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I appreciate Louis' posting of this NYT article on the list. I would be more interested, however, in any comments ON the article and the subject. IMO, this article objectively lays out the problem of technology under the capitalist mode of production and shows how it can negatively effect the working class. What does not seem to be detailed is the 'social' effect beyond that. The huge build up of employment in video stores has a parallel with independent book stores as book selling became highly commercialized in the 1980s, with the initial advent of the franchising of stores like Marlboro Books, Daltons, etc. They gave way to the 'super stores' like B&N. Now the Internet is doing to physical stores what Netflix has done to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. What keeps independent book stores open are rare, hard to find, un-internet listed books. What keeps the remaining 'neighborhood' video stores open is pornography, which accounts usually for about 50% of their business or more. Porn is not distributed by Netflix, that I'm aware of and of course was not sold in Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. But the social effect is something else indeed. The internet has offered the capitalist system a way of atomizing people. It is the ability to heighten the fake ideology of the cult of the individual that has been going on since around the time of end of WWII with the start of the suburbanization of the housing for a privileged layer of the working class, the building of interstate highways, the development, massively, of the carCULTure and so on. And I'm personally not immune to this trend, nor probably, are most of those on this list. I order books via abebooks.com and amazon.com. I live in the suburbs, have a long commute and our 3 member family has 3 vehicles. Now, Amazon announced it is selling far more ebooks than paper ones, further enforcing this alienation and individual cultism...can't 'lend' an e-book, at least not yet. But the atomization the working class is something that is quite scary in the sort of long term perspective. It reinforces, IMO, alienation from ones class in a large and profound way. David ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
