June 2023 | Made in collaboration with Will Freudenheim and William Morgan at the Antikythera Design Studio
To date, price has evolved enormously complex sensory integration techniques, and as it faces new pressures–a Great Carbonization Event and an Informatic Complexity Threshold–its mutation rate is likely to accelerate. Today’s mega-risks are born of connection and complexity: pandemic, hemispherical tension, bank failure, energy insecurity, climate catastrophe, information balkanization–a polycrisis whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. On the one hand, a new species of financial instrument may rise to fill the niche created as legacy systems go extinct. On the other hand, price will also select for the emerging technologies that bolster the adaptive capacities of the global system of exchange, for example the recent step change in the power of transformer models may lead to a hyper-hypo-pricing speciation that alleviates the so-called “rational inattention” of consumers.
What gives rise to these possibilities is the autocatalytic power of price, the question of autocatallaxy.