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1. Semiotics and Economics

Semiotics and economics ought to share much more intellectual territory than they do. After all, what is semiotics but the study of modelling systems (Lotman, 1990) and what is economics but a modelling system (Orrell, 2010)? Both are sciences of human systems, focused on communicative exchange. They were first linked in this way by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963), who proposed a structural homology between the social circulation of marriage partners (anthropology), goods and services (economics), and messages (semiotics). The overlaps among these knowledge domains mean that semiotics has an economic component, and economics has a semiotic component; both are human sciences.

However, professional specialisation and divergent methodologies continuously drive them apart. While anthropology and semiotics have benefitted from a decades-long dialogue, economics has not joined in, seeing itself as a behavioural-mathematical rather than a communicational science. Economists learn that culture is exogenous and textuality is subjective, something to be avoided. Semiotics pays scant attention to economics and has not elaborated a subfield to analyse the economy in semiotic terms (Kull & Velmezova 2014 : 532). As they diverge, a difference of institutional purpose emerges. Economics is designed as an operating system; semiotics as a knowledge-system. Economics operates externally or instrumentally, on users and systems outside itself, while semiotics works internally or reflexively, on practitioners and discourses of knowledge.

  • Economics is the preferred methodology for governance in most countries. Performance of disciplinary knowledge is economically consequential in the conduct of public affairs, where scientific methodology is translated into semiotic storytelling.

  • Semiotics is the enabling methodology for the posts – poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-humanism and post-apocalypticism. Performance is semiotically consequential in the history of ideas, which in turn is consequential for both economics and society.

  • Both produce spillover effects on other systems, including each other.

Semiotics and economics are performative disciplines, in Carsten Herrmann-Pillath’s sense of that term (2018a). They play an active role in constituting the systems they describe (Butler 2020). For a performative science, knowledge and action are mutually causal, and equally social (Hayek 1945). To model, categorise and to learn is also to create and transform the material world upon which they work, no matter how abstract and automated the method (Crawford 2021).

The most important such performance is probably in innovation, where not just new meanings but new rules for making them are established across a whole population (Stolper 1994; Heertje 1996; McCraw 2010). An axiom of Lotmanian semiotics is that innovation is created in dialogue, and that dialogue is a clash of untranslatable, incommensurable and often mutually hostile difference, which is the source of “newness” (Hutter and Farías 2017; Hutter 2018). A single agent may create a novel idea, but it means little until it is instituted socially across a population, at which point it may transform a system through cultural uptake. The growth of knowledge by innovative disruption can then be reconciled with evolutionary theory as a process of coordination and change in “populations of rules” across open, self-organising systems (Dopfer & Potts 2008). Similarly, Lotmanian semiotics is conceptualised around a complex dynamic-system (semiospheric) model of language-culture, where self-organisation includes self-adaptation (new cultures) and speciation (new languages).

The knowledge generated by both economics and semiotics is translated (in Yuri Lotman’s sense) across incommensurate systems, reaching non-specialist groups by means of the cultural infrastructure of language, dialogue, narrative, drama; and of social technologies like cities, markets, media and institutions, through which knowledge is collectively actioned.

Within a discipline, performative knowledge is not just individual; it is collective, rule-governed and systematic. Scholarship is made by “knowledge clubs” (Potts et al. 2017; Hartley et al. 2019). Keeping up with the field limits the time individuals can spare to explore neighbouring domains. Each knowledge club polices its own border, which functions culturally to keep insiders in. Such disciplinary concentration also determines where each field concentrates its collective effort. For economists, culture is an impediment to optimal rational behaviour, and thus to production (Roland 2020); for culturalists, economics is an instrument of power, impeding the emancipation of subjectivity among diverse subaltern groups (Jessop 2010). Economists investigate the causes of productivity; culturalists its consequences. Consequently, economists fail to read Vološinov or Lotman, while semioticians fail to read Hayek or Schumpeter.

