I'm sick of the nattering about so-called revolutionary social media. I hope this video helps illustrate why:
AmEx has managed to do what it does best - capitalize on the relations in a society organized to capture labor and turn it into profit, for companies such as AmEx. Using the supposedly revolutionary new means of "horizontal" and democratic interaction - you know, the ballyhooed fountainheads of not only the Arab Spring, but resurgent progressive politics - AmEx has, with less than a minute of video, done us all a tremendous service. It has shown twitter, social media and the internet for what they are: means of capitalized exchange.
It's ad men have shown us the naked operation of spectacular forms of control, assimilation and integration.
In a hierarchical, monetized society, there is no democracy, no consent, no free exchange. Any interaction which occurs within the confines of an owned system of exchange belongs to that system, in the same manner in which licensed software belongs to its producer, and text messages remain the property of the phone company.
In our communities, horizontal interactions occur only within hierarchies. There are no social currencies which are not also capitalized ones, owned by fiat or fiction in the name of real chains of command. Capitalist exchange colonizes everything it can, whenever possible, however it can afford to do so.
Social media, in our society, do not develop in a democratic haven safe or secure from corporate predation and influence. Social media are the creation of hierarchically organized bands of expropriators. They are direct and immediate colonizations of human exchange. Every tweet is an advertisement, every update a commodification, every blog post an offer to sell.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
great post
ReplyDeletetechnology developed by capital tends, of course, to serve the interests of capital
but, one shouldn't be too deterministic, as there is always a tension between the purposes behind the development of a particular technological innovation and the forms of resistance to which people put it to use
or, to put it differently, all manifestations of capitalism carry within them the potential for resistance to it, this is, in effect, what dialectical analysis, for all of its strengths and weaknesses, attempts to discern
oddly enough, this is why I tend to be suspicious of some utopian proposals regarding things like education, for example, because I sometimes think that absent an experience of an oppressive system, you can't proceed to create a compassionate, humanistic alternative
I guess you could say that there is a thread of Maoism in my thinking, filtered through the cinema of Fassbinder
Richard,
ReplyDeleteI took an all or nothing approach in order to deliberately outline what seems to be ignored by the triumphalist credo of technology=progress=liberation.
But, you are on the money: tools can have their uses altered.
Justin's "walking the dog" illustrates, in the same way, how mental tools (techniques) can be altered as well, to change relations and outcomes...
...I don't know what I think about education. My experiences were too limited and too personal to allow me to develop an expansive or forgiving view of managed edification. My contempt for sponsored academia should be fairly obvious, at this point, but I'm not convinced that this commends me.
Dammit, all this selling I'm doing and I was a poor as I was before I started blogging. #fuckinghell
ReplyDeleteWe are all AmEx now.
"a thread of Maoism in my thinking, filtered through the cinema of Fassbinder"
ReplyDelete- Sounds like one hell of a party. Twitter it!
Totally agreed Crow. The google is very explicit with their class system:
ReplyDeleteI had access to a personally unprecedented amount of privileges, but was not entitled to the ski trips, DisneyLand adventures, stock options, and holiday cash bonuses from their team of temporary Santa Clauses. Thousands of people with red badges (such as me, my team, and most other contractors) worked amongst thousands of people with white badges (as Full-time Googlers). Interns are given green badges. However, a fourth class exists at Google that involves strictly data-entry labor, or more appropriately, the labor of digitizing. These workers are identifiable by their yellow badges, and they go by the team name ScanOps. They scan books, page by page, for Google Book Search. The workers wearing yellow badges are not allowed any of the privileges that I was allowed – ride the Google bikes, take the Google luxury limo shuttles home, eat free gourmet Google meals, attend Authors@Google talks and receive free, signed copies of the author’s books, or set foot anywhere else on campus except for the building they work in. They also are not given backpacks, mobile devices, thumb drives, or any chance for social interaction with any other Google employees. Most Google employees don’t know about the yellow badge class. Their building, 3.14159~, was next to mine, and I used to see them leave everyday at precisely 2:15 PM, like a bell just rang, telling the workers to leave the factory. Their shift starts at 4 am.
As servile and passive as the author seems, they still fired him. Why? He took an interest in something good google citizens know to ignore.
dr-gonzo: thanks for the link, it's a very compelling story, and I recommend that others read it in its entirety
ReplyDeleteas for describing the author, I think that "naive" is more apt
Yeah, thanks for that link, Dr. G. Enlightening.
ReplyDeleteNaive, sure. Maybe I was being a little harsh. The fact that this guy even took an interest in the google class dynamics means he is several steps ahead of his fellow merit class technocrats in being an actual human.
ReplyDeleteJ.R. Boyd begs to differ:
ReplyDeleteLike, look at this blog man. It's like anarchism sprouting in the midst of consumerism...or some shit.
Perhaps, but every posting on blegher promotes the market penetration of blegher.
ReplyDelete