Cognitive-cultural economy

Cognitive Capitalism - Public Seminar

There are broadly three ways of thinking historically about capitalism. One draws on Marx’s value theory and pretty much treats...Read More

Cognitive engineering

Cognitive engineering is an interdisciplinary field that applies principles from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and human factors to design and develop engineering systems that effectively support or enhance human cognitive processes.[1][2] The field emerged in the 1980s when Donald Norman and others recognized the need to better understand how humans interact with complex technological systems.[3]

The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity

This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news and games, the analysis shows that in economic terms platformization entails the replacement of two-sided market structures with complex multisided platform configurations, dominated by big platform corporations. Cultural content producers have to continuously grapple with seemingly serendipitous changes in platform governance, ranging from content curation to pricing strategies. Simultaneously, these producers are enticed by new platform services and infrastructural changes. In the process, cultural commodities become fundamentally “contingent,” that is increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback.

A new middle-class fraction with a distinct subjectivity: Tech workers and the transformation of the entrepreneurial self

With the rise of digital capitalism, a novel occupational segment has emerged: so-called ‘tech workers’. Members of this grouping render and encode the digital technologies that permeate contemporary social life. While there are many studies about highly precarious digital labourers, research on these digital professionals remains scarce. Based on 40 original interviews, the article explores the subjectivity of tech workers. Specifically, it asks whether understandings of middle-class employees as entrepreneurial selves with a holistic market orientation hold true for this grouping, or whether new cultures of subjectivation are emerging. The key finding from these interviews is that tech workers show contours of a post-neoliberal subjectivity. While the figure of the entrepreneurial self remains an alluring force, this study detected four transformative cultures of subjectivation: (1) a return of the critique of economic inequality; (2) a concern for diversity; (3) an ethic of mindfulness; and (4) a lifestyle that signals ordinariness. These distinct forms of subjectivity point to the formation of a new middle-class fraction. However, drawing on the sociology of critique, this article also considers how this transformation of subjectivity can be appropriated as yet another new spirit of capitalism.

Systems: How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy

The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically in several stages, and is defined by a number of constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth. Capitalist economies may experience business cycles of economic expansion followed by recessions.

technological diversity

Technological diversity is the opposite of technological monoculture. It refers to the diversity of artifacts (software and hardware) as well as that of ideas, philosophies, paradigms, techniques, languages, mental models, etc.

Cognitive Farmsteading

The message of the AI medium is intellectual rural domesticity

From information free-riding to information sharing: how have humans solved the cooperative dilemma at the heart of cumulative cultural evolution?

Abstract. Cumulative cultural evolution, where populations accumulate ever-improving knowledge, technologies and social customs, is arguably a unique featu

A compass for a Life-Affirming Economy

This is an invitation to stand at the intersection of Self, Culture, and Science and imagine what flourishing in a life-affirming economy…

Is Revenue Model More Important than Culture?

HN Discussion Here: I always loved getting problems of the type “What is the limit as x approaches infinity” type in high-school/college. You’re given an equation (of the classic y=x format), and a…

AI-induced cultural stagnation is here - Fast Company

AI-mediated culture is already being filtered in ways that favor the familiar, the describable, and the conventional.

Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice

A new model of consumer behavior is developed using a hybrid of cognitive psychology and microeconomics. The development of the model starts with the mental coding of combinations of gains and losses using the prospect theory value function. Then the evaluation of purchases is modeled using the new concept of “transaction utility.” The household budgeting process is also incorporated to complete the characterization of mental accounting. Several implications to marketing, particularly in the area of pricing, are developed.