I think fan fiction is exciting.Not the example with which I'd have ran... but ok...
update Sometimes, I think Glenn Greenwald is shrill. Other times, I wish that I were gay too and that gay people were treated like people people so that Glenn and I could marry.
It looks like Ross Douthat picked the wrong month to try to pretend that threat-induced censorship is a uniquely Islamic practice
Posts
7 comments:
The fuck?
"It turns out that welfare state capitalism just is the alternative to capitalism."
Except the welfare state is being dismantled, slowly, but surely. The only thing that kept the corporate fuckers in line was their fear of the masses and so we got some scraps. But now that the big bad socialist block is gone, there's nothing to keep them in check. Quite the contrary - they have India and China and yes, even Eastern Europe, with their cheap labor to hold the workers (which includes the middle class or what's left of it) hostage - shut your mouth and keep working or else there's tens of Indians and Chinese waiting for your job. Hell, even the tech jobs that made Slovakia the economic tiger it was in the oughts are now being moved to Romania and Bulgaria. Shut your mouth and work for less benefits and less pay, or else we'll ship your job overseas or south of the border, that's capitalism for ya these days. Welfare ain't got nothing to do with it anymore.
And what is this shit about open source software and wikipedia? Does the fucker realize that these things are done by people working in their spare time, i.e. after they're done working at a paying job? Hey, asshole, if you like it so much, why don't you switch to open source and write for free. See how you like it.
And Hector FTW.
Near as I can tell, and the fucker does a piss poor job of stating it plainly before backing it up, is that his thesis is this: Demands have historically been met by companies employing labor in capitalist societiest, but the advent of the free flow of information has let to collaborative creation of certain goods which completely bypass capitalistic means.
I guess that kind of makes sense, but I'm skeptical that these community created goods will ever significantly impact economies for various reasons, not the least of which being that it works only for goods which have no material founding at all (eg software and entertainment.)
Not to mention that plenty of his examples are based on reworks of commercial produced goods, like fan fiction...
After all, if you look at how life in the developed countries has changed from 1930 to 2010 what you see is that people spend more and more time in school, more and more time retired, and more and more time on vacation. In other words, people are step-by-step liberating themselves not from market capitalism as a means of obtaining consumer goods but from wage slavery in the worker-capitalist relationship.
...except for people I call "women," who for some mysterious reason have decided they'd rather work than raise their children full time. Oh, and for people--masochists, probably--who have for perverse reasons elected to hold two and sometimes even three jobs.
When did he write this? 1994?
When did he write this? 1994?
Exactly. It's like that Fukuyama bullshit all over again. I thought we were done with this.
that plenty of his examples are based on reworks of commercial produced goods
Not to mention that almost all of his examples are examples of non-material goods - literature, music, software etc. No disrespec' or nothin' - and I certainly don't want to sound like a Marxist here - but this is unimportant shit. The moment we can open source food or energy production, I will listen to what he and other fuckers like him have to say.
Post a Comment