"What is the Truth?" - Pilate

Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The neologism was coined by Robert N. Proctor,^[1][2] a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology.^[3] Its name derives from the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, "not knowing" (confer Attic Greek ἄγνωτος "unknown"^[4]), and -λογία, -logia.^[5] More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.

A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.^[5][6] Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.^[7]

Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of true knowledge do not "come to be," or are ignored or delayed and untrue knowledge thus becomes the basis of faulty action.

For example, Monetarism was the basis of Babylon and the Old Roman Empire and the Shylocks of Venice based upon private banks and slavery and has been the basis of every failing Empire since. The Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are really private Banks and have nothing to do with their Governments of the USA and of England.  Monetarism's foundation is the lie that vampire - like usury is sustainable. In practise it feeds - vampire-like - upon every creativity and genuine source of value, destroying both. It always leads to the fall of the Roman Empire, or any other Empire based upon Monetarism.

Its proven alternative of the the separation of Banking Action from Speculation epitomised by the Glass- Steagal law developed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in order to stop the 1930s depression was created by economist Hamilton's Credit System of Governmental credit from Government banks at low rates of interest over 50 years or more for proven infrastructure improvements has always increased economies (Old USA and Modern China) at the rate of 10% year on year leading to a general increase in richness, education and societal happiness.

The Glass-Steagal law is based upon the fact that the gambling debts of the private Banksters like the Rockefellers and their European branch of the family, the Rothschilds, are not the responsibility of any other member of the population. The Glass-Steagal law demands the bankruptcy of the offending Banks, the nullification of the monopoly money imaginary 1000 Trillions of Dollars of gambling debts like Derivatives and CDOs and the foundation of Governmental Banks creating Governmental Credit at 1% interest over 50 years and Government created Greenback Currency.

Also for example, knowledge about plate tectonics was delayed for at least a decade because key evidence was classified military information related to warfare, thus earthquakes as a technique of warfare in China and Japan and the created nuclear disasters at Chernobyl  and Fukushima and the resulting dark propaganda against fourth generation nuclear power.^[5]

History

Origins

Proctor was quoted using the term to describe his research "only half jokingly," as "agnatology" in a 2001 interview about his lapidary work with the colorful rock agate. He connected the two seemingly unrelated topics by noting the lack of geologic knowledge and study of agate since its first known description by Theophrastus in 300 BC, relative to the extensive research on other rocks and minerals such as diamonds, asbestos, granite, and coal, all of which have much higher commercial value. He said agate was a "victim of scientific disinterest," the same "structured apathy" he called "the social construction of ignorance."^[8]

He was later quoted as calling it "agnotology, the study of ignorance," in a 2003 New York Times story on medical historians testifying as expert witnesses.^[9]

Proctor co-organized a pair of events with Londa Schiebinger, his wife, who is also a science history professor: the first was a workshop at the Pennsylvania State University in 2003 titled “Agnatology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance”,^[10] and later a conference at Stanford University in 2005 titled “Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance”.^[7]

Political economy

In 2004, Londa Schiebinger,^[11] gave a more precise definition of agnotology in a paper on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and gender relations, and contrasted it with epistemology, the theory of knowledge, saying that the latter questions how we know while the former questions why we do not know: "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and lying political struggle."^[12]

Its use as a critical description of the political economy has been expanded upon by Michael Betancourt in a 2010 article titled "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism."^[13] His analysis is focused on the housing bubble as well as the bubble economy of the period from 1980-2008. Betancourt argues that this political economy should be termed "agnotologic capitalism" because the systemic production and maintenance of ignorance is a major feature that enables the economy in his analysis to function because it enables the creation of a monetarist "bubble economy".

Betancourt's argument is posed in relation to the idea of affective labor. He states that "The creation of systemic unknowns where any potential "fact" is always already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value renders engagement with the conditions of reality -- the very situations affective labor seeks to assuage -- contentious and a source of confusion, reflected by the inability of participants in bubbles to be aware of the immanent collapse until after it has happened. The biopolitical paradigm of distraction, what [Juan Martin] Prada calls "life to enjoy," can only be maintained if the underlying structures remain hidden from view. If affective labor works to reduce alienation, agnotology works to eliminate the potential for dissent." In his view, the role of affective labor is to enable the continuation of the agnotologic effects that enable the maintenance of the capitalist status quo.

