On the Traumatized Lives of the Surplus Salaried Bourgeoisie (Professional Managerial Class)
Monday, September 16, 2024
Bidenomics + Border Un-Enforcement = The Legislative and Executive Branch's Potterville -ification of America
How America continues enabling and selling-out to Mr. Potter Robinette Biden for a corporation-sponsored Surplus Salary... instead of enabling, creating, and maintaining a base of employee-owned small businesses
The small Pennsylvania town of Charleroi has been stunned by the federal government’s deliberate one-two punch of economic devastation and out-of-control migration.
Free trade has allowed major investor-owned companies to move their factories from this and other U.S. towns to Mexico, and open-door migration allowed the remaining companies to hire wage-cutting migrants that enter the U.S. from Mexico. The result is a steep loss in well-paid jobs for Americans, a dying-off of local businesses, an explosion of poverty, and the collapse of city tax revenues.
The pressures being put on Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is a case study of the massive failures of the Biden-Harris border crisis, according to a local city council member. But Charleroi is typical of hundreds of American small towns in the problems Biden and Harris have foisted upon them.
Breitbart News spoke exclusively with long-time city councilman Larry Celaschi, and he detailed the massive problems his borough is facing from job loss and the growing migrant crisis, all of which can be ascribed to Biden’s failed economic and border policies.
Celaschi told Breitbart News, “We are a small town of about 4100 in population. And we are not even a mile long.”
But despite its small size, Celaschi adds that back in the day, his Pennsylvania borough was a mercantile mecca for the area. When the steel mills were running at peak output back in the 60s and 70s and before, Charleroi served as a major shopping area for the many bedroom communities whose inhabitants worked at the steel mills, or Anchor Hocking glass factor — where Pyrex cook wear is made — and more recently food maker Quality Pasta.
But almost all of these jobs are now going away as Bidenomics continues to cause U.S. manufacturing to contract or move jobs to facilities in foreign countries, such as Mexico. Just this month, both Anchor Hocking and Quality Pasta have announced that they are looking to scale back, which will result in hundreds of jobs lost in the area.
The closures will leave the city of Charleroi with no large employers and will devastate the town, Celaschi told Breitbart News.
“So, the loss of those jobs decades ago [when the steel mills closed], we saw a trickle down effect that was devastating to Charleroi,” Celaschi lamented. “We had close to 312 stores within our borough. And now, like I said, the devastating effect from the mills, we saw a punch in the gut really, it really did devastate our town.”
Today, with the glass plant and food plant announcing their shutdowns, Celaschi says Charleroi is poised to suffer even more blight and economic devastation.
Celaschi added that town officials are working with Anchor Hocking and Quality Pasta to save their jobs, but if that fails, the loss of the big employers — both of which paid a lot of taxes and used the city-owned water and sewer system — is going to be a major blow to both the citizens and the city.
“Our tax revenue for our borough, and the budget that we have, which we have about a $3 million budget, that’s going to be impacted, you know, the school districts as well, families are going to have to relocate to find another job. So, a lot of these employees living in Charleroi, they walk to work, and now we don’t have any other jobs for them to start over again — to get the same benefits, the same salary, have the same seniority — that’s been stripped from them, and you know, the family sustaining jobs are going to be tough for them to come upon.”
While that is all bad enough, the flood of Haitian and Liberian migrants forced upon the town by failed Biden-Harris policies is making matters worse for the struggling town, Celaschi said.
“Well, you know, again, this is a macro problem. You’re losing jobs. And frankly, you know, we’re losing jobs because of the Biden-Harris administration. And Charleroi is a case study right now,” the councilman said. “It’s [Donald] Trump’s narrative of what he’s been talking about with the border, the immigration influx into different communities and cities within the country, always just a little molecule on the map. You probably never even heard of us. Maybe you did, but I’m gonna say you probably didn’t until you still saw all this blow up.”
In fact, the former president recently mentioned the troubles Charleroi is facing during a campaign stop.Celaschi went on to explain that Charleroi has always been a predominantly white area, but a few years ago, thousands of Haitian and Liberian migrants began flooding into the area, enticed by federal policy and the jobs in the area. So many of these migrants moved in that it pushed out the town’s small population of Mexican migrants."The small 4k person town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania has experienced a 2000% increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris. The schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don’t speak English.."
— Bruce Porter Jr. (@NetworksManager) September 12, 2024
-President Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/seoyYZkK3K
“The influx of immigrants started a few years ago,” Calaschi said, “and all of a sudden, you know, we have immigrants from multiple nationalities relocated into the borough of Charleroi, and the citizens here, naturally, one’s got to think, ‘how did they get here? Why are they here? What effects are they going to have now on our community? They don’t speak our language. They’re not accustomed to our culture.'”
Now, when residents go into the town’s Dollar General store, they no longer hear English spoken. “You know, they got dumped off in our community, and here they don’t speak any English. You go into Dollar General, and what once was filled with the English language is now filled with a foreign language that we don’t understand. They don’t understand us,” he said.
But before any of the individual migrants even had a chance to make an impact on Charleroi, their influx as a whole caused a major change to the town, the councilman said.
“Our community used to be approximately 70% homeownership, 30% landlord, tenant, and just within a matter of the past five years, that percentage has flip flopped, and honestly, I would be safe to say that we are at 70% landlord tenant and 30% homeownership,” he said.
