Trump and Bannon, through ‘Cambridge Analytics’, are using the ‘Kosinski’ algorithm, which is just an updated data analysis technique, of the ‘markey survey’ type that enabled Thatcher and Reagan to win power in the last century. The irony is that through the ‘Kosinski’ algorithm, the USA is essentially governing itself, through its online behaviours, and wherever else data sets are sourced from. This self-governance tracks desires in ‘real-time’, the results controlling the delivery and logic of Trump’s public statements. It’s a libidinal economy of desires; an oneiric one, governed by dream. I wrote about this oneiric economics, back in the early 1990s.
It’s truly ‘consumer-driven’, as they say, a true reflection of the people. Because of this, it generates the responses typical of social hypocrisy; horror; displacement and projection of horror onto others; and entrenched identification with horror, universalising the horror as unavoidable, in order to justify the identification.
When a so-called ‘culture’ has no self-understanding, it loses confidence; and when the misunderstood forces of its emergence are spent, because of this lack of self-understanding, it looks to nostalgic repetition for replenishment.
The dominant sign of economy is no longer even ‘consumption’, but rather, that of ‘dream’. That consumer desire is retained, as a powerful motivic force, but does not at all displace its circulations and configurations according to oneiric hegemony.
Under the sign of oneiric hegemony; ‘industry’, ‘consumption’, ‘virtue’, ‘morality’, ‘reality’, and even ‘identity’; all of these are forms of capital, in the dominant oneiric economy.
[Originally appeared, March 4th, 2017 at 6:21 pm; http://www.xenosystems.net/the-sad-left/#comment-311892]