Automated Capitalism and the Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics of the Chart

• In Event: Platform Practices and Predictive Seeing 1

Abstract

The chart is a technology of calculation and decision predicated on the logic of inference and association. Far more advanced in terms of operationality in the finance sector than equivalents in the smart city, the dashboard is exemplary as a set of technical indicators that simulates in truncated form the world as externality. With origins in the 18th century Japanese rice derivatives market, candlestick charts are still widely used today in day-trading and futures markets. More abstracted measures of price movements, based on moving averages and standard deviations, drive decisions to buy and sell commodities. Automated capitalism is underscored by chart-reading humans and data-reading machines involved in a tussle of predicting and profiting from other predictions, further devolving markets from actual economies of labour and production. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the history and epistemology of the chart as a predictive technology in urban design and finance capitalism. We consider the current migration of charting techniques into highly iterated machine learning platforms, largely homologous in their functioning with facial recognition, object identification and image processing systems. The ultimate reliance of such systems upon statistical induction points also toward their epistemic limits. Is abduction - championed by Pasquinelli and Peirce before him - the conceptual move that for now remains incomputable? Or might induction-at-scale eventually generate probability estimates of the unforeseen - market crashes, metaphorical leaps, theoretical novelty? At the core of this paper is an interest in the vulnerabilities of prediction and political surveillance entailed within the limits of capital accumulation.

Authors

• Liam Magee, Institute for Culture & Society, Western Sydney University

• Ned Rossiter, University of Western Sydney