This has occurred because longtime residents have up and moved away and rental corporations have spent millions buying up homes to convert them into rentals to get the government subsidized money that follows the migrants.
The “flip flop” in home ownership worries Calaschi because if the town does lose some of its last remaining large employers, even the migrants won’t have jobs and they may also leave. That could leave a large portion of homes sitting empty in the near future, and that leads to decaying properties and blight — a problem the city has been dealing with for a generation already.
To try and mitigate the blight, Charleroi has already spent millions in city funds and grant money to tear down dilapidated homes and businesses that have sat empty for years. And Calaschi worries that the most recent loss of jobs and the influx of poor — often government subsidized — migrants will cause the town to deteriorate into a ghetto-like condition.
The spending on migrants is also a serious drain on Charleroi, especially with the schools.
“The impact of the immigrants has affected our school district tremendously,” Calaschi explained, “and so from the borough standpoint, it’s impacted our budget to where and the school districts. We weren’t prepared for any of this. We did not get any help from the federal government or the state government.”
“From the trickle down effect of the Biden-Harris administration, allowing the immigrants to be crossing the border — maybe some legally, a lot illegally — and we’ve had some of that in the community as well, too … our budget is suffering,” the councilman said. “I placed on our agenda just last week that we need to reconstruct all of our traffic signs in our entire town because of the amount of automobile accidents that are taking place from the immigrants. And, you know, Creole being the most dominant second language, we now need to have the English language and Creole language on our stop signs.”
“But guess who pays for it? We do, right? We’re not a very big community, and we don’t have a large budget. That’s an unexpected expense, sure, and we don’t have the revenue coming in,” Calaschi added.
With the looming loss of even more jobs, Calaschi added that the town’s revenue will be devastated and that will have serious impact on the schools.
“And now look at the loss of jobs, you know? I mean, that’s going to devastate not only the borough, it is going to devastate the school district. It’s going to devastate our city-owned water and sewage company,” he exclaimed.
“The school district, it’s going to affect them because families are leaving the borough and then being replaced by the Haitian community, or Liberian, or the immigrants in general, to where they’ve had to hire interpreters. They’ve had to pay for resources that they weren’t prepared for and restructure the way the learning process is in the Charleroi school district,” Calaschi continued.
“All that has an impact on the American student, to where they have to learn how to coexist, right? And that’s a tough thing for the teachers and the school district. And I tell you what, I give them big kudos for the job that they do up there, and we’re not seeing a dime coming in. They have cried for monies from the state and federal government, and they’re not receiving it,” he said.
Calaschi also blames all of this on the Biden-Harris regime.
“You know when, you’re coming in and you’re changing the mirror image of a town, and who’s changing it? Well, the government’s changing it, and it’s sure not our local government,” Calaschi insisted. “It’s not us. It’s coming from the top, Biden-Harris, and then it goes down to the state. It went back to Governor [Tom] Wolf, and now it’s Governor [Josh] Shapiro, and I’m not going to target whether you’re Republican or Democrat. I don’t care, you’re the government. You should have had a plan for every community that this was going to affect, and they didn’t have a plan. And so you dump it on us. Come on, we’re just small communities. We don’t have the resources.”
If they could have provided the resources and the knowledge and the team to come in to first educate us before this was going to happen, it would have been great,” he said. “Well, they didn’t do any of that, and that was just totally unfair. And it’s trying to ride a bicycle for the first time, and that’s how I would probably compare it. Your parents put you on a bicycle, and you’re trying to balance yourself and trying to pedal and trying to make the bicycle go forward. And it’s a disaster in the beginning.”
Recently, U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R, PA) blasted the Biden-Harris regime for the failed border policy so badly impacting Charleroi.
“Weak immigration policy is hurting Pennsylvania communities. Take the small town of Charleroi, which has grown by 2,000% due to an influx in migrants. Roads are dangerous, schools are overwhelmed and police are struggling to keep up with the surge. We need strong leadership to fix our immigration crisis and protect Pennsylvania,” said Dave McCormick.Finally, the crime has also risen in Charleroi, a town that had already been forced to disband its own police force and replace it with a regional cooperative whose 12 officers are tasked with responding to several other local communities along with Charleroi.Weak immigration policy is hurting PA communities. Take the small town of Charleroi, which has grown by 2,000% due to an influx in migrants.
— Dave McCormick (@DaveMcCormickPA) September 13, 2024
Roads are dangerous, schools are overwhelmed and police are struggling to keep up with the surge.
We need STRONG leadership to fix our… pic.twitter.com/ZsKOR3K7zq
On top of the petty crimes — often having to do with marijuana trafficking — car accidents have also skyrocketed as migrants somehow get hold of cars and drive without either licenses or insurance, or even knowing the rules of the road.
All these pressures are sending the borough of Charleroi into a tail spin of alarm and depression, Calaschi said. And the number of migrants — if they stay — will further result in material changes to the area. Indeed, the time is not very far off when migrants will be voting in the town’s political representatives.
“I guarantee you that right now, if they were able to and they were registered to vote, they could take over. We have seven members of Borough Council and a mayor, I will tell you that it’s a majority. Would probably be the immigrants if they were to hold an election in Charleroi today, they would hold the majority of the seats, and possibly the mayor,” he said.
