Competitive Liminality

Daniel Bell died recently, so by way of a tribute, I thought it might be appropriate to touch base with some strands of cultural sociology that reflect the concerns expressed in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Bernice Martin, for example, considered the effects of the "expressive revolution" of the 1960s in terms of its challenge to the English tradition of "the gentleman amateur". According to her, aesthetic cultivation had long been the exclusive preserve of  upper class, young leisured gentlemen:

"Thus we see two forms of individualism in education, the meritocratic/instrumental and the romantic/expressive. The latter is strong in the arts and humanities, in the universities and the professional upper middle class (especially all the communicators). The former is the tradition by which the vast economic costs of the education industry were usually legitimated and was strong among the commercial middle class, politicians and the non humanistic middle ranks of the teaching profession. It also found a natural home among most of the working classes who valued book learning, if they valued it at all, as the source of marketable skills and qualifications. The important, small minority of the working class which held a view of education close to that of classical humanism was Robert Roberts's self-educated and politically articulate proletarian intellectuals who valued learning for the truth, the social prophecy and the self-development which it held out to them."

A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change progressively argues that rock music shook up these cross class tensions: the contradictions did work as a symbiosis and united working and middle class wings of youth culture, the Underground and rock into a powerful cultural force. She sees the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP as marking a turning point, after which pop and youth culture disintegrated-- returning to class homogeneous markets or groupings-- having successfully shifted the accepted attitudes on many issues, especially concerning sex and authority. Middle class prog rock then went about deconstructing rock to the point where it became more indistinguishable from "serious" avant garde music.

Martins's narrative has the ring of truth to it. I would add though that record executives responded by panicking- urging their signed acts to tour incessantly in an attempt to stop them sinking with barely a ripple into a small, specialized, albeit appreciative, loyal fanbase. Indeed, most of the British prog acts did not play at home for years because they were always touring America. A potential irony of the situation was that the increasing sophistication of home hifi equipment threatened to make live music less appealing, if not entirely redundant. This is a bit like the recent turn to 3D by the movie studios, who are obviously concerned about the popularity of home theater systems and downloading movies. But I digress. The prog acts, along with the likes of David Bowie (the latter masquerading as an alien being in his Ziggy persona), deliberately compensated by putting on spectacular stadium shows that utilized all manner of gigantic, theatrical props. Afterall, who otherwise would be content with trying to make out the ant-sized performers as a virtuoso solo is been played on a distant stage, when they could instead choose to relax with the live album at home?

Unsurprisingly, the dreaded "roadshow" syndrome gradually set in as rock star personas assumed a greater sense of imperial remoteness that was as far from the ideal of "Woodstock Nation" as could be imagined. The art of Guy Peellaert is clearly a product of this era. 

Portrait of Bob Dylan

I should mention though that there is another wrinkle in this story which goes unremarked in Martin's book. However, I don't see that it does any damage to her basic thesis. Simon Frith in Art Into Pop, and Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again both do an admirable job in documenting the explosion of creativity from Britain's art schools, which in part was a reaction against the strictures of punk, if not quite marking a return to the lengthy extemporizations characteristic of their prog predecessors.  No doubt, it would be appealing to read these developments as a reconstitution of the kind of "powerful force" Martin described. Part of the problem with this institutional base though was there from the beginning. The art schools taught commercial, socially "useful" graphic design skills, which offered advance warning of how any politics of modernism would have to reckon with its rapid recuperation by the advertising industry. As Reynolds shows particularly well, this was starting to become apparent as early as the mid 80s, when post-punk bands were already starting to more self-consciously portray themselves as corporate entities as part of their marketing strategy. Therefore, it can hardly be coincidental that Frankie Goes To Hollywood took their name from a Guy Peelaert painting of Frank Sinatra.

But I don't want to lay too much blame at the feet of the musicians. Sure, there was something very appealing about the democratization of access to the means of musical production that helped a thousand flowers to bloom. By the same token though, the shame of it all is that even more great electronic music may have been possible, were it not for the way the schisms of the British class system had earlier played out in the 1970s. Peter Zinovieff's famous Electronic Music Studios never managed to transcend their aristocratic origins. As Trevor Pinch has argued in Analog Days,  the upshot of this was that there was no room for "trade" there (i.e. engineering and manufacturing). That was all done elsewhere, whereas in the States there was a much closer interaction between engineers and musicians. The former were cognizant of the fact that the latter wanted a keyboard performance synth, which duly arrived in the form of the Moog. I just can't help thinking that a greater ready availability of the Moog and the VCS3 synthesizer in Britain in the 70s and 80s could have facilitated innovation by been more affordable, were they obliged to directly compete with each other. 

