Thank you so much Max - and for these very fine expressions of the
issues and forces at play.
I'm following up on Janeway - very interesting.
I love the Mona Lisa reading... :)
Thank you again.
R
On 24/11/2020 18:32, Max Herman wrote:
Hi Rana,
This is a great essay and very apropos vis-a-vis the relationship of
democracy to property in the West.
Your observation that 18th century England could not afford democracy,
and did not need it, is right on target. Also on target is your
observation that gradually pressures of revolt led to a degree of need
that dovetailed with the ability to afford. This to me is the right
concept of a system of contraries in more balance or less depending on
a variety of circumstances and decisions.
The old idea of "parlement," or allowing the subjects to talk to the
monarch, is relevant as well. Many have observed recently that
"king-in-parliament" rather than democracy is the best form of
government. If the monarch is capital, or property, then you end up
with something like a conversation on unequal ground. Of course there
are many varieties of conversation on a continuum, and even if
socialism were the global order rather than capitalism there would
likely still be questions of power, control of resources, inequality,
military conflict, law enforcement, and such.
I found William Janeway's book /Doing Capitalism in the Innovation
Economy/ quite interesting with regard to the themes you discuss such
as the mercantile and industrial revolutions. His more Keynesian
approach says that capitalism is somewhat eating its own liver right
now, with the interests and powers (big data tech being the prime
example) who benefitted from the state investments in the Digital
Revolution now arrayed rather cannibalistically against the state
investment which is required for the next phase of innovation i.e. the
Green Economy. Janeway explains well how this libertarian orthodoxy
gets out of hand and cultivates dangerous liaisons with far-right and
nationalist-populist elements. Your description of its philosophical
trappings a la Bannonian Post-Enlightenment is excellent and apt.
In this sense I am hopeful that novelists and artists can help foster
a climate in which public and private can find a win-win of
cooperation. I obviously can't predict whether a co-operative
approach will succeed, and if so how, but I do believe it is possible
under the laws of physics and can be influenced at least
hypothetically by the good old 18th century public sphere of
communication (long may it live and continue to improve). My fervent
hunch is that Leonardo predicted something like big data run amok, and
used the /Mona Lisa/ to symbolize the history of technology as a
bridge, its present as a garment, and its rightful guide and author
(human agency) as the gesture of the right hand directing our
attention to what we weave.
At very least I enjoy the fiction that he might have intended this! 🙂
All very best regards,
Max
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* [email protected]
<[email protected]> on behalf of Rana Dasgupta
<[email protected]>
*Sent:* Monday, November 23, 2020 11:49 PM
*To:* [email protected] <[email protected]>
*Subject:* <nettime> Big tech, the return of capital to its C18
supremacy, and the decline of American democracy
Dear Nettimers
Here's a recent essay which owes much to my contemplation of the various
conversations on this list. I apologies: I'm not spontaneous enough to
participate in those conversations: I discover only much later what I
think, and through writing pieces like this.
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/the-silenced-majority/
<https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/the-silenced-majority/>
The assault on American democracy, I say here, is not a matter of
personalities or political parties, but a deep-structural concomitant of
the return of capital. In order to understand the forces at work, we
would do better ignoring the more obvious, but analytically
inappropriate, parallels of Hitler, fascism, etc, and focussing instead
on Britain in the eighteenth century.
In this light, today's Silicon Valley giants appear as a significant
historical force of both technology and capital. Both as technological
platforms and as new formations of finance and (non-) labour, they are
well-adapted to the task of expelling the Western masses from the centre
of the world economy, and relegating them to the periphery - where they
had been until the C19 or even C20. Democracy, inevitably, then becomes
the big problem - even in the wary, discriminatory form it has assumed
in America.
Very best to all
R
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