But, in the end, the town simply has no choice but to “move forward,” Calaschi said.
“We got to move forward. This is the hand that has been dealt to the borough of Charleroi. I just want to see the federal and state government step up to the plate and come here and deliver a truckload of funding for us, OK, to be able to improve our community and improve the lives of the immigrants that are now here,” he concluded.
But the cost has already been so high for the town, said Calaschi, who comes from a long line of city officials and whose father was the chief of police back in the 60s.
“I hear this statement from a lot of families. Larry, your dad would be rolling over in his grave if he saw what happened to the borough. And then we had a former congressman in our town that lived here, Frank Mascara. And I hear Frank Mascara would be rolling over in his grave if he could see what happened to his Charleroi,” Calaschi said. “They are gone. We are here, and we have to deal with it.”
Americans waking up today...
COMMERCE not CAPITALISM!
Main Street NOT Wall Street!!
The Portuguese had come across the island of Madeira in 1420. It was a genuinely uninhabited Island. There weren't many, but this was one. And they named it after the resource which they rather fancied ,which covered the island Madeira, or wood, Timber. They were very short of Timber, they couldn't build the battleships they wanted because they didn't have enough of it, so they were delighted to find this. And so to begin with, they just did what they had been doing on the mainland, they cleared some forests, they ran a few pigs and cattle in it, they shipped out the Timber. And then someone realized that this was a great place for growing sugar, perfect climate, perfect soil, Etc.. And sugar did very well there. And then they realized, well, we're in an unusual position here because there's no constraints on how we use the land. There's no church here, there's no land owners, there's no custom, there's no culture, there's no Society. We can just do exactly what we want on this land!
So, they could fully commoditize the land, just turn it into an object for making money! And then they thought, "well, where are we going to find the labor? Oh, we can just bring people in to work." And who are the cheapest people to bring in? Slaves. So they started importing slaves, first from the Canary Islands, then from Africa. And of course, slaves are fully commoditized labor. You've stripped away everything that gives them their Humanity, stripped away their social context, their cultural context, their religious context (a whole lot of it). And it's pure 100% commoditized. Labor is what slavery is. Then, they needed money to finance the operation. Previously on the mainland, you would have gone to the landowner or someone, and being charged extortion at rates of Interest. But no, they could shop around, and they could just say, "We just want money. We don't want any attachments to that money. We'll just pay the lowest rates of Interest we can get. And so, they went to Flanders and Genoa to get their money. So they'd commoditize the money as well.
And what happened was a very rapid rise in sugar production. I mean this, you know if you're trying to make a lot of money, this system works very well. But alongside it was a remarkably rapid rise in ecological destruction. And the reason for that was that this great sugar industry, which had created so quickly, absolutely devoured Madeira. You need 60 kilograms of wood to refine a kilogram of sugar. And what that meant was that as the slaves used up the timber in in the surrounding areas, they had to go further and further to get it. And suddenly, productivity fell off. By about 1470, Madeira was the top producer of sugar on Earth. The sugar industry on this tiny Island, by 1500, had collapsed by 80%. It was a very sudden boom, and a very sudden bust. And then, and this is an absolutely crucial component of it, they did what Capital has gone on to do all over the world. They left. Boom - bust quick.
Those are the three components of capital; that is what capitalism does. And then they move the operation to another Island that recently stumbled across, did exactly the same... even quicker destroyed it, used it up with extraordinary speed. Boom-bust-quit. Moved across the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil, moved up the coast of Brazil, bang, bang, bang! Just taking out ecosystems, one after another. Moved into the Caribbean, by which time they've been joined joined by the Spanish, the English. And the model started to proliferate all over the world. Very profitable, but fantastically destructive. And what capitalism is, is a system of colonial looting which creates and destroys its' own Frontiers. It creates these highly lucrative Frontiers. It burns through them, literally or metaphorically, with extraordinary speed. And then, it has to move on to find the next one. And that's the product of bringing together these three Commodities at one and the same time.
And it's moved on to destroy Frontier, after Frontier, after Frontier. Ecologically, socially, culturally. It's a planet trashing machine.
Time to Start a Cloud-Serf Technofeudal Liberation Movement!?!
In their first decade, Internet services, from Google to Facebook to X, insisted that they were humble platforms designed to serve users. The users, not the platforms, would choose what to post or read online; the users, not the platforms, would retain ultimate control over what they decided to say or do. That Internet ceased to exist on January 8, 2021, when these tech companies banished former president Donald Trump and many of his supporters from their platforms. The platforms may have tightened control over users to avoid stricter regulation, but in showcasing their power over public discourse, they amplified public demands for governments to rein them in.
In their second decade, digital platforms moved from content neutrality to managing users’ behavior. Deciding to censor their users at scale, they struck an unusual alliance with state agencies, academic centers, and anti-“misinformation” nonprofits—an alliance that the investigative journalists who published the “Twitter Files” have aptly labeled the “censorship-industrial complex” (which now faces legal scrutiny).