This post has cast a backwards glance, so I suppose there's a danger that Bernice Martin and everything else I've discussed comes off sounding nostalgic and irrelevant to what's happening on the contemporary scene. I plead innocent, so hear me out please! One facet of Martin's argument will have to suffice to prove my point. When she describes "competitive liminality" Martin is drawing attention to how performers commonly feel obliged to pursue increasingly rarefied thresholds of difference. This cycle keeps repeating itself, to the point where the individual risks living in a permanent liminal state of anomie unmediated by "limits". Although highly distressing on a subjective level, she argues, some attempts have been made to accommodate this condition, which explains the appeal, for example, of the Maharishi's philosophy for the Beatles. Adorno speaks in like terms of "moments" of atavistic subjectivity intended to escape society in an individual experience of transcendent intensity, as does Bell, in his descriptions of the pursuit of ecstasy.

The most dangerous variant of this strategy, notes Martin, is what Kenneth Burke calls the principle of entelechy. Basically, this means each symbolic item of a classification system must engage in the task of destroying its own alter ego as part of a kind of aesthetic permanent revolution. Hence, for example, disorder must become an absolute value which denies order per se; individualism must extirpate the collective. Martin continues:

"If the strategy is successful, the possibility of communication is destroyed. The preferred symbol becomes literally incomprehensible; language reverts to babel; music becomes meaningless noise."

I note with interest that recent Adornian style aesthetic critiques in effect describe Kurt Cobain from Nirvana in remarkably similar terms to what Martin has to say here. It follows that I was particularly taken by the claim that for Cobain, "Endless, Nameless" suggests "we must confront the possibility that the utopian dimension of Grunge music might have been inseparable from its “suicidal” character". 




Kurt Cobain leaving no doubts about his intentions



Evidently then, Cobain still exerts a real hold on the popular imagination, so if Martin's work can be applied to him as well, I take it as read that she is not somehow outdated. We shouldn't be misled by carelessly slapping the "postmodern" label on Cobain either, or we'll lose sight of this fact. I'd even venture a further claim. How's this for an explanation of the "purity" by which the genre of "black metal" music originally was originally defined by some?:

"What usually happens, of course, is less drastic- there is simply an extension and amplification of the symbols of disorder and anti-structure, which then becomes the symbolic focus of belonging, the sacred language of identity for a new, purified community which stands over against unregenerate society, a new spiritual elite set apart from the children of darkness. Students of millenarianism will be familiar with the syndrome."

I can't see that a musician such as Burzum would have too many problems assenting to this statement (as even a cursory glance at his blog will confirm), even if we need to modify it a bit to show that it is the "children of darkness" who in the case of black metal regard themselves as the elite set apart from the unregenerate society.

Corpse paint and anti-Christian sentiments are standard fare for black metal musicians

Another reason these examples are interesting is that they cannot be simply described in the usual sociological terms as byproducts of the anomie that follows secularization. In Cobain's case this is obvious in the name of his band, Nirvana, along with his recorded personal beliefs (Jainism, Buddhism). Furthermore, few would deny that Norse paganism exerted a formative influence on Norway's black metal scene. Klaus Eder has argued that it was never proper to speak of secularization in reference to the United States, so any attempt to theoretically contextualize Cobain should probably be mindful of this fact. Eder instead limits secularization to Europe, but makes greater allowance for the post secularization thesis in more recent years. 

This begs the question though, where have Martin's interests taken her of late? Well, it seems she is part of the post secularization research group. I see no evidence that she has thrown in her lot with the radical orthodoxies of John Milbank, who are set on punishing sociology for adhering to the secularization thesis for so long. Inevitably, there will be those who will want to question the motivations of some of the company Martin is keeping here. Is this fellow an example of the kind of gentleman amateur we hoped to consign to the past, a traditional humanist scholar, or is he exploring comparable possibilities?:

  That’s because democracy and capitalism have each become compulsory and fundamental. They ground everything we do, including religious practice—so we can only get outside them through the kind of postsecular leap of faith that I am talking about. That realization is one of the things that is important about Alain Badiou’s thought. Such leaps may also be relevant to situations in which we encounter secularism’s limits—when secularism can’t contain the ethical and epistemological demands we make of it...The example I have chosen is literary, and only a tiny (and declining) sector of the population is open to literature’s postsecular intensities. Of course, somewhat equivalent intensities can happen in other cultural domains, like art and film and dance and theater and video. None of these offers what Christianity and Islam can: the possibility of a collective life organized around the promise of salvation. But, of course, to be educated into modernity is, by and large, to lose the ability to believe in salvation.

