Newmedia on Fri, 2 Mar 2012 19:13:54 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Political-Economy and Desire |
Mr. Ghost-of-Wells: As your email address indicates, you are apparently a "fan" of H.G. Wells. Of course, the Morlocks and Eloi (plural, one "l") are the dramatis persona in Well's 1895 "Time Machine." "By the year 802,701 AD, _humanity_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_race) has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the _Morlocks_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morlock) . The Eloi are the child-like, frail group, living a _banal_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banal) life of ease on the surface of the earth, while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing and infrastructure for the Eloi. Each class evolved and degenerated from _humans_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human) . The novel suggests that the separation of species may have been the result of a widening split between different social classes, a theme that reflects Wells' sociopolitical opinions." (Wikipedia entry for ELOI.) Wells was a Fabian "socialist" and, as some nettimers know, someone who is far too little appreciated today -- especially in the Anglophonic world. In particular, Wells was featured in discussions of his 1928 "The Open Conspiracy" at the nettime Beauty-and-the-East confab in Ljubljana and who I also "memorialized" in my "English Ideology and WIRED Magazine." _http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/21/the-english-ideology-and-wired-m agazine/_ (http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/21/the-english-ideology-and-wired-magazine/) Some of this helped to stimulate the infamous "goofy-leftists-against-Wired" thread on the WELL, hosted by sci-fi satirist Bruce Sterling, who claims he was deeply influenced by Wells. Fortunately, he's much funnier. The implications of Wells' construction of human nature is perhaps best summarized in Michael Vlahos' 1995 essay "Byte City" published by the think-tank that brought us Newt Gingrich (and some interesting early debates about the impact of the Internet), the now-defunct Progress and Freedom Foundation. In this essay, Vlahos (who now "supports" radical Islam and works at the US Naval War College), proposes a segmentation between the 5% "Brain Lords" (i.e. your crew with the "laser pointers" and Wells' "New Samurai"), the 20% "Upper Servers" who work as their support staff, the 50% of "service workers" and then the 25% who are permanently "Lost." Radical? Honest? Hardly -- this is just what you would expect if you play out the implications of Hobbes, Bentham et al . . . just as H.G. Wells did (with an added dose of Santa Fe "complex systems" thrown in). What I'm looking for are those contemporary political-economists who have figured out that the 1950s shift to service economics, followed by the 1990s shift to information economics, has *fundamentally* changed this very old "story." It has gotten very TIRED. Btw, sociologist Daniel Bell, who is often given credit for coining "post-industrial," spends most of his 1973 "The Coming Post-Industrial Society" discussing why he (and his friends) are actually the "Brain Lords" and should therefore be put in charge -- as usual, sociology comes down to power. We "flipped" into something quite different when we went "post-industrial" (which Bell appears to not understand) -- so how do today's best thinkers describe this *new* situation? Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 3/2/2012 10:03:22 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, morlockelloi@yahoo.com writes: Desire is but hard-coded goals, that got hard-coded for reasons that were prevalent in the past. Now that the technology can cheat and s(t)imulate, the firmware is trashing in useless loops. Desires are amplified and have practically squeezed out ideas and ideologies. The cat has encountered the eternal laser pointer. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org