Agnoiology

A similar word from the same Greek roots, agnoiology, meaning "the science or study of ignorance, which determines its quality and conditions"^[14] or "the doctrine concerning those things of which we are necessarily ignorant"^[15] describes a branch of philosophy studied by James Frederick Ferrier in the 19th century.^[16]

 Media Influence

The availability of such large amounts of knowledge in this information age may not necessarily be producing a knowledgeable citizenry through conscious obfustication of the truth. Instead it may be allowing many people to cherry-pick information in blogs or news that reinforces their existing beliefs.^[17] and to be distracted from new true knowledge by repetitive or base entertainments. There is conflicting evidence on how television viewing affects intelligence as well as values formation.^[18]

An emerging new scientific discipline that has connections to agnotology is cognitronics:

cognitronics 

aims (a) at explicating the lying distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and globalization and (b) at coping with these lying distortions in different fields... Cognitronics is studying and looking for the ways of improving cognitive mechanisms of processing information and developing emotional sphere of the personality - the ways aiming at compensating three mentioned shifts in the systems of values and, as an indirect consequence, for the ways of developing symbolic information processing skills of the learners, linguistic mechanisms, associative and reasoning abilities, broad mental outlook being important preconditions of successful work practically in every sphere of professional activity in information society.^[19]

 See also

• Junk science
• Obscurantism
• Politics of global warming:
  • Pressure on scientists
  • Efforts to mislead public
• The Republican War on Science
• Merchants of Doubt
• Fear, uncertainty and doubt, or simply 'FUD', a disinformation technique using the appeal to fear
• Fnord
• Subvertising

 References

 Further reading

• Michaels, David (2008). Doubt is Their Product: How industry's assault on science threatens your health. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-530067-3. 
• Mooney, Chris (2005). The Republican War on Science. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04676-2. 
• Proctor, Robert N. (1995). Cancer Wars: How politics shapes what we know and don't know about cancer. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00859-9. 
• Proctor, Robert N.; Schiebinger, Londa, eds (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5901-4. 
• Smithson M (1985). "Toward a social theory of ignorance". Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (4): 323–346. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.1985.tb00049.x. 

 External links

• Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance
• Agnotology and Misology
• WordSpy citations

 

Semiotics - Semantic Manipulation

Chart semiotics of Social Networking Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically.

Semiotics is often divided into three branches:

1. Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning

2. Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures

3. Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them

Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.

Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols.[1] More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences."[2] Charles Morris the famous advertising expert adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs. 

Sometimes semiotics or lying is achieved by bullshit, using big words without any meaning, so as to distract from the real meaning. It takes much study of many books and real intelligence - a  need to find the truth - to see through the lying to the real truth which is beneath.. as in Betancourt, below.

 

Betancourt on ‘Immaterial Production and Scarcity’ - Vampirism through Bubbles and Monetarist  Fiat Currency

This talk was the opening presentation at the Digital Inflections: CTheory Global Online Seminar on Critical Digital Studies, June 17, 1pm PDT, on “Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism,” June 17, 2010 On ‘Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism’ Michael Betancourt with additions by Satchidanand - www.energyenhancement.org - I was very happy to improve this article and through that to get closer towards any Truth it may contain.

I know the discussion in my article may appear to be primarily concerned with financialization; however, in my view financialization is an epiphenomenon, a symptom, of another distinct process of Monetarism whose origins lie with the emergence and ascendancy of what I have called the imaginary numbers the, ‘aura of the digital.’ My concerns are with how this monetarist immaterialism has come to dominate the political economy, and those factors that suggest how this dominance manifests itself as immaterial values created without productive action.

