Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

Structural Patterns

Reflections on Art, Technology and Society

Archive for January, 2023

They Took All My Money in One Day

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Walking along the 86th Street and 2nd Avenue Q platform, I heard screams of agony from a young voice. Between loud crying and guttural sounds, I distinguished the phrase, “They took all my money in one day.” The words repeated over and over as inconsolable screams with pauses only to breathe while crying.

I couldn’t see who the boy was, but as I quickened my pace out of curiosity and to reach the far end of the platform before the southbound Q arrived, the cries got louder and louder. Finally, I was in eyesight of the tortured creature; a boy who looked about six wearing a blue blazer, white shirt, and khaki trousers, light brown hair neatly parted to one side. The boy was accompanied by his father, an older middle-aged man, athletic in appearance.

The father kept his left hand on the boy, rubbing his back and gently squeezing the shoulder. His right hand held a briefcase. He was speaking softly trying to console the boy, but the boy did not appear to hear a word that the man said as the crying and screaming – “They took all my money in one day…” did not stop. The boy’s chest was heaving, large tears falling down his cheeks. In the short time that I could see them, I observed the boy’s face redden. Myself a father, I was intrigued. Had the boy been bullied by schoolmates who took his money?

I put aside my goal to make it to the far end of the train and board the last car, which at the Brooklyn Church Street stop leaves me right by the stairs leading toward my home. I was now hoping the train due in two minutes would be delayed so that I could learn about this boy’s lament.

The father and boy had slowly made their way to a steel bench at the center of the platform. The father sat down to be at eye level with the boy. They had their backs to the southbound side of the platform that I had been walking along. So I walked toward them, considering taking a seat on the same bench, but really just trying to get close enough to hear the father and get a sense of what had happened to this poor boy.

It was 3:30 in the afternoon and on my way to the subway, I had walked past similarly uniformed boys of various ages. Certainly, this boy attended an Upper East Side private school – The Buckley School or Saint David’s maybe Dalton? Perhaps his money was spent by the twelve or thirteen-year-olds buying pizza on Lexington. This was a group of unruly boys in the same uniform. I had to brush against the blue-blazer’d mob as they monopolized the width of the sidewalk just outside of Famous Famiglia at 84th and Lex. I could easily imagine those older kids taking money from a six-year-old just for laughs.

I now heard the father repeating to the boy, “This is just part of the game, it’s how it works…” as he held the boy’s arm. I was now discreetly watching. I observed the boy reach into his pocket, his chest still heaving, tears still streaming down his face, but he had stopped repeating the phrase. The boy pulled out an iPhone, cupped it in his small hands, and with a couple quick thumb swipes opened a trading app. The app in dark mode presented red, negative numbers, and a plummeting sparkline. The boy stared down at his phone as the screen blurred with tears.

Written by ricardo

January 19th, 2023 at 3:11 pm

Reading: The Making of the Indebted Man (note 4)

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From The Making of the Indebted Man by Maurizio Lazzarato. The following are all quotes from the book:

The Subprime Crisis

No direct or indirect wage hikes (pensions); instead, consumer credit and the push for stock market investment (pension funds, private insurance). No right to housing; instead, real estate loans. No right to tuition; instead, university loans. No risk mutualization (unemployment, health, retirement, etc.); instead investment in private insurance.
The wage-earner and the beneficiary of public programs must earn and spend as little as possible in order to reduce labor costs and the costs of public services, whereas the consumer must spend as much as possible in order to use up production. But in modern-day capitalism, the worker, the beneficiary, and the consumer are all one and the same.
Pg. 110

Christian Marazzi argues, we have moved from public deficit spending to private deficit spending in order to prop up the global demand for goods and services.
Pg. 112

The Sovereign Debt Crisis

Banks were saved through the use of the “public” money to nationalize their losses. The State injected a money flow into society – which is, as Deleuze has shown us, a flow of power – in order to reestablish and reinforce the power relation between creditors and debtors.
Pg. 115

Society is not the space in which a certain distance or a certain autonomy is created with respect to the State; rather, it is the correlate of governmental techniques. Society is not a primary and immediate reality but part of the modern technology of government, its product.
Pg. 125

Reestablishing the “relation of man to man” spoken of by Marx, reveals itself instead as the source and height of the cynicism and hypocrisy of our “financialized” society. Continuous cynicism and hypocrisy not only in relations between bankers and costumers, but also in relations between the State and the users of social services.
Pg. 136

Debt operates not only in the manipulation of enormous quantities of money, in sophisticated financial and monetary policies; it informs and configures techniques for the control and production of users’ existence, without which the economy would not have a hold on subjectivity.
Pg. 137

Etymologically, autonomy means to make one’s own law. At the unemployment and welfare agencies, employment, competition, and the market are the law. Autonomy means being able to find one’s own bearings. At the unemployment office, everything always points to employment, the market, and competition.

Becoming “human capital” and being an entrepreneur of the self are the new standards of employability.
Pg. 145

Written by ricardo

January 17th, 2023 at 9:07 pm

Reading: The Making of the Indebted Man (note 3)

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From Chapter 3 “The Ascendency of Debt in Neoliberalism,” The Making of the Indebted Man by Maurizio Lazzarato

The increase in psychologists’, sociologists’, and other ‘self-help’ experts’ interventions, the creation of ‘coaching’ for better-off workers and obligatory individual monitoring for the poor and unemployed, the explosion of ‘care of the self’ techniques in society – these are symptoms of the new forms of individual government, which include, above all, the shaping of subjectivity.
Pg. 95

Biopolitical Power
A massive transfer of revenue to business and the wealthiest and an expansion of deficits due to fiscal policies, deficits which have in turn become a source of revenuer creditors being State debt. The ‘virtuous circle’ of the debt economy is thus complete.
Pg. 103

Unlike what happens on financial markets, the beneficiary as ‘debtor’ is not expected to reimburse in actual money but rather in conduct, attitudes, ways of behaving, plans, subjective commitments, the time devoted to finding a job, the time used for conforming oneself to the criteria dictated to finding a job, the time used for conforming oneself to the criteria dictated by the market and business, etc. Debt directly entails life discipline and a way of life that requires ‘work on the self,’ a permanent negotiation with oneself, a specific form of the subjectivity: that of the indebted man.
Pg. 104

Power relations that crystallized around May ’68 has led to the creation of a power bloc acting – often by trial and error – on different mechanisms of power at the same time (at times favoring the market, at other business or the State).
Pg. 106

Governmentally has produced a collective capitalist – as Lenin would put it – which is not concentrated in finance, but operates throughout business, administration, service industries, political parties, the media, and the university. This political subjectivation provides capitalists with the same education, the same vision of the economy and society, the same vocabulary, the same methods, in short, the same politics.
Pg. 108

Written by ricardo

January 1st, 2023 at 12:52 pm