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On the one hand, in their opposition to ‘things’ (commodities and money), persons are real individuals who are pre-existent and already engaged with others in a social activity of production; on the other, with these same things, they are functions of the exchange relation or, alternatively, as Marx has it juridical ‘masks’ which individuals have to assume to be able themselves to be ‘bearers’ of commodity relations. [...]
kinda dense but worth keeping maybe
[...] for Marx, progress is neither modernity nor liberalism nor, even less, is it capitalism. Or, rather, ‘dialectically’, it is capitalism insofar as capitalism makes socialism inevitable and, conversely, socialism insofar as socialism resolves the contradictions of capitalism.
[...] in the case of the human species, which was thereby distinguished from every other species, individuals possess another essential attribute, consisting in their consciousness of their relationship to the common kind. Human beings are not only defined by membership of the human race but by their consciousness of belonging to it (an idea Marx himself abundantly employed in earlier texts). This enables them to construct a moral community on the basis of such consciousness.
[...] it is mistakenly assumed that human consciousness is a constant "original" which computers will either "copy" or fail to "copy". In fact, the distinction is far less sustainable, and human consciousness is already becoming computerized. This book is concerned with the question of what consciousness to come is shown by virtual reality and by gaming. It is therefore in some ways indebted to McKenzie Wark's influential idea that it is less a question of games becoming like reality but of reality becoming like games. The dialectic interplay between reality and the virtual is a site at which the future can become visible.
[...] this means controlling the actions and paths of people to best produce profit for those with corporate interests in the city, something that is now done primarily via smartphones.
on Ingress / Pokemon GO
[...] Our mobile phones pretend to be about fulfilling every desire [...] yet what is much scarier than the fact that the user can fulfill desire via the mobile phone is the possibility that the phone creates those desires in the first place. While the user thinks they are doing what they want, as if desires already exist and are simply facilitated by the device, in fact Google has an even greater power: the ability to create and organize desire itself. [...]
[...] If McGonigal is right that games can seize us and affect us when we are feeling aimless, hopeless, or anxious--dealing with those feelings of fragmentation and transforming them into something concrete and apparently positive--then this should make the alarm bells ring and cause us to be very suspicious. It shows us nothing more than the extent to which games are powerful ideological tools. [...]
referring to a fairly staid TED talk by Jane McGonigal on WoW
[...] it is essential that such games are experienced as a complete waste of time. Their purpose is in part to erase a clear distinction between work and leisure so that the worker must "pay back" their Candy Crush indulgence by answering emails in bed at night, for example.
Such games aid capitalism not by stimulating capitalist success or endorsing its principles, but by appearing to be totally useless and nothing more than a complete waste of precious time. By appearing as such they are able to make the mundane work we perform for capitalism seem so much the more "productive" and "useful" by contrast. After we have "wasted" five minutes on Cookie Clicker, we feel like we are carrying out an act that is both productive and reparative when we return to Microsoft Excel afterward. [...] these distractions not only consolidate our impression that capitalist productivity is comparatively useful and positive, but also make us feel indebted and keen to make amends to an employer after gaming. Such games are a kind of licensed transgression that not only allows society to continue unharmed, but actually reinforces our desire to pay back what we owe for our little acts of perceived nonconformism. Additionally, they renew our commitment to capitalist production when we might otherwise be reflecting on how unfulfilling our working conditions are.
p38: mentions Benjamin's theories on distraction as an alternative to contemplation
General education is basically an attempt to democratize what had been an elite mold. It’s a combination of Humboldt, with the whole idea of Bildung, and a little bit of Oxbridge, I think. There used to be the idea of an educated gentleman, who was able to confront a whole range of problems, from sewage in Calcutta to tribal warfare in Iraq on the basis of having thoroughly studied the classics. Now, we don’t do that kind of canonical education, and Sosc Core is of course much more critical than that. But the attempt to promote critical awareness flies in the face of vocational education. So it’s a critical attempt. I think it could be a profoundly democratic attempt.
One of the reasons why Black Skins, White Masks is very uncomfortable for a lot of students is that it’s in part a psychoanalytic approach to the experience of being Other. In postcolonial thought, by contrast, the Other is a reified category. It’s reverse Orientalism, where you’re not allowed to do a critical analysis of a Muslim society. With what’s going on now, people are totally helpless conceptually.
[...]
One of the reasons I think Fanon is so challenging, for many students, is because he argues that the system of racism creates certain kinds of selves that are not free from it, that it does not sit like a carapace on the black self, which is just waiting to burst the carapace and emerge. In some respects, aspects of The Wretched of the Earth are for me a theoretical regression and indissolubly linked with a valorization of violence as liberating. There is a kind of fairy tale that racist structures remain external to people, and that all you have to do is change the structure and everything will poof! Then there’s just you and me. There’s no damage done. It’s a form of positivism. And I think Black Skin, White Masks makes students uncomfortable because that isn’t what he does there.