Our Invisible friend

Over the weekend I caught the tail end of a BBC interview with an Iraqi Jewish American artist, Michael Rakowitz, who has had an impressive piece of artwork assembled; and mounted on an historically vacant, fourth plinth, on London’s Trafalgar Square.


The artwork is a retrospective reproduction of a vandalized ‘Lamassu’: [“a Winged bull and protective deity”] that stood for 2800 years at the gates of Nineveh, awaiting the eventual arrivals, of the new barbarians, in the form of Daesh: now rebuilt from the detritus and discarded leftovers of modernity.


He calls it “The invisible enemy should not exist.”


The interviewer, Stephen Sackur, asked if his work had a political meaning, and was he therefore a ‘political’ artist since he couldn’t truly be a ‘commercial’ artist. According to Mr Sackur’s Q sheet, much of what he did was not saleable, reproducible, or scalable: or whatever the current re-interpretation of ‘commercial’ is.


In his answer, he indicated that he was an artist, who worked with his interpretation of his milieu, and therefore there would be an inevitable ‘political’ stream in the back-story. [Personally, I do suspect his Lamassu is infinitely scalable and reproducible, but that is not relevant to my point here]


His answer though caused me to pause and ask myself the same question. Am I a commercial writer of commercially satisfying stories that I aim to put in a place where their scalability will enable some form of remuneration… yes? OR. Am I an artist, in the vein of the late New York Jazz pianist Cecil Taylor………..described as a “visionary pianist” in the NY Daily News, and referred to in a different, earlier BBC newscast, as a person who followed his own path? As obviously does the Iraqi Jewish American artist Mr.Rikowitz …………


I was unable to arrive at a conclusion to that: considering myself a simple working class wordsmith. I am also not certain that most people would consider a poet to be an artist.


Nonetheless, I did have to concede that, on two levels, at least I am a completely ‘political’ writer. My evolving Azanian Quartet has two specific political purposes. I am going to share one of them with you now. I’m doing this because today is possibly the most auspicious opportunity that exists, for the human race to ascertain, that it discount’s the late Stephen Hawking’s gloomy prediction: that we would be lucky [the human race] to emerge intact from the 21st century.


I am referring to that glorious entrepreneur, Mr. Zuckerberg’s immanent Congressional Hearings … and the immensely elusive opportunity those hearings present for constructing a solution, to what is already, and going to be even more of, a problem of immense magnitude, by the time we reach the part of my quartet that is set in 2037.


I refer to the inevitable specter of mass scale, long-term structural unemployment, for which we have to create a remedy, that contributes to growth and developments, rather than subtracting from it. Currently everything being suggested is regressive.


My remedy, and #1 political issue of choice, was to identify and provide a viable [fictional] solution for this problem in the future. That remedy I called BASIC PAY: is now more popularly called: Universal Income.


I was always intrigued, as a life long ‘nonprofessional’ reader of science fiction: Asimov, Heinlein, Bester et al, by a particular feature of science based fiction writing. This was the use of the term “credits”, when the text called, somewhere, for how people lived in the future [now arriving at speed] They always spent ‘credits’… And since Credits suggested debt how did they pay for the debt?


What are these ‘credits’, I would ask me… where do they come from: and how are they financed? [Declaratory Note: I am not a scientist, I am part of an educator class of financial economist with a bent towards the history thereof and who writes poetry, because it ‘happens’.]


So: in many ways, my entertainment podcast, prose poetic cyber serial, The Jonker Memorandum, exists to provide that answer [as a by-product to telling you what I hope is a cool story]. I call it “Basic Pay”. After many years basic pay is now gaining traction as “Universal Income’: and as such has featured in the current political agenda’s of at least half a dozen countries, and is being punted by such glorious entrepreneurs as Mssrs: Gates and Musk. The problem however remains: how is it financed?


In the cyber serial, my solution of choice was the Transaction Levy [aka Tax]. However: that was then. And it is also on the subtraction side of our growth equation. That was though, before the tech revolution gave us DATA… and me: a writer of fiction, the new Tilling fields that yield the “New Gold”. Something Mr. Zuckerberg has so deftly demonstrated: and regrettably, so brutally abused. DaTA is/are the “New Goldfields”.


So the message that Mr. Z’ and the rest of the new tech ‘Wunderkinde’ should be getting from the Congress is simply this… Their discovery of the power inherent in DATA, contains and illustrates the legitimacy of ‘Universal Income’. Billions of people are contributing quadrillions of Data measures daily for remunerative algorithmic exploration which thus provides the basis for a complete reinvention of fundamental economics. Yes: i shall invoke such an extreme statement


Currently Mr. Z and his Silicon cohorts are implicitly [with no offence] the greatest slave-owners in human history. In the same way however that Spotify [for instance] pays a kontribution to each kontributor from each access, so too must those who ‘slave’ to provide content to the marvelous inventions of Mr. Z’s [and the rest] receive a similar contribution…. I.e. It is time that data starts to pay rent. #DATA must pay rent…


I call myself a poet so I conclude with the poem that will open the second stanza of Part 4 of my Azanian Quartet… My assumption is that by 2037 [the setting] … this moment [NOW] will have been the turning point in this, amazing new journey, on which we are kolektively embarked.


We gave our DATA freely to Mr. Z et al… they in return gave us free use of the toys they made. Then he/they found a way to collect rent… from our contribution… now we must be reimbursed our share for our belief in them. For the data freely given is still ours.


To rephrase Mr. Rakowitz: [with respect]


“The invisible friend that must
Be shown to exist”


Hear ye
Hear Ye


Some will strive
to
Achieve
Nietzschean validation – the
Povo*
Will become automatonotik
Fiddling witheir [sic]
Mobiles
Seeking to affirm their intrin
sic irrele
vance.


Nonetheless
Machines don’t buy things!!
They dispense.


On what basis should we
Perceive
Value.


Given the thrust of
a digital economy that
Konsrukt kalled
DATA
Is the land that must be
Mined for
GOLD.


Peepil become
Products
To be exploited for their
DATA value
Should they not
Receive their
Rightful
Fee?


In Gold?
Yeah gold
You say data is
The new gold.
No… I said it was the new land
Waiting to be mined: for what is in it.


Does it pay rent?
Not yet.


!NiK[‘18]


So there you have it. All Kongresspersons: the most truly
bipartisan goal it is possible to achieve,
on behalf of all humanity.


Thank you on their behalf.


Povo: Shona [Zimbabwe] meaning the ‘masses’ or ‘Mass’
pronounced PorVor.