But lurking behind the digital free-speech debate are fundamental questions of digital rights. Who should own your content, your account, the digital persona that you cultivate? Who should protect your digital rights, civic and consumer, against platforms that expropriate everything you create on them? We have entered a new political-economic situation in which digital civic rights and the rights of digital property are not yet fully established, while traditional concepts of political freedoms and property rights increasingly fail online. To establish a coherent framework of digital rights, we need to understand the nature of the modern platform economy. What, exactly, do platforms produce that gives them such power?
Imagine that you have some Nothing—pure, unalloyed Nothing—that you have decided to sell for $5 per unit on Amazon. Imagine further that, because of some glitch, Amazon shows your offer to 10 million users. Some people would buy that Nothing by mistake or out of curiosity. With sufficient reach, you’ve got a good business.
This scenario is no fantasy. In 2014, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, funk band Vulfpeck posted on Spotify a new album, Sleepify, that contained ten tracks of silence. They asked fans to stream the songs on a loop, allowing the band to collect royalties of one-half of a cent for each stream. Their fans obliged. In a month, the blank tracks were played more than 5 million times, earning the band about $25,000. Spotify tolerated the gambit for a while, but then took the album down. Meantime, two Canadians from Alberta launched a similar ploy, putting a Ziploc bag of local air on eBay. When somebody bought it for $0.99, the sellers lost money on shipping. But when they started compressing crisp Albertan air into cans and selling it abroad, they reached $300,000 in annual sales in 2018 through online purchases and retail stores, mostly in South Korea.
These whimsical stories suggest a heavier lesson. Despite Bill Gates’s proclamation in 1996, content is no longer king. Instead, on today’s Internet, reach is king. With enough reach, you can sell nothing, something, anything—even air.
A new form of value has emerged in the platform economy. It has little to do with exchange-value, use-value, or the concept of a commodity. The most valuable asset of a platform is connectivity: its ability to reach a sufficient number of users.
This platform effect holds true only past a certain threshold. Consider the digital strategy of the New York Times, which, in essence, seeks to transform the news business into a platform business. Only about 700,000 people subscribe to the print newspaper itself, a number that is steadily going down. Digital-news-only subscribers sit at 3 million and falling, less than one-third of total subscribers. Yet the Times is successfully adding overall subscribers to its ever-expanding range of products—offering significant entry discounts, crosswords, addictive word games, culinary recipes, and sports coverage. The company initially set out to achieve 10 million subscribers by 2025, hit this target in 2023, and is now pursuing a “meaningfully larger number.” After building a sufficiently huge platform, the Times will be able to sell anything it wants. Reach is what matters: the commodity for sale—whether compressed air or newsroom output, or even the compressed air of the newsroom—is of secondary importance. Platform reach constitutes a new product, whose value can render irrelevant the underlying content.Illustrations by Dante Terzigni
Engineer and early digital pioneer Robert Metcalfe anticipated this reality decades ago with Metcalfe’s law, a principle that seeks to quantify the value of network effects. The value of a network, he maintained, rests on a straightforward concept. The more that users participate, the more potential connections they can form, and the more benefits that each can attain.
The writer Clay Shirky helpfully summarized the meaning of these “network effects” in his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus. Suppose you want a ride to New Jersey at a certain time and post a request on a car-sharing service. If, after making 20 such requests, you find only a few takers, you’ll probably decide not to use the service again. The network effect was not activated. But if the service generally helps you hitch a ride, then the effect was activated. To be valuable, such a service must attract a high enough share of possible riders in the area, making it likely that somebody will emerge to meet the demand.
It follows that the platform best serving modern users’ interests is monopolistic. If all users gather on a single platform, then all possible matches will happen. Users will benefit the most from only one Facebook, only one Google, only one Amazon, only one X, only one Tinder, and only one car-sharing service. No doubt the market will fracture to serve specialized needs. But too much segmentation will diminish the network effect, and therefore the platform’s value, for users. Network effects naturally drive platforms toward monopolization, not due to the evil will of the platform overlords (though they surely don’t object) but through the activity of users themselves.
Platform monopolization has downsides, of course, such as the abuse of monopolistic power over users or global system glitches that could disrupt the lives of all who depend on a particular platform. Regulation could theoretically rectify such abuses or critical dependencies. But the political system often struggles to adapt to fast-moving technology, and the introduction of state power into the digital world invites the risk of regulatory capture, as in the Twitter Files. (See “The New Censorship,” Summer 2023.)
Market segmentation shows that the platform appetite for monopolization has natural limits. New digital features or new generations of users arrive and undermine old monopolies. For example, Myspace was the first social-media platform to reach a global audience; Facebook’s offer of more advanced features made Myspace obsolete. Social-media services X, Instagram, and TikTok each offer specific features that allow them to approach monopoly power in their own niches.“With more connections on a certain platform, users grow a larger social capital. More connections empower but also enslave us.”But the digital economy may still be in an intermediate stage of development. The experiences of other countries suggest that a universal, ultimate social-media platform could eventually emerge, embodying all possible features of social networking—from chatting and dating to video reporting and digital shopping. The popular Chinese app WeChat might best resemble this universal platform, but similar examples have sprung up elsewhere.
This leads to another corollary of the network effect: in the ideal network, any possible matches become inevitable. Say you want to have a cup of coffee with someone near Times Square after work and post an open invitation on Facebook. If you have 200 Facebook friends, the offer probably won’t be taken up. But if you’re a celebrity with 200,000 followers, a line will form for the privilege of your company.
