The Art world is not a success. It is not progressive, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous, it is not unbiased – and it frequently misses opportunities to perform better. The art world is a world we dislike, and, in the long term, despise. A machine of accelerated aesthetics, burnouts, precarious living, 24/7 availability and galvanised gossip that is motivated by survival, rather than a common good. I am partial to the thought that the art world has succumbed to something not entirely human, some- thing which in some circles is referred to as Capitalism. ...

Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What’s not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it’s hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It’s becoming clear that the tech industry’s promised “innovation” is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond ...

This fifth SDUK broadsheet examines the multifaceted meanings of ACCOUNTING in the age of climate change. This issue considers accounting in its colloquial sense, pertaining to investment and economics, but also moves beyond the ledger book to consider what remains uncounted, and what is consciously left out. Throughout this issue, we find slippery concepts, things, and actors that pose a challenge to accounting as a means of representation and understanding. Beginning with economics, one might ask: What are the basic tools and assumptions on which accounting is based? In his ongoing unsettling of fundamental economic concepts, D.T. Cochrane looks at how ...

The blockchain is Janus-faced. On one side its traits of transparency and decentralization promise much in terms of fairness and accountability, but on the other its monetary roots born as a financial payment system, albeit grounded in open-source software, mean its implementations are often stridently capitalistic. Furthermore, those involved in its development seem to oscillate between radical ethical standpoints and reductionist technological determinism. The blockchain engenders what has been called a “digital metalism” with the ability, like a modern philosopher’s stone, to transmutate life through a distributed ledger. That such a pecuniary minded technology is being touted as a new ...

Austerity and Utopia is the first in a series looking at other potential narratives for mapping our current landscape through redefining the social, political and economic terms of engagement. It was planned a long time before the pandemic. Our current situation was unimaginable just a few months ago, but that it was not easily predictable does not mean that there were no elements pointing to a possible crisis of this nature. Yet the collective search for measures of care and climate justice in the attempt to redefine the neoliberal understanding of austerity and utopia – two major points of the ...

On the ledger and the herbarium: the settling of financial and botanical accounts. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the age of digital media and TCP/IP protocol architecture, the 1989 discovery of the manuscript of Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) in a locked safe perhaps appears more dramatic than the unpublished novel’s retrospectively tepid dystopian prophecies. Yet its narrator Michel Jérôme Dufrénoy’s employment in the banking house of Casmodage et Cie. provides unexpected insight into what it meant to keep the books in nineteenth-century France. The novel is set in a Paris of the 1960s, when literary culture was ...

Crypto collapse! Simply HODL and stay with us while we talk with Wassim Z. Alsindi: veteran of the timechain, founder and host of the 0x Salon, conducting experiments in post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices. Wassim specialises in conceptual design and philosophy of peer-to-peer systems. Today he guides us through the speculative hellscape.

What is BitchCoin? BitchCoin is a digital currency backed by the photography of Sarah Meyohas at a fixed exchange rate of 1 BitchCoin to 25 square inches of photographic print. This rate of exchange will not change, even if the value of the photography increases. As her work changes in value over time, so will the relative value of BitchCoin. How did BitchCoin get started? BitchCoin is the focus of “Where 6,” an exhibition on prediction at Where, a gallery and publishing house headquartered in a shipping container in Brooklyn. Where invited Sarah Meyohas to “mine” her coins in the gallery and design ...

Civilizations at their peak present curious spectacles. They ooze wealth and pride, produce fantastic art and technologies, all while shredding the foundations of their prosperity. Their citizens seem to believe they eclipse mundane restrictions of time and space. The monuments their predecessors have left in Rome, on Easter Island, in Egypt, in Venice, littered like warning beacons elsewhere throughout the world, demonstrate such faith may not match reality. A rock thrown skyward must believe, at the top of its arc, fleetingly, that it is flying. When we admire our great cities, we find it hard to believe that they will ever ...

The inaugural episode of Explain Me, an art podcast with critic Paddy Johnson and artist William Powhida! A round of woos and hoos please! Explain Me looks at politics, money and the moral of responsibility of artists working in the art world. In this episode, we discuss Documenta’s massive overspending and near bankrupcy, the closure of Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and a new development along the 7 line describing itself as New York’s best installation. We also talk about a few shows we’ve seen recently in Chelsea, Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins, Christian Marclay at Paula Cooper, Tom Friedman at Lurhing ...

Capital at the Brink reveals the pervasiveness, destructiveness, and dominance of neoliberalism within American society and culture. The contributors to this collection also offer points of resistance to an ideology wherein, to borrow Henry Giroux’s comment, “everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit.” The first step in fighting neoliberalism is to make it visible. By discussing various inroads that it has made into political, popular, and literary culture, Capital at the Brink is taking this first step and joining a global resistance that works against neoliberalism by revealing the variety of ways in which it dominates and ...

City planners across the planet have recently adopted gentrification led by creatives as a development strategy for increasing the wealth of cities while also promoting inclusiveness, diversity and social integration, all of which are important to these cities’ engagement in global networks, as well as increasing capital with minimum political objection. An all-round win. However, faced with growing socioeconomic inequalities within major cities over the same period— and between global urban hotspots, or what are called ‘superstar cities’, such as New York, London, Shanghai, Dubai and the rest—even Richard Florida, proselytiser-in-chief for creative gentrification as the path to urban ‘renewal’, ...