"Monetarism was the basis of Babylon and the Old Roman Empire and the Shylocks of Venice based upon private banks and slavery and has been the basis of every failing Empire since. Monetarism was created to maintain control of elites by Feudalism created by poverty (Financial Crashes) , bad education (Dumming Down) and bad health (Pollution and Poisons in food, air and water). The Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are really private Banks and have nothing to do with their Governments of the USA and of England.  Monetarism's foundation is the lie that vampire - like usury is sustainable. In practise it feeds - vampire - like - upon every creativity and genuine source of value, destroying both. It always leads to the fall of the Roman Empire, or any other Empire based upon Monetarism.

The proven alternative to Monetarism of the the separation of Banking Action from Speculation epitomised by the Glass- Steagal law developed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in order to stop the 1930s depression was created by economist Hamilton's Credit System of Governmental credit from Government banks at low rates of interest over 50 years or more for proven infrastructure improvements has always increased economies (Old USA and Modern China) at the rate of 10% year on year leading to a general increase in richness, education and societal happiness - an anathema to controlling Elites.

The Glass-Steagal law is based upon the fact that the gambling debts of the Banksters like the Rockefellers and their European branch of the family, the Rothschilds, are not the responsibility of any other member of the population. The Glass-Steagal law demands the bankruptcy of the offending Banks, the nullification of the monopoly money imaginary 1000 Trillions of Dollars of gambling debts like Derivatives and CDOs and the foundation of Governmental Banks creating Governmental Credit at 1% interest over 50 years and Government created Greenback Currency

At the moment in the world there is a battle between two competing World Views.. The Monetarism of the Old Roman Empire and the Credit system of Hamilton and the Old American system of Economy. Its victor will probably be decided by War" - Satchidanand

The immaterialism apparent in the emergence of the digital has deployed financialization as a vehicle for the semiotic development of wealth and accumulation without physical production. The issue in this immaterial dynamic is a change in the historical nature of currency, most visible in how the financial institutions receiving bailouts in 2008 and 2009 became stronger as a result. It shows the changed relationship between the physical commodity-form and the immaterial value of currency, one that does not suggest a dialectic, so much as a spectrum of dominance where physical and immaterial value exist dynamically with interpenetrating positions of greater and lesser significance. The shift from coincident values to this variable dynamic spectrum is essential for the immaterial generation of value through lying semiosis.

As the digital technologies developed in the 1960s expanded throughout our culture in the 1970s, 80s and most visibly in the 90s, there was a general reordering of industrial culture and production around this new technology. Automation of both physical and immaterial production, globalized off-shoring of labor, and the networking of shipping, communication, and immaterial trade all depend on these digital technologies; without them, the reduction of latency in communication essential to immaterial production would be impossible. The speed of many of these transactions is striking: trades lasting only a fraction of a second using High Frequency Trading “bots”— automated digital systems—have become the dominant productive force in immaterial value generation.

Immaterial production is possible because the digital is a semiotic realm where the meaning of a work is separated from the physical representation of that work; the “aura of the digital” describes an ideology that claims a transformation of objects into a semiotically-based immateriality, which is linked to the actual conditions of digital technology, most obvious in the relationship of a digital “copy” to the digital “original.” Both are identical (not merely equivalent, but the same); based in implementations of code, they do not decay when copied, used or reproduced—making it is possible to sell a digital work and retain it at the same time. This final factor enables the ideology of accumulation without production that is specific to digital capitalism.

Within the digital we have a technology that appears to be essentially a matter of immateriality—of course this is not true; however, what is of interest is that we seem to behave as if it were true, and it this behavior that is significant.

The aura of the digital is apparent as immaterial production because digital technology enables an illusion of production without consumption. This shift from a basis in limiting factors and scarcity is inherent to the immateriality posed by the digital; at the same time, it denies how Monetarist created scarcity of capital is imposed by the dual forms of interest and profit on capital expenditures. How this dynamic plays out creates both asset bubbles and their collapse.

