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[...] Swartz’s two-year prosecution took place at a time when hundreds of millions of dollars were filtering into Innovation Economy institutions. His alleged downloading of academic articles may have seemed innocuous to outsiders, but the lords of these networks knew better. In a climate of imperi…

The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan might have less and less room for poor or middle-income families and no interest in alternative models of development, but innovation economies are fine places to park overaccumulating capital. The city, indeed, could hardly be more hospitable to titans of busine…

The market has been driving the poor and the working class out of these cities ever since, and the Innovation Economy is finishing them off, cleaning house for the new guests. The cost of housing in Cambridge and Greater Boston has zoomed, with rising rents taking a growing share of dwindling low- …

The Innovation Economy’s futurist model of urban development is, in other words, propaganda for the present system of power—it’s class interest presenting itself in the guise of prosperity, and it appears to be the best that these most liberal of liberal Democrats have to offer to the nation.

Wh…

This, you see, is how innovation works. Mask political choices in the universalist rhetoric of the market. Purge the surrounding environment of social intelligence. Surge into the space with vested interests masquerading as public ones, and then call in the future for cover.