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   about
   MICHAEL BETANCOURT NEWS
   movies: AESTHETICS
   movies: NEWS & REVIEWS
   movies: SHOWS & SCREENINGS
   random art notes
   random how-tos
   research: AVANT-GARDE MOVIES
   research: MOTION GRAPHICS
   research: VISUAL MUSIC
   theory: CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS
   theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM
   theory: GLITCH & POSTDIGITAL
   theory: working notes

 

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archives begin in 1996

  

The Rentier Illusion

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 28, 2011 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM

Rentier currencymoney that comes into existence not as a representation of past productive value, but by as a debt (loaned or borrowed)enjoys an illusory foundation precisely in that within capitalist economies the demand for escalating value masks the rentier paradox: that the debt posed by the rentier claim inherently always corresponds to a larger value than there are values for (re)payment.




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The Grid (a new sketch of The Digital)

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 25, 2011 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM

The paradigm of digitality isespecially at a technological levela reification of the modernist grid. Fundamentally a process of segmentation of ordering, its contents are essentially identical, divorced from the physical variability inherent to other material constructs by the unrelenting opperations of binary code. Once it has been rendered into a human-readable form, the meaning of these codes stands apart from the digital workan example of the aura of information acting within our encounter. It is the transcendent dimensions of early abstraction that finds itself mirrored by encoding of physicality in data samples, paradoxically both literal in its insistence on the measurement of the discrete physical features of the world, and immaterial in how this meaning is held apart from the electro-magnetic switching of microtransistors within blocks of matter (the aura of the digital in action).




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Agnotology, Audits and (Un)Certainty

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 8, 2011 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM

This is a theory fragment:

The various demands occasionally heard both before and after the crises of 2008 about "audit the Fed" or "audit Fort Knox" or "audit ________" have a basic problem: it is not what the results from the audit might be, but the credibility of any result produced with those making the demand; this is not a "post-modern" plurality or relativity of values, but representative of something else, a different process, whose action superficially resembles relativity of values, but is not.




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Gresham's Law and Immaterial Commodities

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 8, 2011 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM

Here is an interesting development about the US mint (from Zero Hedge).

This sounds a lot like Gresham's Law in operation: a so-called "flight to quality."




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Agnotology in Action

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 2, 2011 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM

Here is an example of agnotism: this news story makes it clear the extent to which powerful organizations will use their money and connections to attack, undermine and discredit their critics.




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