Derivative Living

To describe how capitalism operates today, one needs to carefully look into the current correlation of media, finance, and information. As media organize our attention, a financialized colonization of time, discourse, and imagination occurs. Our words, perceptions, faces, and bodies become programmed and programmable; social and cultural differences turn into means of computation and value extraction. The logic of the market and its derivative principles invade all parts of everyday life and communication. Jonathan Beller calls this the era of “computational racial capitalism”: an era in which production, circulation, and valuation are mediated by images or code, in which toxicity, violence and exploitation are abstracted, recalibrated, and executed by means of the computational mediasphere. In his keynote, Beller will discuss these processes, as well as the possibilities of decolonizing and re-engineering a fundamental medium—money. New cooperative anti-state and anti-capitalist models based on secure computational platforms will be introduced and associated with radical finance and progressive sociality.