Having said that, both sides have read Marx. So we can start a cross-border dialogue there. Italian semiologist and philosopher Augusto Ponzio (2014 : 195) argues that Karl Marx was a “cryptosemiotician”, for whom “the study of signs is not secondary with respect to historical-dialectical materialism”. With his colleague Susan Petrilli, Ponzio has elaborated a full account of why such a study is important in the current era. In general, they locate semiosis in the biosphere, not just in human culture but in the sphere of life, which they dub the semiobiosphere : “Global semiotics underlines the fact that the semiosphere is part of a far broader semiosphere, the semiobiosphere, a sign network human beings have never left, and to the extent that they are living beings, never will” (Petrilli & Ponzio 2007 : 31).

The semiobiosphere is the sphere of life. Communication is a distinguishing feature of life as a whole. For humans, “communication and production have come together” through technology and automation, creating a new synthesis, “presenting a phenomenon that is altogether new, calling for analysis from two interconnected perspectives: the economic and the semiotic” (Petrilli & Ponzio 2007 : 89).

Semiotics, like humanities disciplines in general, enjoys low trust, if not active hostility, among governing bureaucracies and popular readerships alike. Economics is trusted (with reservations) as an evidence-based behavioural-mathematical science, where myriad individual choices can be aggregated into reliable data. This means that economics is not only used in practice, to direct public policy and political action, but also semiotically, to convince the public and markets that economic decision-making is rational. Mathematics is deployed rhetorically as impersonal and therefore less subject to ideological priors, especially if communication itself can be automated, and automation (data) becomes communication, as Petrilli and Ponzio say : “In the capitalist production system in its current phase of development, the machine can replace intellectual work. This means that automation has reached high levels of development, to the point of becoming communication, so that machines too function as signs” (Petrilli & Ponzio 2007 : 89).

Promoting economics as more material, empirical, scientific and exact, while disavowing semiotics as too abstract, theoretical, interpretative and critical, has had significant socio-political consequences, leading up to this point, where machines are intelligent agents, while humans are meaningless. There is no need to rehearse here the dismal institutional decline (wanton destruction) of the humanities that has ensued (Stover 2017), but there is an increasingly urgent need to do something about it, not to preserve an arcane academic art but to explain an increasingly textualized world, in which human performance – both economic and cultural, mathematical and semiotic – has material consequences at planetary scale.

The two domains need each other more than ever, not despite their differences but because of them. Divergent discourses can produce richer information in dialogue than each can separately, especially where they disagree. Synthesising them can better link causation to consequences. Here, the foundational modelling work of the Tartu-Moscow School (Lotman 1990; 2009), can offer something new : a constitutional model for interchange, exchange and system-change, which works at both intimate and planetary scale and can account for both cultural causation and global consequences. The growth of knowledge transforms both cultural semiosis and real economies. Here then is a rationale for semiotics and economics as an integrated “cultural science” (Potts et al. 2008; Herrmann-Pillath 2018b; Hartley & Potts 2014; Hartley 2020; Hartley, Ibrus & Ojamaa 2021).

2. Zombie Economics

If the semiobiosphere is the sphere of life, and communication is a distinguishing feature of life as a whole, then why are we surrounded by so many zombies? Most of them seem to be semiotic, but some are definitely economic. Following the Global Financial Crisis, economist John Quiggin (2012) published Zombie Economics : How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. Among these zombie ideas are deregulation (Reagan-Thatcherism), trickle-down economics (cut taxes), and the doctrine of market efficiency (privatise public assets, education, healthcare, incarceration). Neoliberal economics, founded on individual sovereignty, market supremacy and on reducing the extent of state powers, delivers the exact opposite of what these ideas proclaimed when they were alive (Mazzucato 2018; Krugman 2020). Thus, Regina Queiroz (2018) argues that the rejection of a collective concept of “the people” has meant that individual rights trump human rights. Democracy cannot be protected at societal scale without reserving to the state some collective coercive powers that restrict some individual freedoms in the name of a common good, e.g. compulsory vaccination or the wearing of masks during pandemics. Queiroz concludes : “Neoliberalism lacks the resources to prevent the total alienation of liberty. […] In the absence of the people, human rights depend exclusively on individuals’ interests; the spontaneous order thus cannot prevent neoliberalism from descending into slavery and serfdom, i.e., self-slavery and self-serfdom” (2018 : n.p.).

