The Eyes of the State
The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to examine the ways in which model-based reasoning (Morgan, 2013) and machine thinking interact with the production of economic knowledge; and second, to determine how economic knowledge grounds the possibility of manipulating the system. This paper first sets out the image of the economy as an information processor, found in the early debate between capitalist and communist thinkers on the problems that socialist calculation faced (Lange, 1936/1937). From there it proceeds historically by looking at the example of planned economies and the role of machine thinking in establishing the basis for state intervention (Medina, 2011). It then turns to contemporary capitalist examples, arguing that in terms of machine thinking and economic intervention there is only a difference of degree and not kind. Lastly, it argues that if machine thinking and the manipulation of economies are always a part of contemporary economies, the issue must be how to make economic modelling oriented towards the common good. In that regard, it sets out some tentative conclusions about what such a regime of knowledge production would look like.
Nick Srnicek is a Teaching Fellow in Geopolitics and Globalisation at UCL, and PhD graduate in International Relations from LSE. He was co-editor of The Speculative Turn (Re.press, 2011), and is currently writing Folk Politics (2015) with Alex Williams.