Starting from David Graeber’s 2014 debate with venture capitalist Peter Thiel on technology and its capacity to circumvent the future, this talk focuses on the dialectics of (social) creativity and (real) abstraction. Central to Graeber’s work on value and revolutionary social action, creativity (with its attendant notions of imagination and innovation) is, at the same type, the lynchpin of contemporary recipes for the rekindling of capitalism. Creativity shares this ambivalence with abstraction, whose theoretical pedigree traces vectors of domination and alienation even while opening cognitive and scalar possibilities. What happens when creativity and abstraction are pedagogically twinned in the production of value and subjectivity? What is the creative potential of the abstractions generated at the interface of digital technology and capitalist value determination?

The talk explores these questions via two sites in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), where a growing digital industry thrives as an outsourcing market in constant need of cheap labor: an informal school offering coding classes geared towards professional reconversion and a start-up in front-end programming automation. In the first case, participants drawn in by the compelling mirage of well-paid coding jobs strive to become initiated in the basics of algorithmic thinking and programming. In the second, developers and tech visionaries aim to provide a “mental exoskeleton” for creative workers in the shape of an AI powered, collaborative platform for the design of user interfaces. Approaching these two cases as pedagogical levers for the recalibration of abstraction allows me to dwell on the uneven creative formatting of humans and machines in an outsourcing-based coding economy.

All are welcome and you can access the event here. Email adi-events@deakin.edu.au for the meeting passcode.

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