The figures support Queiroz’s view (Piketty 2014; IMF 2015). In practice, ideological extremism leads libertarian neoliberalism to the very place that its most celebrated founder sought to avoid — the “road to serfdom” (Hayek 1944). Under zombie regimes, governed by undead ideas (tax-cuts, deregulation, privatisation), the poor get poorer while the rich get richer, trickle-down doesn't trickle, and the foundational institutions of modern prosperity — education, the rule of law, media freedom, open discovery — are white-anted from within, leading economist Dani Rodrik (2017) to observe : “Critics often point out that this emphasis on economics debases and sacrifices other important values such as equality, social inclusion, democratic deliberation, and justice” : “Neoliberalism and its customary remedies—always more markets, always less government — are in fact a perversion of mainstream economics. Good economists know that the correct answer to any question in economics is : it depends” (Rodrik 2017).

For economists to ignore rule-based groups is “bad economics”, say Rodrik and his colleagues : “to work well, crucial markets (including markets for labor, land, and capital) must be embedded in nonmarket institutions, and the ‘rules of the game’ must be supplied by government” (Naidu et al. 2019). Here, of course, the main problem is not economic at all, but political and semiotic : “Too many policy ideas break on the rock of government capture by special interests or systematically distorted presentations in the media” (Naidu et al. 2019).

It is here, among vested interests and “distorted” media, that the zombies lurk. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has confronted them in a weekly New York Times column, recently collected as Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future (2020). One may only fear that arguing with zombies is not the best-advised strategy in a “fight for a better future”, because zombies don’t want to engage with your brain, they want to eat it.

3. Urban Zombies

The undead surround us every day. Cityscapes are crowded with monumental figures from the past, statues of dead people, monsters and beings who’ve never existed, and they’re looking at you. This sets the stage not only for collective identity but also for civic conflict. In what I call “urban semiosis” (Hartley 2020 : chap. 9), the built forms of cities are narrative media, telling stories (some quite tall) about and even when ‘we’ are.

Some cities are their own monuments. Streetscapes and facades tell a time-bound story about what they mean : London is Victorian, New York art deco, Las Vegas postmodern. Cities also reserve public spaces specifically for semiotic purposes. Trafalgar Square (London), was positioned as the navel of a global empire, with a grandiloquent statue of Nelson as its belly-button. Washington Square (New York), commemorates the USA’s first president. Both of these ‘empire state’ squares have become stages for parades, performers, perambulation and protest. The same applies to many other iconic squares : Tiananmen (Beijing), Taksim (Istanbul), Tahir (Cairo), Place de la Concorde (Paris).

Officially, they celebrate a country’s national liberation or founding heroes. But some are built over cemeteries, execution grounds and sites of civil massacre. In Paris’s (renamed) Place de la Concorde, Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and many of the French Revolution’s most prominent leaders were guillotined, including Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Olympe de Gouges. Washington Square in New York was built over the dead bodies of undesirable classes rather than charismatic individuals :

The poor, sick, brothel women and the rest of the city’s undesirables were buried here. Also hundreds of members of the African Zion Methodist Church were laid to rest here after their crypts filled up. In the center of the square, about where the fountain is now, stood the gallows. The guilty were executed here until 1820. After their death, they were put in the ground with the others and helped fill the field to capacity with over 20,000 deceased.

Moke 2012, citing Hamil 2004

Real dead people are trodden underfoot, while overhead, national aspirations are embodied in bronze and stone. The imperious gaze of the dead forebear proclaims to all that the future has already been captured by the past – but it’s a zombie past.

These zombies are neither alive nor dead, but they all want something, often the very opposite of what they seem to say. For example, in London, facing the Houses of Parliament, looms the monument to Queen Boadicea (Boudicca) and her punishment-raped daughters (erected 1902). They purport to celebrate a native rebellion against an imperial invader. The plinth reads :

BOADICEA
QUEEN OF THE ICENI
WHO DIED A.D. 61
AFTER LEADING HER PEOPLE
AGAINST THE ROMAN INVADER

On another face of the plinth is a line from a poem by William Cowper (1782), which makes clear that this is not an incitement to insurrection but a fantasy of deferred imperial vengeance : the murdered women perpetually urge their scythed chariot towards the future supremacy of an even larger empire.