Social networks tend to snowball because humans are social creatures. As he helped chart a path forward for the modern Internet, Metcalfe described a network of devices, such as fax machines or telephones, that were put into contact. But when the networked nodes are humans, who naturally seek mutual affirmation, the statistical network becomes a social network: the nodes proactively “want” to resonate and coincide.
In digital, your social graph—your connections—is also your social capital. When your online presence is desirable by enough people, you can monetize it. Influencers endorse products, share recipes, unbox promoted goods, and sell air. Increasingly algorithmic, our platforms facilitate social capitalism by calculating who might like whom or what, as well as deciding what you might want to see on your screen.
With more connections on a certain platform, users grow their social capital. More connections empower but also enslave us. Several factors keep users on a given platform: from habit-forming designs and large networks to the fact that users can earn a return on their investment only on the platform they’re invested in. Just as a resident of a one-bedroom apartment can relocate much easier than a family living in a three-bedroom house, the more digital belongings you have on the platform, the harder it is to move.
Like a genie enslaved by his lamp, users cannot escape the magical phones that enable them to enter a new domain. The more stories, thoughts, photos, shares, and memes you store, the more the network effect rewards you. Using your account is like settling into a new house in a new neighborhood: it’s an investment, forming ties that bind.
As digital platforms replace the essentially personal act of socializing, they increasingly take possession of our personae. But does that mean that we are helpless against the platforms’ growing might? An example of resistance from institutional users—namely, the news media, which has suffered its own problems from digital networking—offers lessons about efforts to reclaim control over the digital realm.
Two Anglosphere governments have sought to apply the print-era idea of intellectual property to digital platforms, demanding that the platforms pay news producers for the right to host news content. Australia introduced legislation that entitles the regulator to “designate” the platforms that must pay news producers for hosting their links. Yet the regulation was flexible; the regulator gave the platforms time to make individual deals with key publishers and did not enforce the “link tax” immediately. This lenient approach succeeded, and approximately 200 million Australian dollars flowed to the local news industry from the digital behemoths in the first year.
Canada’s approach was less flexible. The platforms were concerned that the legislation in Canada risked forcing them to pay “news producers” under the law, not under bilateral deals, creating the link tax. Worried about setting an unfavorable precedent in a market so close to the U.S., the platforms simply removed all news. Facebook users in Canada can no longer share a news link, nor can they see news content from abroad in their feed.
This fallout of governmental protectionism hardly serves the news media’s interests, however. Convinced that their product carries more social value than the platforms understand, they now keep it to themselves. In other words, the news media have “protected” their content value—at the cost of losing the surplus value that platforms provide. No surprise that audience engagement with the news websites has plummeted. The Canadian government promises other measures to support the news industry, which now sits in a much worse position and might require public support to survive. The government, however, can benefit from it, as the situation makes the “independent” media even more dependent on budget subsidies and other protective measures.
At the institutional level, then, protecting digital property rights is a double-edged sword. With support from governments, the media have managed to affirm their right to digital property in both cases. Yet the outcomes varied, based on implementation. The news industry wanted property rights on social media; vindicating their claim appeared to require enforcement by state protectionism. Without governmental pressure, the rights of digital property are unilaterally defined by the platform.
But was your content ever really yours after you used a platform to host and distribute it? If you bring something onto a platform, you likely brought it for your own networking purposes; that’s the platform’s business. As soon as you share something on that platform, you also share the property rights over that thing in exchange for the benefit of reaching other users. Exposing yourself and your content for both the network effect and the platform’s own business is, in a sense, your platform fee. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said, humans are the sex facilitators to the machine world, the same as bees are to plants. The metaphor might also imply that, yes, humans make the honey for themselves, but the fruits of their labor ultimately belong to the beekeeper.The modern criticism of platform capitalism posits that capital has become so all-permeating that it has learned to exploit even our leisure activity, such as chatting and liking on social media or listening to something on Spotify. As this activity produces some product for the platforms, it should, the critique goes, be deemed “unwaged digital labor.” Exposing such hidden “exploitation” has become a new creed of “platform” Marxism since the 1970s, when Dallas Smythe revealed the phenomenon of the “audience commodity”: the ability of modern capital to commodify the mass audience’s leisure time.
Such criticism is wrong. It not only neglects the voluntary and proactive entry of users into relationships but also overlooks the fact that users receive a product, too. Moreover, the value that platforms provide in exchange for our “unwaged digital labor” corresponds with the highest value in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: self-actualization. Indeed, the relations of production here can be described in a different way. Platform capitalism evolved to the degree that it can capitalize, both for itself and for you, your leisure time. All efforts you put into your social-media activity are, to some extent, work on behalf of yourself: the more effort, the greater your personal network capitalization. The more actively bees pollinate flowers, the more nectar they gather for themselves.
The result is a paradox. The elements of our digital personality should belong to us, but the digital account itself is an unalienated part of the platform. The paradox is visible if we look at our digital personae on different platforms. They are different, despite being created by one person. They slightly (or not so slightly) differ in their areas of interest, manner of speech, and even appearance.
