by
Slavoj Žižek
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As much as a good-hearted rich man may want to think that underneath all his wealth, he is just the same kind of human being as the poor are, he is wrong. Once we have our social (class) positions, there is no zero-level of humanity where we are all the same. He is not one of them: they are not in the same boat, and it would be extremely presumptuous to think so.
horrific struggle etc etc
(quoting from Alenka Zupančič on Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels)
[...] the way individuals experience their situation: there is no way for them to step out of their world and somehow see, from 'outside', how things 'really are'? Ideology does not reside primarily in stories invented (by those in power) to deceive others, it resides in stories invented by subjects to deceive themselves. [...]
[...] 1730s Paris, to the so-called 'Great Cat Massacre', described by Robert Darnton, when a group of printing apprentices tortured and ritually killed all the cats they could find, including the pet of their master's wife. [...]
basically they were treated worse than cats. never heard of this before, pretty fascinating
[...] It is not enough to remain faithful to the Communist Idea: one has to locate in historical reality the antagonisms that make this Idea a practical urgency. The only true question today is this: do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of (human) nature, or does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are in fact four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the more and more palpable failure of private property to integrate into its functioning so-called 'intellectual property'; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, as has been mentioned above, new forms of apartheid, new walls and slums. [...]
[...] Waiting for another to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity. However, the trap to be avoided here is the one of perverse self-instrumentalization: 'We are the ones we are waiting for' does not mean that we have to discover how we are the agent predestined by fate (historical necessity) to do the task. It means, on the contrary, that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to classical Marxism, in which 'history is on our side' (the proletariat fulfils a predestined task of universal emancipation), in today's constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse. Here, the only thing that can prevent catastrophe is pure voluntarism, i.e. our free decision to act against historical necessity. [...]
kinda similar to note 1553 but different enough to warrant a new note I guess
A tablet doesn't really enable one to fully run one's own affairs on one's own terms. A personal computer is designed so that you own your own data. PCs enabled millions of people to run their own affairs. The PC strengthened the middle class. Tablets are instead optimized for delivering entertainment, but the real problem is that you can't use them without ceding information superiority to someone else. In most cases, you cannot even turn them on without giving over personal information.
He shies away from what I think is the larger problem here, which is that tablets make it very hard for you to go under the hood. They are expressly designed for an easy-to-use UI at the expense of allowing the consumer to understand how it all works. You're not encouraged to tinker or write your own commands. If you want to build an app for it, you'll have to get a separate development device.
Instagram isn't worth a billion dollars just because those thirteen employees are extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it. Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. That has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.
he makes a good point but doesn't quite get to cosmic brain status: valuations are arbitrary and, at heart, political. Instagram is "worth" a billion dollars because Facebook decided it was, and we can only imagine that Facebook decided accordingly after running cost projections on how much more money it could get from advertisers in the long run. But that is an inherently subjective measure that takes into account how many years of revenue Facebook is looking at (i.e., how deep its coffers are right now); fantastical projections about Instagram's ability to attract and retain users in the future; and arbitrary decisions about how much to charge advertisers. Ultimately, Instagram is worth a billion dollars because enough people decided it was. Rather than accepting this valuation as God-given and trying to divide up this amount among Instagram's presumed contributors, we should question the idea of Instagram being worth anything at all.
Instead, his solution seems to be (and I think he clarifies it over the next few chapters) that we should pay all Instagram users who contribute anything to the service. Even if you could convince Facebook that it was worth doing this, I don't see how this will solve the winner-takes-all problem (you already see this with influencer marketing).
[...] People are not just pointlessly diluting themselves on cultural, intellectual, and spiritual levels by fawning over digital superhuman phenomena that don't necessarily exist. There is also a material cost.
People are gradually making themselves poorer than they need to be. We're setting up a situation where better technology in the long term just means more unemployment, or an eventual socialist backlash. Instead, we should seek a future where more people will do well, without losing liberty, even as technology gets much, much better.
Popular digital designs do not treat people as being "special enough." People are treated as small elements in a bigger information machine, when in fact people are the only sources or destinations of information, or indeed of any meaning to the machine at all. My goal is to portray an alternate future in which people are treated appropriately as being special.
mostly agreed, though he does not justify his fear of this "socialist backlash", either here or later in the book--I think he just presumes the reader will share that fear. I guess he did write this book way before DSA's recent explosion in membership & in popular culture, so maybe his views have shifted since then?
An amazing number of people offer an amazing amount of value over networks. But the lion's share of wealth now flows to those who aggregate and route those offerings, rather than those who provide the "raw materials." A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy, could come about if we could break out of the "free information" idea and into a universal micropayment system. We might even be able to strengthen individual liberty and self-determination even when the machines get very good.
I mean this is true but it's the centrist's way out. It's the Hillary Clinton route: overly focused on the middle class and not inspiring. It might be better than the alternative of the middle class slowly dying, but if we're in such a dire situation that that's actually a possibility, why not consider the more radical project of abolishing classes entirely?
If information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued in economic terms. If, however, "raw" information, or information that hasn't yet been routed by those who run the most central computers, isn't valued, then a massive disenfranchisement will take place. As the information economy arises, the old specter of a thousand science fiction tales and Marxist nightmares will be brought back from the dead and empowered to apocalyptic proportions. Ordinary people will be unvalued by the new economy, while those closest to the top computers will become hypervaluable.
but NO accounting is EVER complete and honest. That is literally the whole idea behind surplus value, which is the key concept that fuels capitalism. the best we could hope for is some middle ground between "complete and honest" accounting and the free-for-all situation we have now, where corporations sacrifice some of their profit margin in exchange for paying users the minimum amount of money necessary to keep them happy.
His solution to ordinary people being "unvalued by the new economy" is to propose that they be undervalued instead. which is, of course, standard centrist spiel, but hardly the audacious proposal I was expecting from a book like this.