The market is for Outsiders

Think about it this way: in both a community or gift economy system and a market, you are dependent on others.

If you're in a gift economy, however, you are dependent on those particular others — the particular people that know you personally and the particular situated local community you happen to have found yourself in by chance of birth. The problem with this? Your ability to depend on them, to get what you need out of them (and for them to get what they need out of you) — the capacity of flows of material and social resources move through your society — then depends on tribal group cohesion games and drama, on who likes you or doesn't (for whatever reason, valid or not), who's gossiping about who behind who's back, whether you share particular cultural, religious, or other values or semiotics. If you hold views other people find antisocial or distasteful, of if they just find you gross — perhaps because you're autistic or neurodivergent or trans or queer — then you could very easily face a situation where your ability to get the resources you need goes down terribly.

Likewise, if the community holds everything in common and distributes it to people based on how much the community as a whole, perhaps democratically or through consensus, thinks each person contributes to that community, then you must also conform, you must play reputation games, except to a smaller or more centralized focal point (and I'm not sure whether that's worse or better). You most prove to the community that grants you access to the resources you need to live and exist that you contribute enough, in the right ways; that you share their values and are part of them, creating a strong incentive for conformity; and the community, to prevent free-riders, has a strong incentive for survaillance, whether that's official, traditional, or mere horizontal, social, "neighborly" observation.

Meanwhile, in a market, all else being equal, the flow of resources is mediated by a narrow-waist protocol of commodities or services exchanged for money. It is established as an expected standard, a protocol, through pervasive norms and existing structures — those that constitute the market, since the market is not a natural formation but a constructed one, like all social formations, composed of norms and institutions — that everyone hooks into, like TCP/IP and HTTP, precisely to benefit from the narrow-waist interconnection: to achieve flows between nodes in the network depending on the minimum of conditions — "do I have enough money, and do you have something you want" — instead of a deep and extensive network of needed shared "protocols" such as cultural semiotics or moral values, connections that are detachable, retachable, rearrangeable, quick to establish, decentralized in nature, and transitive, so that goods and services can be shunted and routed from anywhere in the globe, to the point where location hardly matters anymore: a phone designed in California has its parts minted in Taiwan and assembled in China, and then is sold in Germany. Everyone is incentivized to link up to this network, and the more people link up to it, the more incentive there is to do so because now there's more benefit to be accessed through it, and the more people expect it and understand it, strengthening this protocol norm.

Even more leftist ideas of markets gain this benefit: consider ideas within the market on how to make things more mutual, how to share burdens and make life easier for people that mutualists talk about. For instance, the idea of a worker-owned company where everyone when they join gets one share of the company per person. That, again, is based on ownership and money, and thus it's a narrow waist. You don't need to build a reputation, you just join and gain the share and leave and lose the share, that's it. Likewise, take the abstract concept of insurance or a lodge system, where everyone pays in monthly to keep doctors on retainer. Once you take out the regulatory capture, radical monopoly, and all the legal stuff that hides prices, that is a very positive idea for people to share the load… and yet, because it's mediated by money and abstract alienated systems, you don't need to play the primate social game and make sure that everyone who also pays monthly to the insurance company likes you to get in.

This extends to community formation itself. The alienated, atomized nature of the market is precisely what makes the possibility of found families and intentional communities easier: people can pick up and move their dependencies much more easily in an alienated, atomized world than in any other, so it makes cutting off abusive or bigoted family and finding a new one — whatever material and social dislocations that requires — more possible. It certainly would have been much harder for me had we not lived in a market economy, but in one where social reputation and relations were paramount for access to material resources, because I wouldn't have been able to get away and find footing on my own before linking up with a new circle. To quote Nick Land's "The Atomization Trap,"

Substantially, if only notionally, freedom of conscience might tend to collectivity, but formally it locks-in individualism ever more tightly. It defies the authority of community at the very moment it offers explicit endorsement, by making community an urgent matter of private decision, and – at the very peak of its purported sacredness – of shopping. Religious traditionalists see themselves mirrored in whole-food markets, and are appalled, when not darkly amused. “Birkenstock Conservatives” was Rod Dreher’s grimly ironic self-identification. Anti-consumerism becomes a consumer preference, the public cause a private enthusiasm. Intensification of collectivist sentiment only tightens the monkey-trap. It gets worse.