Each user is a digital multi-person who actually does not exist in an assembled form but only in his or her platform variations. Digital multi-personality illustrates the power of the platform design that lures us into creating platform-specific versions of ourselves. For example, Instagram favors visual bragging, X favors political commenting, Facebook favors family and community connections, TikTok favors visual-motor self-representation, and Tinder favors mating show-offs. We plant and grow our digital clones to live our better lives, but our platform-specific personae live within the environment of a concrete platform: they are grown in, by, and for those specific conditions. Digital suicide, or deleting one’s digital presence altogether (as happened on Facebook to the Canadian media, assisted by the government), appears to be the only way to exercise one’s alleged property rights over one’s digital account.
The concept of “biopolitics”—referring to political control over the human body—requires an update. Platforms have ushered in the era of digital biopolitics, allowing us to grow our digital bodies but not to own them. Offering social rewards, the platforms own us without exercising real coercion. So far, the most disturbing social consequence has been the unfreedom of digital speech. But this is just the beginning. The environmental power of the platforms over our digital personalities is limitless. Shadow-banning (the canceling of one’s digital presence on behalf of the regnant ideology) and un-personing (disabling one’s ability to participate in, say, digital banking) have already shown us the contours of the future. The next stage of digital biopolitics will involve social scoring: we will be obliged to live an approved digital life—or pay the price.
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Friday, September 13, 2024
Connecting Byung-Chul Han's "The Palliative Society" with Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"
"In 2012 about 56 million people dies throughout the world; 620k of them died due to human violence (war killed 120k people, and crime killed another 500k). In contrast, 800k committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder."-Yuval Noah Harari, "Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow"
Summary of Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynical Reason"
Except from the above video on Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynical Reason"
The goal of the book, he says, is to lay bare the structure of this cynicism that he thinks today is the dominant attitude or mood of the West. He's writing this in the early '80s, but it's obviously also true today. This analysis is, I think, deeply relevant today, maybe even more relevant. And by "cynicism" he doesn't just mean "skeptical about people and their intentions", he doesn't just mean "pessimistic". It's deeper than that. He defines it as "enlightened false consciousness", that it's "a form of Reason which is a priori reflexively rebuffed against falsification. It already always includes the critique of it". And so, it both disempowers the critique, and also undermines our confidence in joy in living, and in our beliefs, and our conduct. In this way, he says, that the cynical consciousness is both, have it, well-off and miserable. It's immune to attack, but it's you know, our views become immune to attack, basically. Our conduct is immune to attack, but empty. And we don't believe in them and we think that they're wrong. Basically, we're all living in bad faith because of this. He says, "new values have short lives, grand narratives are impossible. We've given up on the idea of truth capital 'T'. And, in a kind of enlightened way, consistent with the Enlightenment project, we just see all of this stuff as a strategy, or a mask of power. We see and think everything cynically, including ourselves and our conduct, and our beliefs. Everyone, including us, has base motives. Everyone's faking it to get ahead.
So, he thinks that this phenomenon of cynicism as reflectively buffered false consciousness, that in order to be understood, it has to be localized in a kind of "dialectic of enlightenment". Specifically, as a polemical dialectic that is oriented to illuminating via unmasking and exposing our political opponents motives. Basically, about exposing their false consciousness their prejudices, their desires, their hidden class interests, whatever, as a way of attacking their political or social position. So, I say something, you say something else, you know, how do we achieve synthesis here? Where do we go from from there? And the way that it works is not, you know, we come to X Y or whatever, but "I have this bias, you have that bias, this is a class interest, etc.", right? So he sees the process of enlightenment as a kind of progressive development of this sort of discourse. These techniques of unmasking, they become increasingly sophisticated and widespread, and then we wind up, not with a win-win discourse, as proponents of the Enlightenment project would like to say, that truth capital 'T', but an interminable clashing of different identities, class interest, desires, passions, hegemonic positions, psychological resistances; we get a war of consciousnesses rather than a dialogue of peace. And this discursive war consists in the reification of the other's consciousness, for analysis and inquiry. The others consciousness is the target of the argument, rather than the validity or the invalidity of their ideas. It involves endless reciprocal reification of subjects, leading to a condition where our interactions no longer are really intersubjective, but inter-objective, and there's universal suspicion.
With Freud, false consciousness looks like a kind of sickness, we trace it to unconscious drives. For Marx, we trace it to non-subjective economic historical laws and see individual people as just sort of epiphenomenon in the process of Capital. And all this stuff is operating behind people's backs, and becomes the real subject of enlightenment discourse. That's what enlightenment discourse is, illuminating. He actually thinks that Marxism is a kind of particularly important jump in cynicism, since we get not just false consciousness, but necessarily false consciousness. False consciousness that is false in precisely the correct way, because stemming from your social class you know the false consciousness appropriate to your social class. He thinks any functional understanding of truth actually inclines one to cynicism. Sociologists, even if of the non-Marxist variety, tend to have a functional view where they think, basically, that false consciousness isn't necessary for society to function.
But, so then, Sloterdijk goes through a kind of step-by-step historical development that he calls "8 unmaskings", and it's a kind of genealogy or tracking of the development of enlightenment critique that proceeds from target to target. First, and-Latin? begins with the critique of Revelation. These guys argue that there's no trans-historical non-philological objective way to verify the sacred texts. So that's, as you said, at the top. At the top of the macro-sphere, at this sort of outermost limits of our metaphysics, the furthest away from man. That's where the enlightenment critique starts, and then it goes down.
