noted. 06/22/2012

• Future legends – The New Inquiry

  • Michael Sandel is justly worked up about how “markets crowd out morals” and undermine social norms, but that’s because the view that markets are wise and fair collective-action problem-solvers has come to seem like common sense. But markets don’t solve for human flourishing necessarily; they solve for capitalist control. They process power differentials neutrally, with no mechanism for diminishing them, and ignore all human desires that have no money backing up their urgency or sincerity. Also, market propaganda shouldn’t blind anyone to the fact that markets are designed and shaped through laws (so called good governance) meant to protect the interests of the already powerful; markets aren’t manifesting some transcendent law unto themselves.

     

  • Closer to the truth about markets and technology are the warnings of conservative “futurists” like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler, who as Graeber points out, helped convince politicians that in the second half of the 20th century that “existing patterns of technological development would lead to social upheaval, and that we needed to guide technological development in directions that did not challenge existing structures of authority.” Technology needed to yield consumer goods that could placate the otherwise disenfranchised; it shouldn’t empower such people to be able to have more of a say about the shape of the society in which they are embedded.
  • Instead of pursuing the inconvenient discoveries that might make everyone’s lives better, corporations have chosen to prefer technologies that enhance social control — surveillance, drones, social media, etc. — the developmental equivalent of prioritizing guard labor over productive labor. “Basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen,” Graeber claims, arguing that research conclusions are more or less preformatted by the expectations of funders.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.