American history – at the global frontier of atomization – is thickly speckled with elective communities. From the Puritan religious communities of the early colonial period, through to the ‘hippy’ communes of the previous century, and beyond, experiments in communal living under the auspices of radicalized private conscience have sought to ameliorate atomization in the way most consistent with its historical destiny. Such experiments reliably fail, which helps to crank the process forward, but that is not the main thing. What matters most about all of these co-ops, communes, and cults is the semi-formal contractual option that frames them. From the moment of their initiation – or even their conception – they confirm a sovereign atomization, and its reconstruction of the social world on the model of a menu. Dreher’s much-discussed ‘Benedict Option’ is no exception to this. There is no withdrawal from the course of modernity, ‘back’ into community, that does not reinforce the pattern of dissent, schism, and exit from which atomization continually replenishes its momentum. As private conscience directs itself towards escape from the privatization of conscience, it regenerates that which it flees, ever more deeply within itself. Individuation, considered impersonally, likes it when you run.

And so, if you want to be able to join mutualist organizing, leftist organizing, intentional communities, communes, found families — you want alienation; you want atomization.

Then there's the fact that — and I have a good William Gillis essay on this — fundamentally markets and the money mechanism allow for meaningful revealed preference to solve non-obvious problems where everyone claims they need something. The example Gillis gives is if you and a group of friends are moving into a common house and there's only one room with a window. If you just ask everyone whether they need the room with the window, almost everyone could just say yeah, I totally need it. But under our market system, you allow people to say what chores they would be willing to do extra for all the people that didn't get the room with the window. It creates a common unit by which you can then compare everyone's actual desires. It creates a means of coordination and organization that doesn't have to deal with petty politicking and subjective internal claims that no one can confirm. These benefits compound with specialization and the division of labor.

In a hyper technological advanced economy, the production and maintenance of the things we use is much too complex for any one person to learn. The key for all of this to work under the hood is the market calculation and information processing mechanism allowing these hideously long and complex interdependencies to form. Through price signals, the essence of knowledge far away and in greatly different contexts is transmitted to people, but they're still able to make calculations and concrete decisions. For us, the key is that all of this can happen, and we can have these massive and extreme webs of dependency, without having to personally know a million people and play primate politics with them. Thus we get the upsides of the most extreme and abject interdependency, while still remaining free to be ourselves and detach ourselves whenever we want — we can be nomads in the market.

None of this is to say that actually-existing markets are perfect. They are not. Markets are composed of people, and people can have the same biases and prejudices under both communitarian/gift economy systems and market systems, and that can influence their actions toward others; this is borne out in real life by the fact that hiring discrimination still does happen, or the idea of "culture fit," or redlining.

The key point is those factors are present in both market and more community-oriented reputation-driven thick-waist high-bandwidth systems. Leftists like to pretend that if we get rid of the market, we can just assume that all these other systems of prejudice will just go away, but they won't; we see them reproduced even in the most non-market, peer-to-peer, cooperative, mutual, even leftist settings, and we saw the same or still other prejudices long before the market existsed, and if they're a common feature, they're not a differentiating factor. So if you want to understand, from the perspective of a natural Outsider, the core tendencies, opportunities, that these differing ways of building relations function, then you must algebraically factor non-intrinsic prejudice out of both sides, and after that, what you get out of markets is better: because at their core, gift economies and communities are high-bandwidth, thick-waisted interfaces that depend on reputation, on primate social games, on people liking you, and thus on prejudice, in some sense, inherently, whereas markets do not.

None of this is to say, either, that you must sit and wait for the deterritorializing, decoding flows of the market to inevitably wash away discrimination along with everything else, content to let people suffer in between. You need not. This is not a moral argument. I don't think ultimately your struggles will mean anything compared to the long-term movements of the market, but do as thou wilt, and if you're fighting against prejudice, I wish you all the luck and power in the world.

This is also not to say that you should even assume such an inevitability. That is the mistake Fisher correctly points to Land as making. Markets are still subject to path dependence, imperfect information, natural monopolies, and coordination problems. Capitalism's reterritorializing forces — designed to protect capital's human flesh-mask — may reinstate fascism, xenophobia, populism, or racism again.

The focus here is the central tendencies of the market, the central features it offers show a path beyond primate-rooted humanity and into the inhuman future.

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. — Nick Land, "Meltdown"

And that's the key here: like all narrow-waist, low-bandwidth protocols, the TCP/IP of the market — commodity exchange and the cash nexus — is a cold, cold world to live in. It creates freedom, freedom that we can't give up even when we claim we don't want it, freedom that I claim I do want, but this network is not a world meant for giving our primate selves the warm-fuzzies; it may pretend to be, when it is profitable, but that's just the T-1000 wearing a synthetic-flesh face; what it offers us underneath is the cold schizophrenic comfort of deterritorializing flows,a world alien and hostile to our primate brains even as it makes something new possible for us, within us — bears something new from us, perhaps.

So the question is: will you be ready for this maximal ultramodern, post-humanity life in all its alienated interdependence… or will you shy away in fear?