Thread by @rechelon

So there's this take I've been kicking around in my head riffing on Wark's idea that capitalism has been replaced by vectoralism... Specifically that the capitalist class were overshadowed by a managerial class who is now being overshadowed by an ephemeral grift class.

No class ever gets entirely replaced (even aristocrats still exist), but new classes rise in prominence. The grift class are rent-seekers defined by the relative temporariness & fluidity of their grifts. Finance bros, btc hucksters, protest swoopers, patent trolls, promoters...

As our world becomes more and more fluid & turbulent the stable long-term accumulative relationships of conventional capital like factory ownership are transcended in profit by gradient exploitation of very temporary, localized, severe disequilibria.

I've talked about memes before as exploding pyramid schemes that end up acting as ping messages in the network structure of society, mapping distance between clusters. A kind of market clearing mechanism in social relationship space. It has a certain resonance here...

It's not an particularly optimistic model since it doesn't imply an overall trajectory of market -> zero-profit efficiency but instead a move to a fractal non-smoothly continuous/differentiable landscape where chaos creates micro hyper-variable opportunities for profit.

That is to say the breakdown of overall / universal emergent commonality (both 'truth' in the sense of shared epistemological worlds and price in the sense of a clearing market) shifts profit opportunities to the hyperparticular and temporary. It also *increases* net profit.

(Ducking back in to this thread after some pleasant distractions)

If we were naively teleological eg marx we could abstract a kind of historical progression story towards maximal discontinuity / information chaos / fractal arbitrage possibilities (or maybe assume a final break)

This presents an amusing version of marx where maximal anti-market (eg capitalist) dynamics accrue in deeper and deeper penetration until there's just a fractal anti-market of increasing towards infinite (albeit chaotic and inconsistent) profit margins in every relationship.

One could go further and say that all heretofor history has been the history of market bubbles, and the progression of history is towards nonstop infinite bubbles everywhere (the complete opposite of market clearing). And then lol communism is the big reset to perfect markets. :P

But of course there is no teleological attractor to a desirable end of history. Rather the rise of the grifter class/era is the collapse of the managerial class/era. The centralization of epistemic/cultural/etc functions killed off more natural ecosystems of such leading to grift

We are in an era of broken culture/epistemology/etc and a lack of any clear way to reestablish the universals necessary to freedom and communication. The two paths are fracture to reactionary patchwork or the bootstrapping of bottom-up social epistemological tactics/forms.

This is to say that while we *could* just passively trace an arc of postmodernity to fractal microfascism, humanity isn't entirely down and out. New universals can emerge from the bottom-up to replace the shoddy universals imposed top-down.

The explosion of grift that we've seen can, and maybe even is, turning. There is no magical *incoherence* to reality that gives natural skew towards a perpetually increasing fractal grift / arbitrage from communication/knowledge gulfs.