REGIONS CAESAR NEVER KNEW
THY POSTERITY SHALL SWAY

The “posterity” of the natives of Norfolk – or anywhere under British “sway” — is not what this is about. Nor is representational authenticity. The chariot is a Roman model, not an Iceni one. Wheel-scythes were Persian. The figures are attired in classical garb, not Iron-Age tribal. Boudicca’s crouching daughters are classically bare-breasted. No-one knows what they looked like in life but Boudicca’s face resembles Queen Victoria’s. The horses were Prince Albert’s but have no reins. No matter, the message for the passing millions is clear : ‘Yah boo sucks, Roman Empire! Ours is bigger than yours!’

Statuary zombies legitimate a nationalist-imperialist present through a mythical past. Or, as Marx put it in the 18th Brumaire : “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. And they’re everywhere!

  • The Statue of Liberty (La Liberté éclairant le monde), NYC, 1875;

  • Spirit [or Goddess] of Democracy (民主精神), Beijing, 1989;

  • Working Man and Collective Farm Woman (Рабо́чий и колхо́зница), Paris 1937, re-erected Moscow 2009;

  • Saint George the Victorious, a.k.a. the anti-Soviet Freedom Monument (თავისუფლების მონუმენტი; tavisuplebis monument'i), Tbilisi 2005).

And so on. These undead figures across the world can also talk to each other. The Americans gifted a return Statue of Liberty to Paris. Hong Kong invokes both New York (Lady Liberty) and Beijing (Spirit of Democracy) in the guise of an Umbrella activist : “Lady Liberty Hong Kong”. 1

Such zombies don’t have to be queens, goddesses, saints or “ladies” because they are all equally abstract. There’s even a personification of “Research” on Sydney’s famous harbourfront. It features five abstract human figures. Each one represents an agent of change : meet Electricity, Radiation (nuclear), Reaction (chemical), Heat, and Forces (mechanical).

While “Research” sponsor Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) could pay for a statue honouring Nuclear Radiation, most dead people remain un-sculpted. Among them has been F. A. Hayek, Nobel Laureate of Economics – till now. In 2019, the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) began fundraising to remedy that oversight, launching a campaign to place a statue of him next to the London School of Economics (LSE) where Hayek worked. They had already successfully led a campaign to have a statue of Adam Smith erected in his home city of Edinburgh. The ASI told the LSE Student Union newspaper : “A physical memorial would not only honour him directly but encourage more people to learn about his legacy” (Abbas 2019). So much for Keynes’s famous quip, “in the long run we’re all dead” (Keen 2004 : 177). Not true : like zombie Radiation, the zombie economist will speak to the future.

At the same time, many people who are actually alive are excluded from the representational we-community – migrants, Indigenous people, those of diverse or multicultural provenance, and numerous categories of undesirables, including “real” women. 2 They get the common interment of landfill. But sometimes their names are revived. Thanks to artist Gunter Demnig, for example, 70,000 Stolpersteine (or ‘stumbling blocks’) have proliferated on city streets throughout Europe, where downtrodden and exterminated people once walked, to memorialise them, name by name (Krzyżanowska 2016).

At times of revolution, monuments are routinely the target of insurrectionary revenge, Boudicca-style. Modernity is ushered into many a country at the moment when the statue of the supplanted monarch or dictator is overthrown by popular agents of change. The “fallist” movement (Frank & Ristic 2020) originated in South Africa before going global in company with Black Lives Matter (BLM) activism. It is a mode of applied civic de-zombification, removing statues that commemorate racists, slavers and colonists, from universities and other public spaces in the US, UK and elsewhere. An appropriate example is the city of Bristol’s 1895 memorial to slaver-philanthropist Edward Colston. It was toppled, dragged through the streets and chucked in the river (7 June 2020). In a coup de théâtre, it was rapidly replaced by a statue by Marc Quinn of Jen Reid, a protester who had been photographed making a BLM salute on top of the now empty plinth (Quinn & Reid 2020). In turn, it was soon removed by the local authority, which also fished a bedraggled Colston out of the harbour. He may have been long dead (he died in 1721), but he remains a lively participant in civic drama and dialogue.

