This is the transcript of a speech I gave online at the “Calculation otherwise” session of the 2022 Transmediale in Berlin: “This is Not Anarchy, This is Chaos.” The recording of the speech can be found here.
We live in a simulated world. I don’t mean this in a Matrix style, like we’re being raised by robots for fuel. At least, if that was the case, we could just fight the robots. Easy. The situation we’re in is way more subtle. We’re stuck in a simulation of our own making.
Let’s rewind a bit and come back to the birth of what has become the most important number in the world. GDP. Gross Domestic Product. An indicator of economic activity invented in the United Stated during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Back then, the US government was desperate to get its economy back on tracks, but it had no way of checking whether it was or not. And so, they asked Simon Kuznets. Kuznets’ genius idea was to aggregate all activity into one number. A kind of heart rate monitor, but for an economy. If the rate goes up, you know you’ve managed to reanimate your economy. Back then it all felt very technical and practical. But a century later, we are starting to realise the disastrous consequences of the invention of GDP.
Today, GDP is not only a number but also a totem. Countries all around the world do their best to maximise the growth of their GDP. This seemingly abstract objective has become a non-negotiable guideline. Governments maximise their GDP, companies maximise their profits, and individuals maximise their income. The maximisation of monetary indicator has become the most important code line in the software of modernity – a meta-structure that subjugates all others.
It is quite telling that news channel on TV always display numbers about the stock market. This is a reminder of what we think the beating heart of our society is. Even in time of ecosystem collapse and climate breakdown, governments worry about the impact of a potential specie-threatening apocalypse on their economies.
There is a cartoon I quite like where you can see a dinosaur watching the asteroid getting close with a bubble text saying: “Oh shit, the economy!” And of course, the economy is important; the economy as the complex assemblage of institutions that coordinate collective work to satisfy needs. That’s important. But that’s not the economy GDP measures. That’s not the economy reflected in stock market indexes. Hence the simulation. We are living in a simulation where the reality of the economy is shaped by abstract rules defined by abstract indicators legitimated by abstract theories.
What we don’t often realise is that indicators are political. Any indicator shows certain things and hides others. The choice of what is rendered visible and what is left in the dark is unavoidably political. Behind every indicator, there are interests: What is counted? Who is counting? And why?
Today, the way we do national accounting ignores nature, downplays inequality, undervalues the work of women and everyone else that doesn’t sell stuff on markets. It’s not only an indicator. It’s a distribution scheme. Cut a tree and sell it, get points. Save a tree, and let it be, get nothing. This economistic way of thinking legitimates nonsensical behaviour like the cutting of millennial forests in the Amazon to grow feedstock so that the rich households of the world can eat beef everyday, or the spurting of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, threatening the stability of the planet’s climate, just to allow a few percents of the world richest to fly around for holidays.
Some then will tell you that we cannot save nature because we’ve not managed to put a price on it. The only reason it’s been squandered is because it is invisible to our GDP glasses. Maybe we just need more precise indicators?
I don’t think that’s the problem. In fact, I think this wait-game for better models, better indicators, and better data is deceiving. It only postpones decisions into the future. This reminds me of a Sci-fi short story by Isaac Asimov where scientists keep asking complex questions to an increasingly sophisticated computer. And every time the computer is being asked a question, it answers “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.” Today, the biggest dangers for revolutionaries is to play the waiting game; waiting to gather enough data to show that what we’re doing today is wrong. Instead, we should turn this precautionary principle around. The present is not working. The accumulation of wealth in the global North is sucking the Earth dry and handing the bill to the most vulnerable to bear.
The burden of proof should shift. Show me numbers, data, models, and theories to explain how high-income countries appropriating net-quantities of money, labour, energy, materials, and soil from the global South is going to put an end to poverty. Show me how we can green growth, even though almost 1,000 academic articles have shown that this has never been achieved. Show me that wealth trickles down, and that enriching the rich makes the poorest better-off. Until you do. Stop importing the life out of poorer countries, stop wrecking the Earth, and stop piling up wealth in the pockets of the elite.
The problem of GDP is not the way it is calculated, it is its very own existence. Our desire to aggregate a multiplicity of human and non-human interactions into a single number is just a remnant of that old Cartesian quirk of believing that we can – and should – control nature. But perhaps, certain things should not be measured. Not everything that counts can be counted. And certain things that counts stop counting once they’re counted.
Think of the idea of “natural capital”: the belief that nature is only one kind of capital among others; just stuff kindly waiting to be used by us in our almighty economy. Calling it “natural capital” is already a mistake, and so is trying to measure it. So, let’s forget about “natural capital” and fight the logic of capitalising nature. Some South American cosmovisions like buen vivir call nature Mother Earth. Now compare: “degrading natural capital” versus “harming Mother Earth.” The first sounds like an oupsy-it’s fine, the second like a tragedy. We need to oppose the logic of capital. And the logic of capital can only exist with its measuring apparatus. Without indicators, capitalism is naked.
Let’s go one step further: we should actively sabotage this mental infrastructure. Let’s collectively organise a resistance against the measurement that motivates and legitimates the destruction of the planet. Let’s refuse to measure the world with indicators that make the destruction of life on Earth look like victory at some very twisted kind of Monopoly game. Decolonising our imaginaries from this monetary monomania means defending the chaos of the social and ecological against the organising crave of capitalism that wants to neatly count, name, and package every single thing just so that it can be sold.
Imagine. How differently would our societies be if every news channel was at all time displaying the latest numbers about biodiversity loss, global warming, poverty rates, and inequality? My utopia is a world where we would have forgotten how to measure GDP.