Language in a meme economy

Abstract

Artist Ami Clarke traces some of the complexities, multi-temporalities and scales, that coalesce around some new, and some very old power relations, that come of, and are revealed by, the technologies associated with the interdependent ecologies of social media, finance, and the environment.

Her work traces hyper-speculation that came of the semiotic boom, where the loss of the referent in both language and the economy is shared across the trending behaviour of neoliberal/free market dynamics in finance, as well as emerging media ecologies.  Here, inconsistencies in claims of ‘fake news’ amidst rights to ‘freedom of expression’ converge in the shortcomings of colonial practices of extraction, and new hyper-networked digital colonialisms, as the futures markets meets behavioural futures across the interdependencies of a reputation economy that comes of online news and social media, and the forms of finance driven by this.

Pre-empting many of the conditions brought into sharp focus by the pandemic, she touches upon how the insurance industry reveals the catastrophic flaw of investing in the neoliberal myth of the market, as ‘unprecedented’ events become increasingly every-day. A state of contingency, that no longer promises an opportunity to ‘write the future’, but instead, is felt through the mechanisms of disaster capitalism as churning markets across both the financial sector, and the mediasphere, as a means by which to game not only who has the authority to speak, but democracy itself.