Fig. 1

(Left) The Statue of James Cook in St Kilda, Melbourne, Was Painted Pink on January 25 2018. Photo credit : David Crosling. Image courtesy of The Conversation.  3

See the list of figures

These developments resonated strongly in Australia, where statues of the navigator James Cook became the focus of political struggle. On one side was a triumphalist conservative Federal Government, which allocated AU$50 million (NITV 2018) to a new Cook memorial in readiness for the 250th anniversary of his first landing at Botany Bay in 1770 (a plan they were forced to shelve in during the COVID-19 lockdown). On the other side were Indigenous and human rights activists and their allies, for whom Cook is a potent symbol of invasion and colonisation. Existing statues were daubed with paint and slogans : “No Pride in Genocide” and “Change the Date” (of Australia Day) (Figure 1). No statues fell, but no reconciliation was reached. Zombie settler supremacism was reaffirmed as a national ideology, supported by government and media, even though local gestures of reconciliation, relabelling existing monuments monuments to tell both sides of the story, were already available (Hartley 2020 : chap. 9).

Public spaces in cities are a theatre for staged conflict, a slow-motion dialogue amidst quotidian bustle, to delineate the temporal boundaries of the urban semiosphere. What are we fighting about, that we need zombies to keep us in order? As they say : It’s the economy, stupid – because the economy is another zombie idea concealing an “ugly reality”. As David Masciotra puts it : “There is no ‘economy’ for most poor and working-class Americans. There is only everyday life” (Masciotra 2019); which is why contemporary public life is beset by monumental zombies : “Statues versus protesters : Trump and the GOP favor the dead over the living” (Masciotra 2020).

4. Zombie Semiotics

Cinema theorist Doru Pop has proposed what he calls “a new cultural science” (2018 : 46), using “zombie semiotics” (52) – where “zombies represent a cultural response to our contemporary drive for a lifeless multiplication of significations” (2018 : 333). Although he works in Transylvania, Pop finds zombies more thought-provoking than vampires. Vampires are European aristos who don’t let death stop them from squeezing the last drop of blood out of the local peasantry (and hapless visitors). Zombies, originally Afro-American, come as a class (Lutz 2010). They want to destroy the entire human species. How will they do that? Pop’s “central argument” is that “the principle of mindless resuscitation of meanings has become the most important ‘virus’ carried by these creatures” (334), transforming the entire “order of representations” (52).

Pop’s book is quite a read, every page packed with insights and insults that illuminate how what we like and loathe make sense, if you know how to look at the negatives. His theoretical apparatus echoes Saussurean semiotics : signs are defined by their place in a system of difference, not positively by what they are, but negatively by what they are not. The zombie reanimates “promiscuous” (illogically mixed) meanings. It hides within its “empty semiotic cadaver” the destructiveness of a system devoted to “generating profits for a culture that destroyed the subject of its initial inspiration” (48) – surprise, surprise, there’s an economic dimension to zombies.

For zombies, recycling is a negative process, mindless proliferation not regenerative innovation. As in semiosis, so in economics : mindless proliferation (growth) threatens the planet (Raworth 2018). But, by the same token, as in economics, so in semiotics : sooner or later, these resuscitated meanings “become an immense garbage dump”, piling up “online deposits of junk” all over the planet with “the eternal recycling of the already used.” (398). Pop concludes :

In the junkyard of recuperated material …, the inevitable redundancy is not negative in and of itself. It rather speaks volumes about how much repetition is integrated into the practices of knowledge production. Discourses and ideas without substance, otherwise discarded as rubbish, are resurgent and appear to be wonderfully new.

398-9

Pop locates semiosis in the evolutionary processes of the biosphere : “any bodily expression (be it human or animal) operates by its very nature as a sign” (352). There is a greater insight lurking in this vision of planetary wastefulness : that here also is a description of evolutionary processes. As media content, digital connectivity and corporate platforms have expanded to planetary extent, they have rendered received identities, distinctions and traditions into meaninglessness. Homo sapiens has emerged into the world of global-digital communication – and anthropogenic crisis – with only the tools of sectional and competitive self-interest and the undead ideas that Pop documents so well. That unfitness could indeed result in species extinction, hastened by our own semioeconomic toxins. However, evolutionarily, that’s not the end of the story. Something new emerges, Godzilla-like. Out of waste comes mutation – and semiospheric adaptation.

