FLYING MONEY 2018 INVESTIGATING ILLICIT FINANCIAL FLOWS IN THE CITY
133
This approach casts some doubt on the role of critique. Is warning against technologies, or pointing out dangers and all that doesn’t work, enough? My impression is: it means we are always a step too late. How do you see the role of critique? GL: Here at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam we’re always accused of being too early. We started our MoneyLab project on internet revenue models, such as mobile money, crowdfunding and the blockchain in 2013. Your first book on money came out in 2008. The problem these days is not that we are coming too late. We have lost contact with mainstream media. Here in the Netherlands, all communications have to be positive and simplistic. Criticism is not uplifting and ‘Gezellig’. We’re spoiling the party (which is correct). For years, no one was interested in our social media critique. Nowadays, our critique of Bitcoin is compared with arrogant remarks of big banks and New York Times commentators. At the same time, we’ve lost the ability to unleash cultural trends and social movements. Our content is radical and up to date but our organizational understanding is not. However, there is also a good side to this dire situation. If we’re able to change our formats and tone, we can achieve a lot. Criticism is not a culture of complaint. I promote it as a literary genre, an ability to reflect on one’s work, genre, and professional practice. Criticism runs against the dominant forces of marketing and PR. A review asks questions and puts a work, discourse, or event into a larger context and lifts the entire culture to a higher, more complex level. Lively, rich and diverse cultures are driven forward by review cultures that push the boundaries. Critique doesn’t put things down but radicalizes situations and opens new windows. The idea of the critic as a bad-tempered and depressed failed professional has always existed, but should not concern us. What’s at stake now is freedom of expression. Both New Age positivists and authoritarian bureaucrats love to shut down critique because it essentially disturbs their business. Participatory culture and citizen involvement can only join the table if they come up with constructive proposals for ‘change’. Negative feedback is banned. We clearly see that in the crackdown on ‘comment cultures’ on social media platforms. As long as educated citizens contribute to an Habermasian rational discourse, all is fine. But let’s return to the Money Question. The European Left doesn’t seem to play much of a role in this debate. How come? At what point in time did they start to lose touch? Is the Left still attached to industrial capitalism and the working class? When it comes to global finance and the virtual nature of money, there seems to be a real refusal to critically analyse such phenomena. There’s Yanis Varoufakis and the DiEM25 agenda, which focused on the non-democratic nature of the European Commission in Brussels and the ECB in Frankfurt. However, what you’re addressing goes well beyond the level of the Euro as a common currency. On the other hand, there was Andre Gorz… Who are your positive examples? How can we expand speculative economics? SH: The Left has won the culture wars. But it has paid a heavy price. It won by succumbing to the neo-liberal ideology. Blair, Schroeder, Clinton, also unfortunately Obama, when it comes to drone-wars and finance, and so on. Having won the cultural side of this two-sided war, the left turned normative – ‘CTRL-Left’. Whomever brought it up, that term gives something of an accurate assessment. With the Left turning normative, the dynamics of transgression are being pushed to the Right. In the end, we’re about to lose both: the economic grounding of a genuine Left and the transgressive dynamics needed for a collective movement. The left also suffers from another normative drawback, and that is Marxism. There is one