The realities and codes of modern politics as a series of negotiations and compromises between political actors over distributional, international and regulatory affairs are giving way to something more viscous and difficult to map. The codifications of politics as a delineation of ideological variation between competing but generally set groups whose ideas were known through manifestos and negotiated through shared axioms are now being de-codified as situations are becoming more and more complex, eating away at these institutional capacities to cope. The axioms that were before set in place through loose constitutional frameworks and arenas for debate (parliaments, congresses and ballot boxes) are now becoming battlegrounds and fissures where difference gives way to disconnection and insularity, and where the totality of politics that was previously found in negotiated strategies is now found in singular issues and neo-tribal forms.

This is the transcript of the talk I gave for the Wyrd Patchworkshop Quattro – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYXemShH_Yo&feature=youtu.be

I define patchwork as the adaptation and fragmentation of institutional structures through the processes of exit and voice. In this sense patchwork can be seen in multiple real-world vectors where developments are creating institutional complexification and blurring the lines of jurisdiction and sovereignty. Spontaneous disorder, the overload of socio-economic information, is accelerating financial and logistical matters beyond direct control and thus altering and de-codifying the decentralised plans that Hayek described as integral to markets. These restructuring dynamics are part of what I would call our intertechnic period of socio-economic-technological capacities and apparatuses which gives precedence to communication, inter-operability and speed.