by
Jon Baskin
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[...] The opening scene stages the very common modern confrontation between an individual who identifies his most precious self with his inner "feelings and beliefs" and a society that treats that human being like an automaton, "bred for a function." The confrontation, Wallace suggests, is mutually reinforcing. The harder the inward-facing individual bumps up against this alienating society (it is symptomatic that as Hal gets more and more uncomfortable, one of the administrators gives the great modern-bureaucratic excuse that they are just "doing our jobs"), the farther he is encouraged to retreat from it, until there can hardly be any communication betwen what the individual conceives of as his essential self nad society at all. [...]
IJ
[...] it is not only by emphasizing simplicity and sincerity that Wallace's AA plays its central role in Infinite Jest's philosophical therapy; it is rather by advancing a picture of thought, and of philosophy, that will seem unfamiliar and perhaps initially banal to most of his readers. The idea is not to install belief in AA, or in anything else, but rather to expose the confusions and limitations of the picture of thinking to which many of Wallace's readers and characters already subscribe. Wallace uses AA not to introduce his readers to a new model of belief but to bring them to consciousness about what they already believe.
[...] The stillness and enclosedness of the poet's environment reflects an inner condition of decadent self-satisfaction, which Wallace depicts as stagnant or lifeless. Iannis Goerlandt says that "one of the points the story makes is that the end lies in this stasis, not in death itself." The story's title, "Death Is Not the End," is most naturally taken as referring to the artist's desire for immortality through art. But it is precisely this desire, Wallace implies, that causes death to come before the end. Paradoxically, the artist's desire to stand apart and transcend finitude or death will lead him to create dead or lifeless art; after all, there is only one way - as Cavell would say - to escape the human.
A solution to this problem might seem to be to deny that the judgment of others has anything to do with who we are or what we mean - that is, to decisively privilege our "inner" selves over the self that we expose to the public. But this option, sometimes associated with romanticism or modernism in the arts, is connected in Brief Interviews to the temptation to remain "forever overhead," like the decadently isolated writer in "Death Is Not the End" or the boy poised on the edge of the diving board. [...]
responding to the conundrum posed in "radically condensed history of postindustrial life"
[...] Brief Interviews presents many characters seeking to secure victory over skepticism and thereby over their dependence on other people and on the external world - a view from "forever overhead," as it were. In criticzing this aspiration - a criticism carried out not through analysis but via a representation of its practical and moral consequences - Wallace encourages just such an endless refusal of victory. [...]
The original Luddites are similarly misunderstood. As Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in a 1952 article, machine breaking was a common tactic of labor resistance during the Industrial Revolution. Rather than directing their anger at technology per se, workers broke machines “as a means of coercing their employers into granting them concessions with regard to wages and other matters.” Such sabotage “was directed not only against machines, but also against raw material, finished goods, and even the private property of employers.”
The modern figure of the Luddite is valuable to capitalists and their ideologues for primarily rhetorical reasons: if workers can be portrayed as hostile to some method or device that has manifestly positive qualities, they can be dismissed as selfish or irrational. Never mind that in many cases, the problem is that useful and potentially emancipatory technologies are trapped within a capitalist integument, optimized to maximize private profit rather than social wealth.
[...] Winning a share of the fruits of automation for the rest of us requires victory at the level of the state rather than the individual workplace.
This could be done through a universal basic income, a minimum payment guaranteed to all citizens completely independent of work. If pushed by progressive forces, the UBI would be a non-reformist reform that would also quicken automation by making machines more competitive against workers better positioned to reject low wages. It would also facilitate labor organization by acting as a kind of strike fund and cushion against the threat of joblessness.
A universal basic income could defend workers and realize the potential of a highly developed, post-scarcity economy; it could break the false choice between well-paid workers or labor-saving machines, strong unions or technological advancement.
not sure how I feel about this ... seems like it could easily lead to a local maximum (suboptimal equilibrium)
This kind of gamification promises solutions to inequality that will come faster and more efficiently than governments can deliver them by “channelizing user agency.” Inequality? There’s an app for that!
Technophobia might seem to be the only response from the Left. For every injustice, we are presented with a purportedly politically neutral tech-based solution, which promises to solve the problems of the dispossessed without ever disturbing the privileges of the powerful. In such a depoliticized climate, it is no surprise that some radicals have come to be suspicious of technology, to see social relations of domination inscribed in the forces of production themselves.
Such an attitude, however justified, does an injustice to the legacy of socialist thinking on technology. From the beginning of the modern workers’ movement, concerns about the place of technological progress in the attempts to confront “the social problem” have been central to socialist theory. If we examine some of the positions that shaped socialist thinking on technology, we can use them to reconstruct a role for those who refused to let what Brecht called “the new bad things” rest in the hands of gamifiers and disruptors.
With these three principles, Braverman restored Marx’s emphasis on the class implications of technology in capitalist society. Scientific management was no neutral technique for improving efficiency, but a scheme for controlling labor in its struggle with capital. The failure to appreciate this point is clear in Lenin and Gramsci’s discussions of Taylorism and Fordism, and leads quite directly to the one-sided conclusions they reached about the applicability of Taylorist techniques in post-capitalist society.
Braverman defines three principles of Taylorism:
- dissociation of labour process from skills of workers (deskilling them to reduce their power)
- separating conception from execution (instead of allowing workers to design their own processes, which again gives them too much power)
- scientific management, where management redesigns the production process for maximum profit
Extreme travel firm Space Adventures began offering occasional private trips to the International Space Station in 2001. Ticket prices reached $30 million.
not a bad way of getting rid of rich people tbh