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[...] the modernists tended to express such principles in accents of anguish or pathos. Nietzsche’s battle cry about the death of God was their watchword, along with various laments about the disenchantment of the world, and various purely psychological accounts of alienation and the domination of nature. What distinguishes postmodern philosophy, in my opinion, is the disappearance of all that anguish and pathos. Nobody seems to miss God any longer, and alienation in a consumer society does not seem to be a particularly painful or stressful prospect. Metaphysics has disappeared altogether; and if the ravages to the natural world are even more severe and obvious than in the earlier period, really serious ecologists—the radical and activist kind—do something about it politically and practically, without any philosophical astonishment at such depredations on the part of corporations and governments, inasmuch as the latter are only living out their innate instincts. In other words, no one now is surprised by the operations of a globalized capitalism: something an older academic philosophy never cared to mention, but which the postmoderns take for granted, in what may well be called Cynical Reason. Even increasing immiseration, and the return of poverty and unemployment on a massive world-wide scale, are scarcely matters of amazement for anyone, so clearly are they the result of our own political and economic system and not of the sins of the human race or the fatality of life on Earth. We are in other words so completely submerged in the human world, in what Heidegger called the ontic, that we have little time any longer for what he liked to call the question of Being.
Today we no longer speak of monopolies but of transnational corporations, and our robber barons have mutated into the great financiers and bankers, themselves de-individualized by the massive institutions they manage. [...]
something to think about more (the rest of the paragraph is kinda unnecessary tbh)
[...] the systems of imperialism began to colonize the world in terms of the otherness of their colonized subjects. Racial otherness, and a Eurocentric or Americano-centric contempt for so-called underdeveloped or weak or subaltern cultures, partitioned ‘modern’ people from those who were still pre-modern, and separated advanced or ruling cultures from the dominated. With this moment of imperialism and modernity, the second stage of capitalism, a worldwide system of Otherness was established.
It will be clear, then, that with decolonization all that is gradually swept away: those subaltern others—who could not speak for themselves, let alone rule themselves—now for the first time, as Sartre famously put it, speak in their own voice and claim their own existential freedom. Now, suddenly, the bourgeois subject is reduced to equality with all these former others, and a new kind of anonymity reigns throughout world society as a whole. This is a good anonymity, which can be opposed with some ethical satisfaction to the bourgeois individualism whose disappearance we have hitherto greeted with such mixed feelings. Billions of real people now exist, and not just the millions of your own nation and your own language.
How can culture and subjectivity not be transformed, when opened to the vicissitudes of this vaster landscape and population which is globalization itself? No longer protected by family or region, nor even by the nation itself and its national identity, the emergence of the vulnerable subject into a world of billions of anonymous equals is bound to bring about still more momentous changes in human reality. The experience of singularity is, on this level, the very expression of this subjective destitution, one so often remedied by the regression into older group or religious structures, or the invention of pseudo-traditional ethnic identities, with results ranging from genocide to luxury hobbies. This dialectic, between egoism and pseudo-collectivity, carries within it at least one moment of truth, namely the radical differentiation—qualitative, ontological and methodological alike—between the analysis of individual experience and that of groups or collectivities. Both kinds of analysis share the dilemma of bearing on an imaginary object, one whose unity is impossible and whose stubborn endurance demands, on the one hand, a new ethic, and on the other a new politics. To project either of these impossible tasks is Utopian; to refuse them is frivolous and nihilistic. But it is the political dilemma we must face in conclusion.
man, he can be a pretty decent writer when he's not up in his Hegelian-Lacanian-etc clouds
[...] Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as global scale. Whether you think of the issue of Palestine or of gentrification and zoning in American small towns, it is that peculiar and imaginary thing called private property in land which is at stake. The land is not only an object of struggle between the classes, between rich and poor; it defines their very existence and the separation between them. Capitalism began with enclosure and with the occupation of the Aztec and Inca empires; and it is ending with foreclosure and dispossession, with homelessness on the individual as well as the collective level, and with the unemployment dictated by austerity and outsourcing, the abandonment of factories and rustbelts. [...]