So, (2) we move down a step and we get a critique of religious illusion. This critique notices how God is being anthropomorphised, how he is portrayed in a culturally relative way. This turns also into the idea of religion as instrumental or functional, existing to legitimate the social order or to ease our existential angst.
Then (3), we go down in metaphysics in metaphysical illusion, and this is Kant basically, where human reason is limited and functions reliably only under conditions of experiential knowledge. So the power of pure reason is delimited. He says that after Kant, truthful propositions concerning objects beyond the empirical are no longer possible. So that what first looked like knowledge, metaphysical knowledge, comes to be seen as deception.
Then (4), we get the critique of the idealistic superstructure. Which he says is a giant leap for a critique. This is Marx claiming, that what happens in our head is determined by social functions and the economy of labour. He says that people are masks of social functions, and that religion, aesthetics, justice, welfare, morality, philosophy, science; Marx thinks all of this is ideological mystification. So false consciousness, false being, this is a function of the process of Capital and Marx. So we can have necessarily false consciousness, which means Universal mystification.
Then (5) comes the critique of moral illusion. And this has, he says, three strategies, remember, as of polemics, right? The first is, uncover a double standard. The second is, invert being and illusion. And the third is a reduction to what are thought to be realistic motives. So basically, you catch your opponent in hypocrisy, you invert interior and exterior in order to attack the true core of their views or their beliefs, and this is always power, egoism, selfishness, horniness, greed, whatever.
Then (6) we get the critique of transparency. And this is like Freud as the main figure, but he's not the only one, or the first one. The idea of the rational, self-transparent mind has been systematically dismantled. Since the 18th century, rationality starts to look like self-delusion, Post-hoc, pseudo-justifications of our behaviors and ideas, and attempt to evade the deeper reality of the irrational forces and motivations that actually guide us. Freud was actually viewed as a reactionary for a long time, because his idea of the unconscious undermines not just this or that class, but every class, even the victim. Psychoanalysis is familiar with the idea of the eternal victim, who exploits their apparent position of weakness for aggression, right? So this undermines everybody. And then finally, just in case you thought, "Okay, well maybe all this stuff is BS, at least these irrational, unconscious forces, and motives are mine, at least they're my desires", wrong!
The final one (7) is, we get "the critique of illusion of privacy". Your own ego doesn't even really belong to you. Even your selfishness isn't yours. You're basically just an object to be sliced and diced by it and make critique, until there's nothing left at all. Your self is molded. your subjectivated, as Foucault would say, by all this discourse and these forces of social control, and of power. You don't know what, or who you are. And even if you did, it wouldn't matter. Because, to switch over and point out as Lacan does, even your desire is always the desire of the other.
So Enlightenment begins with critique aimed at the top, at the church, officials, monarchy, whatever, exposing them as frauds. But the end result of this kind of dialectical polemics is that we even expose ourselves as frauds. That truth is a fraud, that even our fraud is fraudulent, because it isn't even our fraud, it doesn't actually belong to us. There is no "us" to own it.
And I mean, so Nietzsche warned about Enlightenment's destruction of life, destroying illusions, and boy did it. How do you believe anything, or do anything, or live your life, or find joy or peace in a situation characterized by this mode of reason? Well, you do it cynically. You know very well what you're doing is BS, or saying it is, but you do it anyway.
This is actually where Zizek takes over this idea of cynicism from Sloterdijk. He refers to him frequently in his talks. You know he says, "my friend Peter Sloterdijk". But this is how Zizek talks about how ideology functions today, that they know very well what they're doing, but they're doing it anyway. That's how this works. And you know that everybody else is doing and saying BS, and our institutions and our values are BS. And the idea of any escape or systemic transformation is BS. He actually anticipates our current identity politics fixation by saying that this creates a kind of manic drive to recover some sort of solidity. Something that's ours, and stable.
But, you know, ultimately there's, we just get back to this. And it ensures even more, the primacy of the alien over ourselves. We just find this sort of bedrock layer of unconscious programming, we hope! And all this has just totally annihilated the possibility of ideological seriousness, of intellectual seriousness. Everyone's in bad faith. They know they're in bad faith, but there's no alternative. So strike up this defensive identity, live in bad faith. You know, it's false consciousness, but we're enlightened about our false consciousness. We know that we're falsely conscious, and what else is there to do? So just live in bad faith, and do it to get by, or win, or whatever. What else is there?
So and then he talks about how it functions in in relation to different disciplines and stuff. But, this is part of what I'm cutting out, but I do want to point out the way he relates it to Weimar. Because I think this gets at the deep relevance of this topic in the book to our present moment. He examines the psycho-politics of Weimar as being sort of pre-war, predisposed to Nazism. Due precisely to the heavy atmosphere of sentient cynicism. And he says, "you know we can't live this way". So when the pressure builds up, violence erupts. People become catastrophilic. Like they're hoping, they're just waiting for something to happen, some catastrophe, some eruption of the real into the world so that there can be some meaning and substance again.
