Whacking The Hornet’s Nest

How do you feel about the framed ‘inevitability’ of ‘modernity’ (ie ‘democratic’ capitalism) dovetailed/juxtaposed with the ‘inevitability’ of the digital future/wirearchy?

Does it necessarily begin with the deprecation of ‘primitive’ but viable alternatives already in place?

(A badly posed question, I think, but I thought I’d pose it anyway…

Yes, I’ll have to unpack that a bit. I’m assuming there are a lot of assumptions inside or underneath some of the labels you’ve used that it would be useful to have on the table, to offer anything that isn’t clearly a silly response. And even then .. I’m not an ecomnomist, nor economic philosopher, nor politcal economists, but a mere dilettante functioning on caffeine and intuition.

My initial sense is to create a map of links of other articles and essays I have read (Dave Pollard, Umair Haque, Ulises Mejia, george dafermos, Jeff “Rhizome” Vail, Felix Guatteri, Manuel de Castells, and others .. and hand it over to you.

Then there are always the relevant economic and societal sections of Constellation W that might help .., most of which I believe is pertinent and holds some latent response (disclosure .. I played a part in the authorship).

I tend to think that the structural inertia of capitalismm and modern “institutions” in which capitalism is framed and made manifest will be so resistant to the effects of hyperlinks, archiving, retrievability and decentralized distribution thatthere will be of necessity a grand and cataclysmic crisis before any real, substantive and widespread change will happen … and so very much is likely to be destroyed along the way that it is hard for me to hold any portrait in my imagination as to how it might unfold in any reasonable way(s).

Caffeine? You too?? I’m doing it again this morning after a month or so break. (The intuition is harder to shake.)

Thanks, bub, for the links. I’ll unpack them, too, over time.

Your last paragraph I’m in essential agreement with. “Lend me your ears,” we said to the Woof. “Let them fucking go, first,” he growled.

“Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con.”

From memory, in David Mamet’s film ‘House of Games’, a neophyte is instructed that the ‘confidence’ is conveyed first by the con-er toward the con-ee. This suggestion is enough to seed the mark into reciprocating the ‘trust’ as an acknowledged, but good, mutual risk, given the ‘reward’.

‘We trust the American People to xyz…, We trust the American People are xyz…’ sounds pretty familiar.

(I wonder what % of USians are NOT vulnerable to the straight con…)