Economic Anthtropology

The article focuses on three different vision modalities of the future in Slovenia: the meta-narrative about entrepreneurship
as a driving force of social development; social entrepreneurship as a formal agent of social changes; and a variety of social
experimentation practices or initiatives, which generate hope and encourage the implementation of social changes. Not all of
these visions are analysed in the same manner, i.e. entrepreneurship is studied as a meta-narrative, while social entrepreneurship
and social experimentation are explored at the experiential level. The three vision modalities are referred to because
they are perceived in the context of their common ideational characterisation and mutual feedback (even though in a critique).
The article indicates that certain similarities exist between these visions of the future: entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, and
social experimenters do not expect the social situation to stabilise. Some of them wish to change it, while others believe that
the change is a part of market development. Everyone agrees that changes should originate from below (from the people),
but see them in a variety of ways. In the minds of social experimenters and some social entrepreneurs, change implies a total
transformation, while others see it as self-activation on the market. The visions emphasise the decisions of individuals, their
self-activation (or engagement), and action. They underline the importance of personal transformation and refer to the mechanisms
of self-regulation, self-evaluation and improvement, despite a variety of interests and orientations. The common point
of all these visions is a critique of the legal-administrative system, as more support is expected from the state institutions or
the formal legal framework.
The developmental paradigm promotes social innovation and the search for solutions at the local level, while encouraging people
to engage in social experimentation. For this reason, a closer cooperation between informal, local, and civil initiatives on
the one hand and the national, formal and institutionalised level on the other hand is promoted and keeps occurring. However,
cooperation often results in the political and economic (neoliberal) appropriation of social practices.
The article deals with the visions as hope, steering the activities towards the creation of a different future. The visions – characterised
by the past as well as the present – are related to experiencing the present as well as to the transformation of values,
tenets, and identities.
The article places the visions that involve watershed social changes in the context of social experimentation. The visions of
social experimenters are characterised by the imminent future, but at the same time also by a long-term perspective, i.e. the
time that involves responsibility and the heritage of the coming generations as well as of our planet itself.

Modern physics associates consciousness neither with creativity nor with computation, emphasizing instead awareness of one’s relation to the game played by the given agent, while differentiating between deterministic and algorithmic systems (Penrose). Conversely, algorithmic culture (Striphas), from which contemporary modes of social production e.g. the creator and the attention economy arise, makes no such distinction. In ‘the informational space,’ (Bagheri Pour Fallah) from the centralized landscape of AI to the decentralized proposition of blockchains, algorithms are given precedence, albeit in opposing capacities, through computational excellence, over their human counterparts, provisionally granting the latter the freedom to assume the role of the creator, in an implicitly utopian vision of society. The term ‘creator’ here follows neatly the notion of the ‘prosumer’ (Toffler), taking simultaneous cues from relational and participatory art, asserting itself as the sine qua non of both web2 and web3 architectures of the internet as one coalescing into greater society. This paper asserts the replacement of the terms art and artist with creation (content) and creator to be more than a matter of semantics, and of significant anthropological relevance. Kant’s Anthropology locates man’s horizon as one ‘that goes from the ambiguity of the Spiel (game-toy) to the indecision of the Kunst (art-artifice)’ (Foucault). Similarly, in the existential anthropology of Peter Wust, man is in essence ‘the artist’ in the extent that ‘he is conscious of himself.’ To locate man today is therefore a matter linked with his role in the (network) society, as artist—beyond the creator economy.

In this chapter I put forward two main ideas: The first is that we cannot maintain national frameworks as the basic researching fields of class-theory, in an era, when class relationships are mainly transnational, and current capitalism cannot be seen in any sense or perspective other than global. In this sense Eric Wolf's perspective on the historical validity of global processes is confirmed by developments on the ground. The second idea is that the strengthening of the global class-system, although it does not change the nature of capitalist exploitation, forces the global working-classes into two major transformations. First, exploitation becomes deeper and wider with very low wages and longer working hours. Second, class-consciousness and class-struggle become extremely difficult for workers because their real patrons are thousands of miles away, plus, because they live side by side an extremely numerous underclass, which is ready to replace them at any moment at work. The existence of such huge population of underclasses living in conditions of extreme poverty is the hidden asset, so far unbeatable, of global capitalism. It also pushes millions of people "outside history" in a reverse movement than that of mature modernity of the 1960's and 1970's. I draw on my ethnographic experience in Ghana, but I also use Ghana's National Statistics, regarding occupational distribution and statuses of employment, as an example of global underclass.