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But this kind of branding exercise is a perfect example of how capitalism transforms its opponents into its promoters. Drawing on an advertising and technology industry that scours the social world for images, movements, and experiences yet to be commercialized, capitalism’s “creative” edge leaches…

In The New Spirit of Capitalism, social theorists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have argued that in the world after the protests in Paris in 1968 (and the countercultural revolution of the sixties more broadly), capitalism’s growth has become predatory. It preys on the people, ideas, things, an…

[...] Almost a century and a half ago, at the birth of the electric sublime, competing telegraph interests established the International Telecommunication Union, a global body made up mainly of government organizations and managed on a one-nation, one-vote basis to set global standards for the new …

[...] the dominant political tendency today is neo-liberalism, which was founded on the retreat of the state from vital areas of social life, including communication, where the state was once very significantly involved in building infrastructure, establishing technical standards, regulating market…

[...] Communication provides us with the very basis of politics. The public no longer exists as an entity inasmuch as it is a collection of discreet individuals who are serviced. Under the auspices of efficiency, individuals reign triumphant as a corporatist ethic provides the road map of social de…