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The journalist Mark Ames explains how apparently disparate political interests, especially in the context of Silicon Valley, can be seen to work together. Reflecting on some surprising alliances between today’s technology giants and the lobbying groups and of the world’s major extractive resource companies, Ames (2015) writes that
even if we still give Google and Facebook the benefit of the doubt, and allow that their investments in the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute weren’t directly motivated by killing Obamacare and throwing millions of struggling Americans back into the ranks of the uninsured and prematurely dying—nevertheless, they are accessories, and very consciously so. Big Tech’s larger political goals are in alignment with the old extraction industry’s: undermining the countervailing power of government and public politics to weaken its ability to impede their growing dominance over their portions of the economy, and to tax their obscene stores of cash.
Google—like Facebook, like Koch Industries—wants a government that’s strong enough to enforce its dominant private power over the economy and citizens and protect its wealth, but too broken and too alienated from the public to adequately represent the public interest against their domineering monopolistic power.
In practice, opposition to “government regulation of the internet” is best understood as a core (and in important ways vague) tenet, around which circulate greater and greater claims for the “freedom” created by digital technology. At its most expansive, cyberlibertarianism can be thought of as something like a belief according to which freedom will emerge inherently from the increasing development of digital technology, and therefore entails that efforts to interfere with or regulate that development must be antithetical to freedom—although what “freedom” means in this context is much less clear than it may seem. As Winner (1997, 14–15) puts it, to be a cyberlibertarian is to believe that “the dynamism of digital technology is our true destiny. There is no time to pause, reflect or ask for more influence in shaping these developments. . . . In the writings of cyberlibertarians those able to rise to the challenge are the champions of the coming millennium. The rest are fated to languish in the dust.”
[...] There were also, of course, the honest folk, those who work, who ensure the effective production of wealth, also those who make sacrifices for their children—in a manner that is rather comic or, if you like, pathetic (but I was, above all, a comedian); those who have neither beauty in their youth, nor ambition later, nor riches ever; but who hold on wholeheartedly, and more sincerely than anyone, to the values of beauty, youth, wealth, ambition, and sex; those who, in some kind of way, make the sauce bind. Those people, I am afraid to say, could not constitute a subject. I did, however, include a few of them in my sketches to give diversity, and the reality effect; but I began all the same to get seriously tired. [...]
interesting
During the first phases of my rise to fortune and glory, I had occasionally tasted the joys of consumption, by which our epoch shows itself so superior to those that preceded it. You could quibble forever over whether men were more or less happy in past centuries. You could comment on the disappearance of religions, the difficulty of feeling love, discuss the disadvantages and advantages of both; you could mention the appearance of democracy, the loss of our sense of the sacred, the crumbling of social ties. I myself had done such things, in a lot of sketches, though in a humorous way. You could even question scientific and technological progress, and be under the impression, for example, that the improvement of medical techniques had been at the cost of increasing social control and an overall decrease in joie de vivre. But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing, in any other civilization, in any other epoch, could compare itself to the mobile perfection of a contemporary shopping center functioning at full tilt. I had thus consumed, with joy, shoes most notably; then, gradually, I had grown weary, and I had understood that my life, without this daily input of basic, renewable pleasures, was going to stop being simple.
That show also marked the beginning of my brief—but lucrative—movie career. I had inserted a short film into the performance; my initial project, entitled Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine!, already had that tone of light Islamophobic burlesque which was later going to contribute so much to my renown; but, on Isabelle’s advice, I had had the idea of introducing a touch of anti-Semitism, aimed at counterbalancing the rather anti-Arab nature of the show; it was a wise route to take. I therefore finally opted for a porn film, or rather a parody of a porn film—a genre that, it’s true, is easy to parody—entitled Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler). The actresses were authentic Arab immigrant girls, guaranteed to originate from the hardest Parisian suburbs—sluts but veiled, just the right type; we had filmed the outside shots at the Sea of Sand, in Ermenonville. It was comical—a rather elevated form of comedy, that’s true. People had laughed; or at least most people. In an interview with Jamel Debbouze, he described me as a “super-cool dude”; you couldn’t have asked for more. In fact, Jamel had told me just before the program: “I can’t wind you up, dude. We’ve got the same audience.” The TV presenter Marc Fogiel, who had organized the meeting, quickly realized our complicity, and began to shit his pants; I have to admit that for a long time I had been wanting to eviscerate that little prick. But I contained myself: I was very good—super-cool, in fact.
oh my god
It was then that I decided to marry Isabelle; we had known each other for three years, which placed us precisely in the average of premarital association. The ceremony was discreet, and a little sad; she had just turned forty. It seems obvious to me today that the two events were linked; that I wanted, as a proof of affection, to minimize her shock at turning forty. Not that it manifested itself in complaints, or a visible anguish, or anything clearly definable; it was both more fleeting and more poignant. Occasionally—especially in Spain, when we were preparing to go to the beach, and she was putting on her swimsuit—I could feel her, at the moment when I glanced at her, wincing slightly, as if she had felt a punch between the shoulder blades. A quickly stifled grimace of pain distorted her magnificent features—the beauty of her fine, sensitive face was of the kind that resists time; but her body, despite the swimming, despite the classical dance, was beginning to suffer the first blows of age—blows which, she knew all too well, were going to multiply rapidly, leading to total degradation. I didn’t fully know what it was that happened to my facial expression in those moments that made her suffer so much; I would have given a great deal to avoid it, for, I repeat, I loved her; but manifestly that wasn’t possible. Nor could I reiterate that she was still as desirable, still as beautiful; I never felt, in the slightest way, capable of lying to her. I recognized the look she wore afterward: it was that humble, sad look of the sick animal that steps away from the pack, puts its head on its paws, and sighs softly, because it feels itself wounded and knows that it can expect no pity from its fellow creatures.