As the digital expanded, the US Dollar assumed the role of universal equivalent between both commodities and currencies. It embodies the relative value of all exchanges within the global political economy; that the US Dollar also happens to be a monetarist fiat currency led to the emergence and current dominance of immaterial production. The immaterial force of digital capitalism develops from a transformation of the underlying relationship between the social form of universal equivalent, or currency in Marx’s formulation, based in the physical commodity-form, and its valuation, independent from its role as marker-of-exchange.

Immaterial production emerges from this breach in the duality of currency and commodity-form. Traditionally, gold, Marx’s universal equivalent commodity, maintained a dual identity: as (1) currency, the agent of exchange in transactions, and as (2) a physical commodity-form. The historical commodity-basis of currency allowed it to be a repository for saving values generated by past labor. However, this duality is broken. The storage of past labor depends on currency having this dual function of being both a social token of universal exchange and a physical commodity.

In digital capitalism there is no “saving” of past labor value. Separated from the physical connection to any commodity, Marx’s concept of “equivalent value between commodities” no longer applies to currency since there is no commodity mediating any exchange of values. Because there is no commodity equivalent, monetarist fiat currency undoes the preservation of values generated by past labor through/as currency.  Monetarist Fiat currency is not an embodiment of productive action, or a repository of already-generated-value precisely because it has no commodity-basis, and thus cannot be translated into a commodity. Marx’s underlying basis for all currency—the social acceptance of a universal equivalent—becomes the only value reified in monetarist fiat currency: exchange value represented in currency is not mediated through exchange of equivalent values, but rather as the immaterial value of transactional debt. The social nature of exchange value is reified in the form of monetarist fiat currency.

The paradox of immaterial value and futurity in monetarist fiat currency can be recognized in the essential nature of monetarist fiat currency itself: it is a reification of the pure social relation that is Marx’s definition of “currency”; this fact reveals the non-physical basis of exchange value: the relationship between currency and commodity is not automatic. The contrast between the virtualized currency of digital capitalism and traditional currency is stark: traditional currency was a physical commodity with a clearly defined value. Its symbolic value was directly connected to its commodity nature, and its relative value to other commodities was limited by physical production.

The Bretton Woods Gold Standard 1945AD  and the monetarist Fiat Dollar standard 1971AD  which replaced it have both failed.

Both are based upon the lies that Gold or monetarist Fiat Currencies are actually based upon anything real other than the Military might - the Protection Racket - which condignly punishes anyone who wants to leave the system.

Digital capitalism severs the traditional relationship of commodities to currency, in the process producing a changed relationship between currency and labor. While currency maintains its exchange basis through the social relationship at the heart of the universal exchange commodity, it is no longer able to function as repository of past labor; what happens instead is a shift to the production of immaterial values independent of physical production.

The separation of currency from its historical basis in a tangible commodity necessarily generates a virtualized (digital) value where semiosis is a productive activity.

As semiotic manipulation - Lying - replaces the physical commodity form, immaterial labor replaces physical production, revealing the process of reification that legitimates immateriality as a vehicle for wealth production.

Market-based semiosis generates wealth without expenditure via the spontaneous creation of exchange value sans labor or consumption of resources because semiosis is transactional, not productive.

This change appears as/through financialization; the accumulation it enables also distances all other exchanges from their connections to physical commodities. The distancing is a function of the digital immaterialism, and is the basis of financialization; it is the reason why the current financialization is merely a symptom of immaterial values gaining a dominant position.

The Japanese- and now Chinese-led Asian investment in US Treasury securities and US Dollar-based investments, including subprime mortgage-backed derivatives, reveals the global scope of this immaterialist process in action where immaterial values dominate over physical commodities and production.

However, this ideology of accumulation without production is problematic: ultimately it demands values generated by labor via the futurity-basis of monetarist fiat currency. Yet, freed from the limitations posed by a physical basis in commodities, the quantity of currency-in-circulation can increase exponentially, but appear to retain its value, since there is no physical commodity-form whose physical limit will constrain value.

