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September 2017. Emmanuel Macron condemns the “laziness” of those in France who, according to him, are blocking his reforms. You’ve always known that this word is reserved for people like you, people who can’t work because they live too far from large towns, who can’t find work because they were driven out of the educational system too soon, without a diploma, who can’t work anymore because life in the factory has mangled their back. We don’t use the word lazy to describe a boss who sits in an office all day ordering other people around. We’d never say that. When I was little, you were always saying, obsessively, I’m not lazy, because you knew this insult hung over you, like a specter you wished to exorcize.
There is no pride without shame: you were proud of not being lazy because you were ashamed to be one of those to whom that word could be applied. For you the word lazy is a threat, a humiliation. This kind of humiliation by the ruling class breaks your back again.
August 2017. The government of Emmanuel Macron withdraws five euros per month from the most vulnerable people in France: it reduces—by five euros—the housing subsidies that allow France’s poorest people to pay their monthly rent. The same day, or a day or two later, the government announces a tax cut for the wealthiest in France. It thinks the poor are too rich, and that the rich aren’t rich enough. Macron’s government explains that five euros per month is nothing. They have no idea. They pronounce these criminal sentences because they have no idea. Emmanuel Macron is taking the bread out of your mouth.
You’ve changed these past few years. You’ve become a different person. We’ve talked, a lot. We’ve explained ourselves. I’ve told you how I resented the person you were when I was a child—how I resented your hardness, your silence, the scenes that I’ve just described—and you’ve listened. And I have listened to you. You used to say the problem with France was the foreigners and the homosexuals, and now you criticize French racism. You ask me to tell you about the man I love. You buy the books I publish. You give them to people you know. You changed from one day to the next. A friend of mine says it’s the children who mold their parents and not the other way around.
But because of what they’ve done to your body, you will never have a chance to uncover the person you’ve become.
Last month, when I came to see you, you asked me just before I left, Are you still involved in politics? The word still was a reference to my first year in high school, when I belonged to a radical leftist party and we argued because you thought I’d get myself into trouble if I took part in illegal demonstrations. Yes, I told you, more and more involved. You let three or four seconds go by. Then you said, You’re right. You’re right—what we need is a revolution.
A tablet doesn't really enable one to fully run one's own affairs on one's own terms. A personal computer is designed so that you own your own data. PCs enabled millions of people to run their own affairs. The PC strengthened the middle class. Tablets are instead optimized for delivering entertainment, but the real problem is that you can't use them without ceding information superiority to someone else. In most cases, you cannot even turn them on without giving over personal information.
He shies away from what I think is the larger problem here, which is that tablets make it very hard for you to go under the hood. They are expressly designed for an easy-to-use UI at the expense of allowing the consumer to understand how it all works. You're not encouraged to tinker or write your own commands. If you want to build an app for it, you'll have to get a separate development device.
Instagram isn't worth a billion dollars just because those thirteen employees are extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it. Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. That has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.
he makes a good point but doesn't quite get to cosmic brain status: valuations are arbitrary and, at heart, political. Instagram is "worth" a billion dollars because Facebook decided it was, and we can only imagine that Facebook decided accordingly after running cost projections on how much more money it could get from advertisers in the long run. But that is an inherently subjective measure that takes into account how many years of revenue Facebook is looking at (i.e., how deep its coffers are right now); fantastical projections about Instagram's ability to attract and retain users in the future; and arbitrary decisions about how much to charge advertisers. Ultimately, Instagram is worth a billion dollars because enough people decided it was. Rather than accepting this valuation as God-given and trying to divide up this amount among Instagram's presumed contributors, we should question the idea of Instagram being worth anything at all.
Instead, his solution seems to be (and I think he clarifies it over the next few chapters) that we should pay all Instagram users who contribute anything to the service. Even if you could convince Facebook that it was worth doing this, I don't see how this will solve the winner-takes-all problem (you already see this with influencer marketing).
[...] People are not just pointlessly diluting themselves on cultural, intellectual, and spiritual levels by fawning over digital superhuman phenomena that don't necessarily exist. There is also a material cost.
People are gradually making themselves poorer than they need to be. We're setting up a situation where better technology in the long term just means more unemployment, or an eventual socialist backlash. Instead, we should seek a future where more people will do well, without losing liberty, even as technology gets much, much better.
Popular digital designs do not treat people as being "special enough." People are treated as small elements in a bigger information machine, when in fact people are the only sources or destinations of information, or indeed of any meaning to the machine at all. My goal is to portray an alternate future in which people are treated appropriately as being special.
mostly agreed, though he does not justify his fear of this "socialist backlash", either here or later in the book--I think he just presumes the reader will share that fear. I guess he did write this book way before DSA's recent explosion in membership & in popular culture, so maybe his views have shifted since then?
An amazing number of people offer an amazing amount of value over networks. But the lion's share of wealth now flows to those who aggregate and route those offerings, rather than those who provide the "raw materials." A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy, could come about if we could break out of the "free information" idea and into a universal micropayment system. We might even be able to strengthen individual liberty and self-determination even when the machines get very good.
I mean this is true but it's the centrist's way out. It's the Hillary Clinton route: overly focused on the middle class and not inspiring. It might be better than the alternative of the middle class slowly dying, but if we're in such a dire situation that that's actually a possibility, why not consider the more radical project of abolishing classes entirely?
If information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued in economic terms. If, however, "raw" information, or information that hasn't yet been routed by those who run the most central computers, isn't valued, then a massive disenfranchisement will take place. As the information economy arises, the old specter of a thousand science fiction tales and Marxist nightmares will be brought back from the dead and empowered to apocalyptic proportions. Ordinary people will be unvalued by the new economy, while those closest to the top computers will become hypervaluable.
but NO accounting is EVER complete and honest. That is literally the whole idea behind surplus value, which is the key concept that fuels capitalism. the best we could hope for is some middle ground between "complete and honest" accounting and the free-for-all situation we have now, where corporations sacrifice some of their profit margin in exchange for paying users the minimum amount of money necessary to keep them happy.
His solution to ordinary people being "unvalued by the new economy" is to propose that they be undervalued instead. which is, of course, standard centrist spiel, but hardly the audacious proposal I was expecting from a book like this.
Even the most successful players of the game are gradually undermining the core of their own wealth. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. A market system can only be sustainable when the accounting is through enough to reflect where value comes from, which, I'll demonstrate, is another way of saying that an information age middle class must come into being.
at least he does recognise this fact! and he does address UBI proposals later on (though skeptically). the only problem is his teleological approach of capitalism no matter what the cost ...
In the event that something a person says or does contributes even minutely to a database that allows, say, a machine language translation algorithm, or a market prediction algorithm, to perform a task, then a nanopayment, proportional both to the degree of contribution and the resultant value, will be due to the person.
this is literally impossible to do well (by any measure) and i feel like i'm having a stroke just thinking about this. i don't even know how to express the degree to which this proposal makes no sense