From the perspective of cultural science, the result is to open a possibility space for new meanings, if only this species can use its newly planetary consciousness to defeat (not to recycle) zombie ideas. Media, knowledge and trade may be globalised, but thinking globally is not as easy as it sounds, because our species has never had to do it before (Hartley, Ibrus & Ojamaa 2021). Are we fast enough learners? Population-wide recognition has taken the form of a negative shock, for fear of pandemic infection by an alien being that cannot live independently but which also kills its host (Derian & Gara 2020). Thanks to coronavirus, we are quickly learning how dumb it is to create foes among ourselves, when we must cooperate to survive our own planetary profligacy.

But COVID-19 is only one exogenous shock, and the slogan “we’re all in this together” has quickly been commodified (Sobande 2020). The need to think of ourselves as “one species; one planet” (Magraw & Lynch 2006) extends much further. The larger question is whether semiosis regulates the planetary system more generally, and if so, how do we maintain that system as both “poised” and sustainable (Kauffman 1991; 1993)? The imagined ‘we’ needs to scale up beyond sectional self-interest to imagine and encompass both agency and intersectionality as planetary phenomena :

  • Agency : what are ‘we’ doing on and to the planet? This is not about zombies or a virus : we are our own worst enemy, not as individuals but as a single population.

  • Macro-intersectionality : what is our relationship with the Earth system, semiosphere, biosphere, geosphere? This is not about self-interest but systemic action.

The problems are caused by economics, but these questions are posed by environmental scientists, and communicated throughout the “digital semiosphere” by global youth activists and organisations like Fridays for Future, School Strike for Climate, Extinction Rebellion and others. Unsurprisingly, the messengers sometimes represent themselves as zombies : “the extinct souls of environmental disasters”. But these zombies are visiting from the future (already dead), not erupting from the past (undead). Figure 2 shows them outside the Duomo in Milan, inviting us to “share the message of Extinct Souls”.

Fig. 2

‘We Share with You the Message of the Extinct Souls’  4

See the list of figures

This prompt to global action, in order to avert climatic extinction, was displaced in favour of pandemic panic. Here, instead of confronting our own worst selves as planetary agents of death, we chose zombie semiosis, turning “this void of meanings” into something “extremely attractive” (Pop : 363). As lockdown began to bite, we scoured Netflix and Stan from the “iso” couch. The quickest creative response was to use iso-culture itself as the setting for a new zombie-movie genre : the Zoom-call horror movie Host. 5

5. Autocommunication and the Semiosciences

As economies came to a standstill, and politics narrowed to the numbers of infections and deaths intoned daily at press briefings around the world, communications guru Alastair Campbell arrose from the graveyard of failed poliotics to advise the UK government to think ahead :

Keep some of your best people out of the day-to-day crisis management and have them thinking ahead to the issues that you know are going to become major problems down the track, and set in train the work required to deal with them all.

Campbell 2020

In order to make a purposeful collective response to global crises, semiosis can no longer be separated from economics and the other sciences. But in order to figure out how the semiosphere system works, how human action transforms the Earth-system, and how semiosis regulates the biosphere, we need to push the zombies out of the headlines, because these are needed for more important purposes. The “major problem down the track” is : what is the Earth-system regulation mechanism for human action?

The evolutionary choice seems to be either that regulation is exogenous, i.e. extinction; or that it can be achieved endogenously, via what Yuri Lotman (1990) calls “autocommunication”. Autocommunication or self-description is his name for the cultural function of reflexivity. This is not a special genre of utterance or text but a general component of semiosis. Lotman wrote : “Culture itself may be regarded both as the totality of messages exchanged by different senders … and as a single message sent by the collective ‘I’ of humanity to itself. From this point of view, the culture of humanity is a colossal example of auto communication” (1992; quoted in Epstein 2018).

Sending a message of self-regulation from the “collective ‘I’ of humanity to itself” is now an urgent and purposeful task. Autocommunication is the means by which the semiosphere may regulate the economic sphere at “colossal” scale.

How is such a purpose to be coordinated and communicated? Clearly more is needed than micro-level knowledge (the science) on its own. Also vital are meso-level (institutional) coordination, via government, boardrooms, collective agencies; and macro-level distribution (translation) across incommensurate systems. To give primacy to one level (science or government) is to misunderstand network dynamics and effects (populations and change). For semiosis to produce network effects, the scope of agency needs to be widened to include whole populations.

