by
Ia Genberg
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Four already seemed like a lot, but in actual fact we were merely a fraction of the horde of translators contracted by twenty-seven publishing houses around the world to translate this book. Detaljerna, published earlier that year, had been a runaway success and would go on to win the prestigious August Prize in November. It’s the fourth novel from Ia Genberg, who debuted at forty-five after leaving a career in journalism and retraining as a nurse in order to be able to save her writing for fiction.
hell yeah
[from the translator's note]
"Nell", the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people--and this is true whether or not they are well-educated--is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations--in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. [...]"
"The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code--but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."
"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."
"Yes. Some of them never challenge it--they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel--as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."
"Which path do you intend to take Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"
"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded--they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."
[...]
" I suspect that Lord Finkle-McGraw, being an intelligent man, sees through all of the hypocrisy in his society, but upholds its principles anyway, because that is what is best in the long run. And I suspect that he has been worrying about how best to inculcate this stance in young people who cannot understand, as he does, its historical antecedents--which might explain why he has taken an interest in me. The Primer may have been Finkle-McGraw's idea to begin with--a first attempt to go about this systematially."
Government plays an enormous role in manufacturing cyberspace magic because much of its legitimacy today is based on identification with this future wave. This is certainly understandable. The transfer of power from government to the private sector in the last 30 or so years and the spread of free trade, deregulation, and the creation of global trading blocs administered by private-sector-controlled bodies has diminished the authority of national governments substantially. [...] One of the few areas left for it to establish a genuine, universally recognized allure is with the new technology. [...]
[...] For Fukuyama, the freedom in liberalism and the choice in politics do not include the freedom to choose to oppose the singularity of a global market system, even to the meager extent of opposing by strengthening the nation state, let alone by daring to choose something other than capitalism. His is the freedom to choose after all the major political, economic, and social decisions have already been made.
[...] Even as myths of cyberspace reveal the unique power that people attribute to this age, these myths also mask the continuities that make the power we observe today, for example in the global market and in globe-spanning companies like Microsoft and IBM, very much a deepening and extension of old forms of power. These patterns of mutual constitution between culture and political economy, specifically between myth and power, suggest not a mythic radical disjunction from history, but a strengthening, albeit in a different mythic client, of old forms of power.
Looking at the history of technology literally puts us in our place by suggesting that rather than ending time, space, and social relations as we have known them, the rise of cyberspace amounts to just another in a series of interesting, but ultimately banal exercises in the extension of human tools. They are potentially very profound extensions, but not enough to warrant claims about the end of anything, other than the end of a chapter in a seemingly never ending story. [...]
Digitization takes place along with the process of commodification or the transformation of use to exchange or market value. The expansion of the commodity form provides what amounts to the material embodiment for digitization. It is used first and foremost to expand the commodification of information and entertainment content, enlarge markets in the audiences that take in and make use of digitized communication, and deepen the commodification of labor involved in the production, distribution and exchange of communication. Digitization takes place in the context of powerful commercial forces and also serves the advance the overall process of commodification worldwide. In other words, commercial forces deepen and extend the process of digitization because it enables them to expand the commodity form in communication. From a cultural or mythic perspective, cyberspace may be seen as the end of history, geography, and politics. But from a political economic perspective, cyberspace results from the mutual constitution of digitization and commodification.
Digitization expands the commodification of content by extending opportunities to measure and monitor, package and repackage entertainment and information. [...] Initially, commodification was based on a relatively inflexible system of delivering a batch of channels into the home and having viewers pay for the receiver and for a markup on products advertised over the air. The system did not account for different use of the medium; nor did it make any clear connection between viewing and purchasing. It amounted to a Fordist system of delivering general programming to a mass audience which was marketed to advertisers for a price per thousand viewers. Each step along the way to the digitzation of television has refined the commmodification of content, allowing for the flow to be "captured" or, more precisely, for the commodity to be measured, monitored and packaged in increasingly more specific and customised ways. [...]
really excellent
[...] Nortel's product also reflects a fundamental contradiction besetting the business of cyberspace, i.e., the conflict between he goals of building consumer confidence to turn the Internet and its users into a universal market and commodifying without government intervention whatever moves over the Internet, including personal identity [...]
basically sold consumer internet behaviour tracking software. privacy activists shut it down. its behaviour was totally sensible - it needed to "expand the commodification of its major resource, the Internet"
Useful as it is to recognize the lie in the myth, it is important to state at the outset that myths mean more than falsehoods or cons; indeed, they matter greatly. Myths are stories that animate individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence that lift people out of the banality of everyday life. They offer an entrance to another reality, a reality once characterized by the promise of the sublime.