You can't have a society where there's a universal distrust and suspicion. When nobody believes in politics, everything's too complex to grasp, the serious and the playful can't be distinguished from one another. There's a kind of, so what you end up getting is, there's a kind of desublimation. You're all consumed by will the power, and so just go ahead and let it out, live honestly at least. Because, otherwise there's just this deep ambivalence about everything. And yeah, it's precisely in this sort of social-psychological, psycho-political stew that something like Nazism can develop. And its success has a lot to do with the need to simplify this tremendous complexity, this sort of schizoid tension, where all of us are living these double lives, pretending to be this or that, to be content, whatever. But deep down, we suspect all of it's a lie, and wrong, and a malicious delusion, and it's unbearable. And so it demands some kind of event so that we can be disburdened of it. That's obviously not the path that he wants to go down, Nazism.
So, what can we do? Well, he doesn't think that we can have a return to the simplicity of a mono-perspective, a world that we can know something definite about, or master through the use of objective reason. We've lost the macrocosm, retreated back to subjectivianism. But we get all the way to the bottom it doesn't do any better, because subjective and objective reason are both caught in a in a kind of mutual liquefaction. He says," philosophy used to be about trying to find some kind of foundation that we can learn about, know about, that gives us information about the world and ourselves. Because they link up with one another. Modernity splits these two things apart, and then Bridge that connects them is obliterated too, so that neither the world, nor the self is intelligible, even on their own. The self pole is exposed as empty, the world pole is a stranger.
So, as he says, how an emptiness is supposed to be able to recognize itself in a stranger cannot be imagined by our reason. No matter how hard we try, we can't do this. So, from our perspective, knowledge about either pole, about both, or about their having a shared foundation at all anymore, just looks naive to us. Critical reason necessarily rejects both of these propositions. And yet, he says, "only with the anticipation of universal understanding can Enlightenment refrain from just the war of individual strategies, and save itself in the universal". He goes on, "the subjectivity that cannot mirror itself in any whole, nevertheless encounters itself in countless analogous subjectivities that, similarly world listen encapsulated, pursue only their own goals. And that where they interact with each other, then they're bound together only precariously, and subject to revocation in antagonistic cooperation".
So again, this anticipates what I think is a much better framework for arriving at a solution that he articulates later in 'Spheres'. Stuff, about encapsulation. Other stuff he says about Auto-hypnosis, about the privileges of the kind of binding media of individuals over individuals themselves at least. All this gets at a much more extensive treatment in 'Spheres'. But for now, the main recommendation that he gives is what's called Kynicism, cynicism, but with a 'k'. And this is an allusion to the original Greek cynics. This tradition that he wants to return to, Diogenes in particular. And he thinks it's a much better way of fighting against cynicism today, in a sort of way of developing a serious movement that could actually challenge the status quo. And that's because basically, it opposes idealism in this kind of cynical reason not with, further unmasking, not with more critique, not with a call to return to some kind of naivete that is unavailable to us now, but because it offers a material embodied rebuttal to the critical cynical reason.
Diogenes is famous for things like urinating and masturbating in public, to demonstrate rather than to argue, something about our norms, about the nature of desire, and how easy it is to satisfy, etc. He's famous for plucking the feathers of a bird, taking it into the Academy, and saying, "Here's Aristotle's man", because the latter had defined man as a featherless bird. So Diogenes didn't argue with him, he didn't try to make a rational case for a different conception, or to try to dismantle Aristotle's position via argumentation or "whatever" him. He just has a kind of cheeky light-hearted jovial way of embodying the counter critique, as a jokester, and Sloterdijk thinks this is the way we ought to be today if we are to stand a chance at all against any of this stuff. And he really does, himself, also embody this kind of attitude. In this book, and today still, throughout his works, the idea that one becomes a kind of living, vital refutation of idealism. Living with the irreverence and joviality, rather than cynical suspicion and disappointment, and disbelief in everything.
This goes back, I think, to like the kind of Nietzschean idea: loving life, loving the body, opposing the despisers of life and the despisers of the body. But I think it also relates to the hippie experience that Sloterdijk has, his experience with Osho. And I think it's the weaker part of the book, but I do think there's something to it, this kind of affirmation of life as a rejection of the despotism of negativity that stifles all of us in this kind of heavy, cynical atmosphere. It's an escape from the confines of critique and it's endless undermining of every possibility, in every value. He says, "we ought to oppose critique not with more critique, which is just turning the cynical screw even more, but with this kynical attitude, just this sort of like Monty Python "I fart in your general direction" sort of idea.
So anyway, yeah, I skipped a lot. This is kind of a bare-bones summary of the book in terms of the way that, in terms of the stuff that I think is important in it. Basically, thanks for sticking with me...
Thursday, September 12, 2024
Tango en la Boca y Santa Maria y Confianzas
Juan Gelman, "Confianzas"
se sienta a la mesa y escribe
«con este poema no tomarás el poder» dice
«con estos versos no harás la Revolución» dice
«ni con miles de versos harás la Revolución» dice
y más: esos versos no han de servirle para
que peones maestros hacheros vivan mejor
coman mejor o él mismo coma viva mejor
ni para enamorar a una le servirán
no ganará plata con ellos
no entrará al cine gratis con ellos
no le darán ropa por ellos
no conseguirá tabaco o vino por ellos
ni papagayos ni bufandas ni barcos
ni toros ni paraguas conseguirá por ellos
si por ellos fuera la lluvia lo mojará
no alcanzará perdón o gracia por ellos
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)