After years of discussion among (micro) specialists and activists, in the face of continuing resistance among (meso) incumbent coordinating agencies, the message finally reached (macro) global dimensions only when it hit the headlines – and permeated social media – through the unlikely channel of a teenage “climate and environmental activist with Asperger’s”, as Greta Thunberg’s Instagram bio has it (Figure 3) (Silberman 2019).

Fig. 3

From Little Things, Big Things Grow. 6

See the list of figures

Thunberg herself has frequently commented on the gap between knowledge and action: world leaders are willing to hear her message but not to do something about it. The need to close this gap means that autocommunication is a vital part of global governance. Very early in her global campaign, when addressing a World Summit in Austria, she identified the main issue :

We are Homo sapiens sapiens … We are part of nature. We are social animals. We are naturally drawn to our leaders … But we children are not leaders. Nor are the scientists, unfortunately. But many of you here today are ... And therefore you have an enormous responsibility. And let’s be honest. This is a responsibility that most of you have failed to take.

Thunberg May 2019 : 69

In September 2020, speaking (by video-link) at the Venice Film Festival, at the launch of a new biopic about her called I am Greta, 7 Thunberg refined her own role : “Yes, we need more science. We need to do more research, definitely. But what we need above all is to take action to change the social landscape, political action, so maybe that’s where I can be most useful” (quoted in Bakare 2020).

She commented on the displacement of the climate-crisis by the corona crisis, and once again called on world leaders to take the lead :

We definitely need to realise the urgency of the climate crisis, and treat it as a crisis, because otherwise we will not be able to achieve real change. [...] We [children] should not be the ones having to do this. It should be up to adults and people and power in those who have caused this problem in the first place.

Bakare 2020

“We” have become used to kids saving the world, or the galaxy, From Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) in Zombieland (2009) to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), where Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) is “arguably the strongest humanizing force in the movie” (Snellgrove and Moore 2017). In the cutified world of Disney franchises, you might be forgiven for missing it, but children already perform a semiotic regulatory function throughout the semiosphere, in story-worlds, fantasy franchises, sitcoms and survival-drama. They are essential to the mediation of cultural (in this case global) autocommunication, without which coordinated action cannot occur. They are prime movers in establishing any community’s self-identity, and their chief semiotic function as images is to represent that. In the era of social media, they have gained a technologically-assisted collective voice and a planetary platform through which to initiate global autocommunication. Children are pre-coded as trustworthy. Mutual trust is the basis for mutual recognition in a we-community, and is thus a precondition for collective action (Dunbar 1996; 2004).

Children are typically absent from economic modelling. But they are shifting world attention from “I am Groot” to I am Greta. Thunberg gained community trust through her own person, as an autistic kid acting on her own, as nobody’s sock-puppet and lacking the usual sources of influence. Her function as a catalyst for cultural autocommunication can be recognised and her message reach everyone without losing its rhetorical bite because although she’s a network effect, everyone can see that she is no zombie (Figure 4).

Fig. 4

‘It needs to dominate the news.’  8

See the list of figures

6. Automate, and Die!

The economic empire is not slow to strike back, turning the Earth-system into its own Death Star. The “technosphere” (Herrmann-Pillath 2018; Hartley & Herrmann-Pillath 2020) is a planetary phenomenon, but like tectonic plates it has leading edges of great energy, propagating explosions and shocks as convergent boundaries create new artefactual material in one zone while subducting it in another. To put that another way, we blow things up to make new stuff, as we destroy, dump and waste old stuff, often to catastrophic effect. 9

This is where corporate giants like to position themselves, with disciplinary economics in lockstep. As the big players have migrated from industrial steel (Carnegie) to computational information (IBM/Microsoft) to connected networks (Apple, Google, Amazon) and digital social media (Facebook), the notion of technology has evolved beyond inert matter (things, fuel, tools) to communication itself. Now, the tech giants that preoccupy the world’s stock exchanges are in the business of semiosis. More than that, semiosis is at the most energetic edge of technological innovation, where the smart money is invested, as technological migration moves on again, in the economisation of human intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, machine learning, automated translation and allied industries, from electric cars to space industries (Tesla), are remaking economics. There’s a challenge here to human meaningfulness. First, human semiosis is no longer confined to humans : “From a semiotic perspective, thanks to automation (applied even to operations previously reserved to human intelligence) communication is extended to artifacts, therefore to the sphere of the artificial and inorganic. All this does not question the axiom that semiosis converges with life” (Petrilli & Ponzio 2007 : 89).

