topic/drift
David Van Reybrouck,
Guy Standing,
Ellen Ullman,
Mark Fisher,
John Hills,
Wolfgang Streeck,
Terry Eagleton,
Slavoj Žižek,
Yanis Varoufakis,
Bob Hughes
[...] Electoral fundamentalists refuse to regard elections as a means of taking part in democracy, seeing them instead as an end in themselves, as a holy doctrine with an intrinsic, inalienable value.
drift I tell you!
When the supporters of the American and French revolutions proposed elections as a way of getting to know 'the will of the people', there were as yet no political parties, no laws regarding universal franchise, no commercial mass media, let alone social media. In fact the inventors of electoral-representative democracy had no idea that any of these things would come into existence. [...]
this is so drifty i'm crying
[...] Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark, not next to ideas but next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness? Would we still have the nerve to call what is in fact a bizarre, archaic ritual 'a festival of democracy'?
drift drift drift
(basically it needs refactoring)
The French Revolution, like the American, did not dislodge the aristocracy to replace it with a democracy but rather dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy [...] a new upper bourgeoisie took power. It derived its legitimacy no longer from God, soil or birth but from another relic of the aristocratic era, elections. This explains the exhausting arguments about suffrage and the severe limitations placed on it, as only those who paid sufficient tax could qualify. Only one out of every six citizens in France was allowed to vote in the first parliamentary elections, according to the constitution of 1791. [...]
he says later on that elections were "never actually intended as a democractic instrument in the first place" which is an interesting point that I'll need to incorporate into my theory of drift
[...] When the International Monetary Fund forces austerity measures on a country, it's not like there's less food, housing, or education to go around than before--the problem is that the current economic system can't distribute access to these according to human need. The same goes for famines that plague one nation while another pays farmers subsidies not to grow crops: the means exist to eradicate famine once and for all, but they will never be used for this so long as resources flow according to the laws of profit.
drift! a great instance of capitalism dominating us because we let it
[...] How would it help if, in the awful and explicit way of computer systems, Reggie made clear what everyone knew-that there was a little fudging going on around the edges, so that providers could get a little extra and give a little more. In the absence of the machine, everyone could wink at these small rough edges. But Reggie-cute little Reggie with its guacamole-colored screens and the smiling face of an African-American man with AIDS-could make it all plain beyond deniability. "Don't do this," I said to the director. "Once you have this information, you'll have to do something about it."
But she was adamant. "The people paying for this system have a right to good data!" she declared.
In this way, the system became the justification for the system. We collected data, therefore it had to be "good" data. And since we could link one database to another, since it was possible to cross-check data here with data there, well, we should link them. And what was designed to store patients' information as a service for them, had somehow become the property of the "people paying for this system"- an agency of the federal government.
Many years and clients later, this greed for more data, and more again, had become a commonplace. It had become institutionalized as a good feature of computer systems: you can link them up, you can cross-check, you can find out all sorts of things you didn't set out to know. "I bet this thing can tell me what everyone is up to all day," said the insurance agent whose employee of twenty-six years knew all his customers by name. "The people who own this system have a right to good data!" said the woman who had set out to do a favor for sick people.
I'd like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image. Like the rock-and-roll culture, it forms an irresistible horizontal country that obliterates the long, slow, old cultures of place and custom, law and social life. We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we are making it in our own image. We call the microprocessor the "brain"; we say the machine has "memory." But the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity. It is as if we took the game of chess and declared it the highest order of human existence.
a pretty disturbing story of a client who wants his secretary's keystrokes monitored. she thinks of it as getting seduced by the promises of the system, though, whereas i would just call it drift
[...] Egalitarian democracy, regarded under Keynesianism as economically productive, is considered a drag on efficiency under contemporary Hayekianism, where growth is to derive from insulation of markets – and of the cumulative advantage they entail – against redistributive political distortions.
Under 'business as usual', however, managements are less concerned with discharging an organization's avowed purpose (providing nutritious food, easy transport between A and B, warmth, comfort, and so on) than with discharging their responsibilities to shareholders (to provide healthy dividends and an ever-rising share price) or to themselves (to maintain their careers on a constantly rising trajectory and their children at private schools). Such organizations are simply not equipped to tackle their alleged aims, but Ashby's law decrees that the discrepancy between claim and reality must be made up somehow. [...]
by "shouting", basically