictions that can be converted into effective virtualities - fictions that not only anticipate the future but can already start to bring it into being​ ... as capital’s cheerleaders endlessly crow, anti-capitalists have not been able to articulate a coherent alternative. The production of new economic science fictions therefore becomes an urgent political imperative.

Mark Fisher, Economic Science Fictions foreword, Goldsmiths Press, 2018 ​(edited)