Another thing that interests me right now is the possibility of reading other people who have been influenced by Martin, such as Eduardo de la Fuente, in combination with those more concerned with Marx, such as Michel Cloucard and  Jean-Claude Michea (partially as a way of getting around the annoyance I feel with Eduardo for publishing in a conservative magazine such as Quadrant; bringing to mind Bell's contemporaries who later gravitated to neoconservatism, as featured in the documentary Arguing the World). Notwithstanding their respective differences, I feel that if there is a basis for common ground, it has to do with the subjective conditions that might eventuate from a neoliberal resolution of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Consider Cloucard's chilling diagnosis: "Neofascism will be the ultimate expression of libertarian social liberalism". 

With a critical eye on the future then, one can see this principle of entelechy launching putropias, such as Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman's libertarian "seasteading" project. Seasteading offers a frightening glimpse of how "competitive liminality" strives to liquidate the collective. I am just praying that this does not expand into outerspace. As astrofuturist Kilgore once noted of the paintings of Don Davis, a model of a multitude of colonies that one could elect to join is about intolerance as much as it is freedom. It is a model of true imperial remoteness that brings this post full circle, insofar as Guy Peellaer's more critical work could also be used to reflect on Don Davis's featured model Americans basking in 24 hour Californian sun.

The banality of evil?

Or, as Sardar and Cubbitt have remarked:


 "Science fiction shows us not the plasticity but the paucity of the human imagination that has become quagmired in the scientist industrial technological, cultural-socio-psycho babble of a single civilizational paradigm. Science fiction is the fiction of mortgaged futures".


In this post I have attempted to demonstrate the relevance of cultural sociology. While certainly not agreeing with everything either Daniel Bell or Bernice Martin have to say, I firmly believe they offer some useful tools to help us learn from our past mistakes, and thereby preventing the inheritance of a mortgaged future.

Transhumanism: transcending biology

But where does libertarianism fit into all this, you ask? First of all, it’s useful to note that transhumanists don’t all fall under a monolithic political philosophy. There are many liberal transhumanists who see the enhancement of the mind and body through technology as the ultimate equalizer that will allow people to improve themselves and transcend their limitations. There are even Christian transhumanists who see the technological singularity as a sort of man-made Rapture that will bring them closer to God (see also here).

But there is also a very vocal sect of transhumanist libertarians who see their future robot bodies as the best chance to escape statist control once and for all.Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey thinks transhumanism is the linchpin that will help libertarians “win the future.” Why? Because once we all become self-healing and self-medicating cyborgs, then “ideas about government health care and government-guaranteed incomes will appear quaint.”

I also tag this post "Patri Friedman" in reference to the seasteader and cyber swinger extraordinaire-- who once flamed me on this blog for criticizing him-- because the Alternet article links to another piece entitled, "The Really Creepy People Behind the Libertarian Inspired Billionaire Sea Castles". The title is self-explanatory, and I concur entirely with how Mark Ames characterizes these members of the Lunar Right. It's disturbing to see how in the time since my post, more people are being drawn to this, "spoilt child's autarky, an imperialism of outsourcing, a very petty fascism" (to quote China Mieville's description in Evil Paradises).

Patri Friedman seen leaving the offices of PayPal Inventor Peter Thiel: "Mak[ing] the world safe for capitalism"

"The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom."



"The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world. A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism".
Peter Thiel
from The Seasteading Institute Annual Report 2008

Perpetual travel & "the 5 flags"

This promotional video for trillionstars.com, a New Zealand financial company (for personal and corporate finance), is something I've found morbidly fascinating. It is but one example of the "Perpetual Traveler" lifestyle and its attendant "5 flags" philosophy. Clients are urged to think of themselves basically as "human multinationals". I believe that social theorists such as Chris Rojek or Anthony Elliott would recognise here an intensification of individual experience. "Postmodernization" is a process typically understood to involve a blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure, whereas the ideal of the "perpetual traveler" appears more suggestive of a growing sense of fragmentation: hence the ideal and lifestyle of the "5 flags" divides identity into relatively discreet autonomous zones. For example, (according to the clip I've posted here), Thailand or Sydney serve as relatively inexpensive "playgrounds", while France is for "friends" and cultural sophistication, and New York or Frankfurt are chiefly financial repositories.