I don't know if I agree fully but this paragraph has a certain poetry in it
Taylor’s ambition, as her subtitle suggests, is to make the case for a new cultural politics of the digital age. How Web 2.0 affects the production and distribution of culture touches her in a direct sense. She is a documentary filmmaker and editor of two books, one on philosophy, the other on the Occupy movement in the US. She has no parallel university job to shield her from the growing structural inequalities she describes; nor for the most part do the musicians, film-makers, photographers and investigative reporters whose stories she recounts, working at the coal face of a culture industry that has been transformed by the internet—but not in ways that Wired predicted. Taylor’s personal background might make her seem an ideal candidate for Web enthusiasm. [...] This background is important; she is coming from a position of high expectations and dashed hopes, not sceptical resistance to technological change.
same
The People’s Platform looks at the implications of the digital age for cultural democracy in various sectors—music, film, news, advertising—and how battles over copyright, piracy and privacy laws have evolved. Taylor rightly situates the tech euphoria of the late 90s in the context of Greenspan’s asset-price bubble, pointing out that deregulated venture-capital funds swelled from $12bn in 1996 to $106bn in 2000. Where tech-utopians hailed the political economy of the internet as ‘a better form of socialism’ (Wired’s Kevin Kelly) or ‘a vast experiment in anarchy’ (Google’s Eric Schmidt and the State Department’s Jared Cohen), she shows how corporations dominate the new landscape [...]
[...] the main source of Facebook’s and Google’s profits is other firms’ advertising expenditure, an annual $700bn in the US; but this in turn depends on the surplus extracted from workers who produce ‘actual things’. The logic of advertising drives the tech giants’ voracious appetite for our data. [...]
good context
The People’s Platform ends with a manifesto—in itself a more ambitious move than those of most books on digital culture, even if Taylor’s demands seem disappointingly limited after what has gone before. She shrinks from the thought of nationalization—there is no equivalent here to Evgeny Morozov’s ‘Socialize the data centres!’—and disparages the free-software movement pioneered by Richard Stallman and others as ‘freedom to tinker’. Instead she calls for more regulation of the service providers and major platforms; improved broadband provision; introducing a kind of Glass–Steagall of new media, to force a separation of content creation from communication and thus prevent a new round of vertical integration; levying a tax on the advertising industry; pressuring Silicon Valley to pay tax at higher rates; more public spending on the ‘cultural commons’, the arts and public broadcasting (the education system gets no mention). In the ‘copyright wars’, she opts for reform rather than abolition or ‘copyleft’. More broadly, Taylor argues that the ideology of ‘free culture’ promoted by Web enthusiasts has centred on distribution, obscuring and ultimately diminishing the people and social supports that underlie cultural production. She seeks to redress the balance by way of a more ‘ecological’, long-term mentality, drawing on the politics of ethical consumption and ‘fair trade’ to call for culture that is ‘sustainable’ and ‘fair’, as opposed to ‘free’.
seems like a good summary, might come in handy one day
While Taylor’s dismissal of free software as ‘freedom to tinker’ captures something real about its prima facie narrowness as a political programme, she misses the peculiar way in which this very narrowness gives rise to significant implications when we broaden the frame and examine a more social picture. While the individual user may not be interested in tinkering with, for example, the Linux kernel, as opposed to simply using it, the fact that it can be tinkered with opens up a space of social agency that is not at all trivial. Since everyone can access all the code all the time, it is impossible for any entity, capital or state, to establish any definitive control over users on the basis of the code itself. And since the outcomes of this process are pooled, one does not have to be personally interested in ‘tinkering’ to benefit directly from this freedom. With non-free software one must simply trust whoever, or whichever organization, created it. With free software, this ‘whoever’ is socially open-ended, with responsibility ultimately lying with the community of users itself.
"opens up a space of social agency that is not at all trivial" is nice (on open source)
There are moments when the mask slips, when his failure to truly engage with the humanity of the victims and survivors shines through. He often appeals to a ‘we’ that is all too clearly a cypher for his own responses to the event. “All over Britain, the sight of the burning tower gave people a horrible sense of dread followed by a sense of relief,” he writes, as though it is a matter of public record, a fact as indisputable as the number of 999 calls, or the square-meterage of the building. This slippage reveals the power of O’Hagan’s rhetoric. In an article that purports to be a dispassionate, objective account of events, a speculative statement that is predicated entirely on the (clearly ridiculous) notion that Andrew O’Hagan has unlimited access to the interior worlds of “people all over Britain” passes by almost unnoticed. [...] Reading the piece, I almost fell for it; I doubted myself, I questioned myself, I looked back over last year’s writings to try and re-attune to the person I was back then. And I’m as certain as I can be that Grenfell did not make me feel “alive” or “exhilarated”. It made me feel sad, and angry, and powerless. It made me mourn for days. The summer grew dark. I felt the fear and the sadness in my bones. “No man is an island,” as the poem goes—except, perhaps, for Andrew O’Hagan.
[...] The question becomes, then, who is permitted to feel? Whose feelings count? To borrow from Judith Butler, which bodies—indeed, which hearts—matter?5 Who do we choose to hear? In tacit response to these questions, O’Hagan grieves the jobs of Nicholas Paget-Brown and Rock Feilding-Mellen at least as deeply as he grieves the lives of those who perished—and those who survived, traumatised, to live and relive that night for as long as they live.