by
Lee McGuigan
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[...] the personal data economy, as a site for capital investment and accumulation, amplifies myths about the emancipatory and/or empowering nature of digital prosumption (e.g., Google, Facebook, and Apple).
citing a 2012 WEF report called "Rethinking Personal Data" (saying it's a key economic resource)
nothing really new but possibly worth citing (and the description of it as a "site" is intriguing)
The audience commodity is not a material thing, but an abstraction that gains a reality in the commercial organization of media systems. It is an abstraction produced by the logic of acceleration inherent in capitalism's sphere of circulation. Following economic historian Karl Polanyi (2001), the audience commodity might be considered an "essential element of industry" and a central "organizing principle" of communication media (76). Just as land, labor and money are "obviously not commodities" in an "empirical sense" (76), the audience commodity is a fictitious commodity that serves a logistical and acceleratory function in reproducing capital both generally and specifically. [...] Mirroring the sale of labor as "labor power" in the sphere of production, the abstraction of the audience commodity allows the sale of "audience power" in the sphere of circulation.
the "acceleratory function" bit is fascinating. need to think more about what that means and how that concept could be translated into other domains
In the cut-throat competition for the scarcest of scarce resources--the attention of would-be consumers--the suppliers of would-be consumer goods, including purveyors of information, desperately search for the scrap of the consumers' time still lying fallow, for the tiniest gaps between moments of consumption which could still be stuffed with more information
great quote. p40 of Consuming Life
[...] By promising people that it is possible to buy their way out of trouble with purchasable solutions to personal and social problems, the animating ideology of consumerism cancels the collective responsibilities traditionally embedded in the identities of the worker and the citizen. Understanding how this commercial enclosure of everyday activity and imagination operates through the promotion of commodities is an essential starting point for any effort to retrieve a conception of citizenship that speaks to the internal complexities of contemporary societies and the shared challenges that transcend national borders.
not at all relevant to diss but quite nice on individual vs collective responsibility
[...] More generally, post-Fordist capitalism and the neoliberal policies shaping it reflect and have generated a more competitive world economy in which various fractions of organized labor have been gutted. [...]
just good phrasing
This leaves me with the thought that the problem and possibilities of the contemporary social novel are not exclusively tied to genre—i.e., they are not the classical problems of the novel, per se. They aren’t exactly the problems and possibilities offered by the familiar challenge of maintaining a balance between action and description (famously described by György Lukács in his rants on the political efficacy of realist prose). There’s something challenging in this unfamiliar territory but also something hopeful, not just because we seem still to like novels, but because it’s clear that literature can contribute, in a significant way, to contemporary events. And where literature can help is in its combinatory and experimental capacities. Novelists can do things and try things that academics and critics cannot. So I am advocating for that now. Let’s have more social novels that explore the disruption and near-impossibility of our cherished narrative forms. Let’s have more social novels that look for narrative—and even fail to find it. In their spectacular and detailed failure, such novels may more closely resemble us.
Also under Eisenhower, USIA sent hundreds of thousands of books overseas to USIS libraries, subsidizing the U.S. publishing industry in an effort to woo the world’s readers away from the lures of communism. USIA officials carefully vetted books to ensure that only those that supported official U.S. policy and met with positive reception among the American public were designated as “acceptable” to foreign cultures and ticketed for wide cultural export. While the CIA funded and organized a Russian language edition of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, USIA rejected Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and William Lederer’s The Ugly American as far too morally equivocal statements on U.S. participation in the Second Word War and (in Lederer’s case) the ensuing promotion of American-style freedom abroad.
USIA also got into the business of directly bankrolling the publication of books that would promote a positive image of America. [...]
let's bring this back but like only for communist books
Exiting the social-democratic nightmare meant, in part, learning, and teaching, a new language. The socialistic shibboleths of “security,” “planning,” “economic democracy,” and “full employment” would have to be confronted and countered with new ideals of competition and entrepreneurship. People like the Brooklyn high school juniors had learned, through years of Depression and war, to associate freedom with security from the thing called “the market,” in its various manifestations: a cruel boss, a closed factory gate, a sped-up assembly line. To redeem the free enterprise system, the apostles of private property needed a vocabulary for emancipation through the market. [...]
[...] the only time the economic circumstances of the people become important is in their cynical and strategic deployment as cultural signifiers enabling the conspicuous display of a political leader’s putative earthiness.
also relevant to tech ceos talking about their army of underpaid workers
Behind all this frenetic policing of culturalized class authenticity is a deep and worsening contradiction at the heart of Anglo-American politics on the right. Modern conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic has frequently bedecked itself in an of-the-people rhetoric in the face of a range of hard-to-refute egalitarian and redistributive critiques. We know this much about the spread of right-wing populism across the generations: it’s what happens when elites can no longer excuse their status on the grounds of kingly magnificence and exceptional genealogy. Instead, they have to turn to a range of bogus emotive rhetorical strategies to arrogate authority from below. Historically, liberals—as distinguished from the socialist left—have been swift to object to this sort of thing, priding themselves on their rationality, fairness, and ironclad faith in meritocracy. In the United States, Trump is a bogeyman for liberals precisely because he is regarded as the zenith—or nadir, as the case may be—of a uniquely unmitigated strain of demagogic truth-avoidance; the same can be said in the United Kingdom for Robinson and the Bad Boys of Brexit. But this placid and complacent mode of counterattack sidesteps, perhaps deliberately, the question of why liberals throughout the Anglosphere—and, indeed, beyond—are engaged in almost precisely the same thing they want to hang Trump or Farage out to dry for.