What was worse, however, was that this ideal of plastic beauty, to which she could never again have access, was going to destroy Isabelle before my very eyes. First of all, there were her breasts, which she could no longer stand (and it’s true they were beginning to droop a bit); then her buttocks, which were following the same course. More and more often, it became necessary to turn off the light; then sexuality itself disappeared. She could no longer stand herself; and, consequently, she could no longer stand love, which seemed to her to be false. I could, however, at the beginning, still get a hard-on, at least a little bit; that too disappeared, and from that moment on, it was over; all that remained was a memory of the deceptively ironical words of the Andalusian poet:
Oh, the life men try to live!
Oh, the life they lead
In the world they live in!
The poor souls, the poor souls…
They don’t know how to love.
When sexuality disappears, it’s the body of the other that appears, as a vaguely hostile presence; the sounds, movements, and smells; even the presence of this body that you can no longer touch, nor sanctify through touch, becomes gradually oppressive; all this, unfortunately, is well known. The disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism. There is no refined relationship, no higher union of souls, nor anything that might resemble it, or even evoke it allusively. When physical love disappears, everything disappears; a dreary, depthless irritation fills the passing days. And, with regard to physical love, I hardly had any illusions. Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism. In short, I was in the shit.
[...] At that time, the judicial arsenal aimed at repressing sexual relations with minors was getting tougher; crusades for chemical castration were multiplying. To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based. I knew all this, I knew it inside out, in fact I had used it as material for many a sketch; this did not stop me from succumbing to the same process. I woke up in the middle of the night, and downed three glasses of water. I imagined the humiliations I would have to endure to seduce any teenage girl; the painfully extracted consent, the girl’s shame as we went out together in the street, her hesitation to introduce me to her friends, the carefree way in which she would ditch me for a boy of her age. I imagined all this, over and over again, and I understood that I could not survive it. In no way did I pretend to escape from the laws of nature: the inevitable decrease of the erectile capacities of the penis, the necessity of finding young bodies to jam that mechanism…I opened a packet of salami and a bottle of wine. Oh well, I told myself, I will pay; when I reach that point, when I need tight little asses to keep up my erection, then I’ll pay. I’ll pay the market price. Five hundred euros for a blow job, who did that Slav girl think she was? It was worth fifty, no more. In the vegetable drawer, I discovered an opened chestnut mousse. What seemed shocking to me, at this stage in my reflection, was not that there were young girls available for money, but that there were some who are not available, or only at prohibitive prices; in short, I wanted a regulation of the market.
Its failure with the critics, on the other hand, was real; to this day I still think it was undeserved. “An undistinguished knockabout farce,” was the headline in Le Monde, differentiating itself from its more moralistic peers, who raised, especially in their editorials, the question of banning it. It was certainly a comedy, and most of the gags were very obvious, if not vulgar; but there were certain passages of dialogue, in certain scenes, which seem to me, with hindsight, to be the best thing I ever produced. In particular in Corsica, in the long sequence filmed on the slopes of Bavella, where the hero (played by me) shows the little Aurore (nine years old), whom he has just conquered over a Disney tea at Marineland in Bonifacio, around his second home.
“There’s no point in living in Corsica,” she hurled insolently, “if it means living on a bend in the road.”
“To see cars pass,” he (I) replied, “is already to live a little.”
No one had laughed; neither during the screen test, nor at the comic film festival in Montbazon. And yet, and yet, I told myself, never had I reached such heights. Could Shakespeare himself have produced such dialogue? Could he have even imagined it, the sad fool?
lol
This figure was the result of a long evolution, scarcely begun at the time of Daniel1, when the average age at death was much higher, and suicide by old people was still infrequent. The now-ugly, deteriorated bodies of the elderly were, however, already the object of unanimous disgust, and it was undoubtedly the heat wave of summer 2003, which was particularly deadly in France, that provoked the first consciousness of the phenomenon. “The Death March of the Elderly” was the headline in Libération on the day after the first figures became known—more than ten thousand people, in the space of two weeks, had died in the country; some had died alone in their apartments, others in the hospital or in retirement homes, but all had essentially died because of a lack of care. In the weeks that followed, that same newspaper published a series of atrocious reports, illustrated with photos that were reminiscent of concentration camps, relating the agony of old people crammed into communal rooms, naked on their beds, in diapers, moaning all day without anyone coming to rehydrate them or even to give them a glass of water; describing the rounds made by nurses unable to contact the families who were on vacation, regularly gathering up the corpses to make space for new arrivals. “Scenes unworthy of a modern country,” wrote the journalist, without realizing that they were in fact the proof that France was becoming a modern country, that only an authentically modern country was capable of treating old people purely as rubbish, and that such contempt for one’s ancestors would have been inconceivable in Africa, or in a traditional Asian country.