This is the fundamental condition of monetarist fiat currency: as the claims on labor exceed the ability to meet those claims, monetarist fiat currency reveals itself as futurity, rendered visible in the cessation of exchange caused by the scarcity of capital—no exchange is possible when all labor is already allocated, a situation that became apparent in the “Credit Freeze of 2009.”

Attempts to hoard physical assets to hedge against currency fears follow such crises; however, because commodity-forms are speculative, new asset bubbles appear instead. These dramatic increases in currency-in-circulation are an essential feature of the immaterially-based accumulative procedure.

The value of monetarist fiat currency only exists as a result of social action and trust in the monetarist fiat currency.

The generation of new value without production is only possible when currency (universal equivalency) is separated from a basis in commodities — it is a virtual economy where values cannot be brought into question without placing the entire system of value into question.

Dangers posed to this immaterial system necessarily force agents within that system to conserve immaterial values via a bailout and suspension of normal trading rules, or else risk losing the social trust necessary for the monetarist fiat currency to continue to function.

Semiotic manipulation characterizes this immaterial production. Values are generated through cycles of exchange, creating asset bubbles; they are a function of the semiotic reassembly and transfer of derivative (secondary and tertiary) immaterial commodities. This is a system haunted by the attempt to expand towards infinity inherent to capitalism generally. The process enables accumulation where the increase in value is not connected to physical production; the only limiting factor to these exchanges is the scarcity of capital—the ability of labor to meet the demands posed by the immaterial generation of titles to its future production.

Scarcity of capital limits expansion precisely because the emergent imbalances between claims on future labor and the ability to meet those claims are traditionally resolved through price inflation/currency devaluation. However, because of the unique role of the US Dollar in the global system of exchange, digital capitalism poses a special situation for this traditional resolution to the asymmetry of value and labor.

Since digital capitalism develops from (1) monetarist fiat currency replacing the universal equivalent, (2) its global deployment as mediator of all exchanges, and from (3) a transition to the semiotic value generation of financialization, means the traditional solutions cannot be employed without threatening to collapse the trust that is the social basis of monetarist fiat currency. Scarcity of capital within this construct becomes apparent via the inherent imbalance between existing values and the number of potential future claims posed by a derivatives market whose value is significantly larger than the quantity of immanent labor (physical, automated and immaterial) available to produce new physical values to match those claims; however, it is not a question of commodity values vs. speculative values, but between rentier claims and production capacity.

Within this monetarist fiat currency system the action of the digital aura is both an expansive procedure and an immaterial ‘production’ via the commodification of virtual “assets” without relationship to physical commodities. Scarcity of capital is a constant feature of this arrangement. There is always a greater outstanding debt than currency to repay it; it is modeled by the Ponzi scheme, which demonstrates this accelerating process of circulation and the inevitable collapse that follows it.

At their simplest level, Ponzi schemes are a microcosm of capitalist accumulation that remain in equilibrium only so long as (1) the number of investable claims against future profits remain constant, and (2) there are sources of income that do not require repayment (thus falling “outside” the system of exchange and circulation); as the Ponzi model suggests, digital capitalism is threatened with immanent collapse when this circulation of credit ceases; thus the necessity for bailouts when asset bubbles burst.

We can use the Ponzi model to understand the larger Federal Reserve system. Equilibrium is maintained only when increases in value for monetarist fiat currency, apparent in price escalation, are counterposed by the equalizing force of currency devaluation: there are no “profits” being produced, only a semiotic manipulation in the form of currency circulation. The ideology reified in the aura of the digital suggests the problem posed by this inherent instability and potentially immanent collapse can be resolved via the shift from physical production to semiotic (immaterial) production. It is this ideology that has acted as the force accelerating the transition to digital capitalism and financialization.

The generation of asset “bubbles” is not only required by this system, it is the demonstration of the inherent nature of the monetarist system in action.

These asset bubbles are required by the nature of the monetarist fiat currency system itself.

Creating value through immaterial production using a fictitious basis in tangible assets requires that the valorizing process apparent in this lying semiosis remain unacknowledged because there are more claims than can be matched to physical commodities; thus, it is a Ponzi structure in action.