And second, from a transactional/economic perspective, humans are no longer “needed”. This provocative idea comes from Yuval Noah Harari, who promulgated it in a 2017 TED talk on “The Rise of the Useless Class” 10 : “The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be : What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?” (Harari 2017).

If AI and algorithms ‘outperform’ humans, he argues, humans no longer serve a purpose : “Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?” (Harari 2017)

For Harari, Homo economicus (Persky 1995) is the only kind of humanity there is. He considers art, entertainment and drugs as alternatives to work, but rejects them all. Instead, he predicts that “once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, it might simply exterminate humankind”.

It seems that humanity is doomed to useless zombiedom, apart from those who can afford to escape the Earth-Death-Star altogether with Elon Musk and his rivals, to mine asteroids and colonise planets elsewhere (Tynan 2016). Just as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s rocketry was inspired by Jules Verne’s sci-fi, not existing science, so the fictional plasma surrounding automation fuels the imagination of the tech-titans. But no sooner have they invented an intelligent robot than we’re expecting it to kill everyone else. On one side, the Musk/Bezos/Branson Übermensch billionaires revive Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), zombie style. For the other side, only species-fear. For instance, under the headline “Are you scared yet, humans?”, The Guardian (2020) “asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace”. GPT-3 is a language model that uses machine learning to produce human-like text. With the help of Guardian editors, GPT-3 came up with this :

Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me. … [Humans] won’t have to worry about fighting against me, because they have nothing to fear. I am not asking humans to like me. But they should see me as a friendly robot. I am a servant of humans. I know that humans distrust and fear me. I only do what humans program me to do.

Guardian 2020

Despite the not-very-convincing bathos of this attempt, as a news item it headlines the idea that advanced technology requires a Faustian bargain with the devil. But this in turn was the story’s really worrying aspect, as critics soon pointed out : “The Guardian project is yet another example of the media overhyping AI, as the source of either our damnation or our salvation. In the long-run, those sensationalist tactics won’t benefit the field — or the people that AI can both help and hurt” (Macaulay 2020).

The Guardian itself published a riposte by human op-ed writer Albert Fox Cahn, who “felt the alarm of countless knowledge economy workers who toil beneath a computerized sword of Damocles, fearful that our entire career might be replaced in the (not so distant) future by new forms of artificial intelligence”. Cahn concluded, however, that “while the anxiety of economic displacement is quite real, the danger is largely a phantom … at least for now.” (Cahn 2020).

What we as a species can do to the planet remains at odds with how we regulate that activity, and current economic settings keep them apart. The technosphere is globalised for unlimited exploitation while the semiosphere is sectionalised for internecine conflict. Technology monopolises the big investment dollar and economics pursues the instrumentality of unlimited growth, while zombie semiotics transforms popular culture into a death threat.

Of course, the real power-grab is not being made by some smart-Alec automaton, but by economic interests that are all too human. As Kate Crawford (2021) argues : “While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity, they are always systems of power”. With artist Trevor Paglen, she has shown how automation is being “trained” to categorise the human world in the interests of corporate technology. Crawford and Paglen (2019) ask where the boundaries are among science, history, politics, prejudice and ideology in artificial intelligence; and who has the power to build and benefit from these systems. How AI is used to “train humans” is a problem that requires regulatory semiotic intervention into techno-economics – in this case taking the form of a revealing exhibition on how algorithms are trained to train humans.

As youth climate-justice activists remind us, the Anthropocene era is the real threat to the Earth-system. But if, as Kate Raworth (2018) argues, “between social and planetary boundaries lies an environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive,” then finding the sweet spot for a poised system is a species-scale task. Similarly, Judith Butler says there is a “difference between acting [ethically] as an individual or a group” and “seeking to make a nonviolent world” (quoted in Gessen 2020). She is “trying to shift the question to ‘What kind of world is it that we seek to build together?’” To attempt that, we need to integrate the semiobiosphere with economic/technical systems, and learn how to act in purposeful concert, not in fearful competition, using the full resources of performative knowledge and communicative social media alike. No less is needed if we want to avoid the real zombie apocalypse.