The similarities are deeper still: the Ponzi monetarist fiat currency issued by the Federal Reserve Bank mirrors the Ponzi scheme’s repayment of investors using their own investment: only it is the Federal Reserve bank that is in the position of investor in the scheme—the Ponzi monetarist fiat currency issued by the bank (as with the commodities sold by the Ponzi scheme) must be repaid to the bank with interest.

The more monetarist fiat currency there is in circulation, the greater the debt to the bank; thus, the digital capitalist economy will inevitably produce a ‘crash’ resulting from the scarcity of capital when the limits of productive capacity (labor) cannot keep pace with the demands of virtualized value via monetarist fiat currency, an imbalance that is unresolvable.

The contradiction between the futurity of currency and the reality of labor, called the “unwinding of debt,” is an inherent feature of how monetarist digital capitalism maintains equilibrium through/as a virtualization of values. Following the Ponzi model, it forces a continual process of valorization as the need to identify new, unfinancialized domains that do not require repayment steadily increases.

These domains have been expanding since the 1960s. The addition of new sources of labor (women enter the labor force); the reduction in the value of labor itself (“offshoring” and “globalization”); the expansion of capital formulation into previously unvalorized domains (securitization and other innovative forms of investment, and the invention of new “markets” for goods such as “children”); through automation and the immaterial production characteristic of the digital; and increased efficiency (or increased labor) without increased wage; the emergence of affective labor is both an example of this extension, and an enabler for the valorization process within the social.

The biopolitical paradigm of distraction that has been termed “affective labor” is a symptom of lying agnotology: a systematic production and maintenance of ignorance.

Lying Agnotology results from the creation of systemic unknowns where any potential “fact” is always already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight.

This lying agnotism, not mentioning other economic systems opposed to Monetarism like Hamiltonian Economics used successfully in DeWittes Russia, Bismark's Germany, France from Louis 11th to 14th, old USA and Modern China, affects all participants within digital capitalism precisely because it is the enabling factor for the perpetuation of the cycle of bubbles and the escalation of values and then the crash they always create at a time known by the elite so they can sell their stocks prior to the crash and then rebuy afterwards at pennies on the Dollar - the constant insider trading of the perpetually rigged casino economy.

The limited horizons produced within this social network of agents and immaterial assets constrains the awareness of potential solutions to those that reinforce the established dynamic. This is the reason no productive attempt was made to resolve the “Housing Bubble of 2008” by addressing the mortgage holders and the Banksters themselves.

This biopolitical paradigm of distraction serves the lying semiotic production of immaterial values by keeping all social agents occupied in affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement: home ownership as “the American Dream” being the lure for the “Housing Bubble.”

Without this systemic lying obfuscation of knowledge, the ability to continue generating immaterial values through the lying semiosis of financialization might be questioned, potentially putting the monetarist fiat currency itself in jeopardy.

Within the monetarist fiat currency system, the action of the digital is both an expansive procedure and an immaterial ‘production’ via the commodification of virtual “assets” without relationship to physical commodities.

The foundational issue, however is not financialization but the specific contemporary Ponzi dynamic that gives rise to its perpetuation and the processes of valuation it specifically engenders—both of which are a reflection of the extension of immaterialist values directly tied to the aura of the digital into the global political economy.

The Foundational issue is ponzi founded monetarism based on lying agnotology and obfuscation whose cure is the separation of Banking Action from Speculation epitomised by the Glass- Steagal law developed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in order to stop the 1930s depression and was created by economist Hamilton's Credit System of Governmental credit from Government banks at low rates of interest over 50 years or more for proven infrastructure improvements which has always increased economies (Old USA and Modern China) at the rate of 10% year on year leading to a general increase in richness, education and societal happiness."

 

Michael Betancourt is a critial theorist, art historian, curator, and multi-disciplinary artist. He has exhibited his movies, site-specific installations, and non-traditional art forms in unseen, unusual, or public spaces since 1992; he currently is a Professor of Motion Media Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design.