Those able to fully avail themselves of the opportunities afforded by the "5 flags" would, almost certainly, have to be the most mobile members in a global network of services. In this regard they stand at the opposite end of the spectrum detailed in the ethnographies of Aihwa Ong (previously posted on this blog). It follows that it is more proper to speak here of the development of globalisation to the exclusion of a cosmopolitan sensibility (i.e. the latter is closer to world citizenship than the individual sovereignty associated with the perpetual traveler).Hence global financial transactions are the closest approximation of a cultural Esperanto, as far as perpetual travelers are concerned (in tandem with legal indemnification against personal loss- i.e. as soon as the latter does not serve the former, the traveler will transfer their investments elsewhere).

By extension, the latter point is a stark illustration of the conventional nature of seasteading, given how easily one can imagine such degenerate utopias setting sail under the "5 flags". To my mind this is also indicative of how the book Evil Paradises may have benefited from a greater attempt to systematise the core literature with respect to the competing agendas of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. For instance, such an approach could have protected China Mieville's critique of seasteading from the predictable ad hominem attacks by the likes of Patri Friedman (which can be easily Googled),given the [libertarian] failure to understand how the method of immanent critique can be used to deconstruct seasteading, and, indeed, "perpetual travel".

The Continental Philosophy Blogosphere: Noosphere or Public Sphere?

I'm deep in the throes of editing a paper for an academic economics journal, so my thoughts here will have to be impressionistic and require future unpacking. But I'm in a playful mood and need to unwind for a moment. Suffice to say, I'm struck of late by the serial effect of so much of what passes for critical analysis in the blogosphere: take the latest Continental philosopher who refers to "capital", and then apply said reading method to the film, dubstep album etc of your choice. In my earlier "Crash" post I touched on a few characteristics of the kind of "interpretive community" that may have generated these tendencies, and I've wondered ever since if they could bear closer examination in terms of a sociology of knowledge, or the perspective I'm more familiar with, social epistemology.

The questions asked would need to be reflexive ones about why these people blog, which should ideally help to elucidate any commonalities between them. It would also have to be determined why this reading method has proliferated to the point where it seems to be the preferred option when it comes to sociocultural theory in the blogosphere. A cynic might argue that it has to do with Donald Campbell's infamous "fish scale model of omniscience", where those who conduct the least amount of empirical research are particularly suited to the mobile conditions of a network society. When such individuals have tenureship, one can expect to find them disproportionately represented at international conferences. When there is no tenureship, cyberspace substitutes as the preferred space for generating network connectivity. Crosscutting both situations, however, is the tendency for depth of knowledge to explode in direct proportion to interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary mobility.

What typologies could potentially be used to draw the relevant distinctions? As I see it, there are essentially 3 choices. Surprisingly, in a moment of rare lucidity, Slavoj Zizek has managed to sketch 2 of these, which could serve as heuristic devices when investigating the blogosphere of Continental philosophy. In his words:

If I understand this point of a one-mind-entity correctly, then it's a version of cyberspace I didn't mention. I first of all mentioned the deconstructionist version of cyberspace which is this post-Cartesian one: Each of us can play with his/her identities and so forth. This is the feminist, deconstructionist, Foucaultian version. But as you probably know there is another, let's call it the New Age school of cyberspace-ideology. It is this neo-Jungian idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, false individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation...
...the Noosphere...
Slavoj Zizek: Yes, that's precisely the idea. We all share one collective mind.

The first alternative is clear enough, but I'm wondering if the second has any explanatory power when it comes to understanding the curious phenomenon in which capitalism is portrayed as increasingly emancipated from human agency, and that it is this inherent tendency that might explain its current dysfunction? I suspect the answer would be "yes", insofar as the Continental response, for all of its rhetorical appeal to complexity, merely complements the widespread disenchantment with human subjectivity as the driver of change on the contemporay scene. We are typically presented with portrayals of the "alien" nature of capital, which affords the Continental commentariat the luxury of just in effect sitting back and anticipating how the disaster will play itself out. Only at that point may the rising crescendo of voices proclaim the emergence of a "new mutation"; in Deleuzian terms, for example, something like "a non facialised individual", and/or a realisation of the promise of "the multitude" (Hardt & Negri). If these preliminary speculations are amenable to further analysis, then their provenance might also be traced back even further.

For example, here is how the social epistemologist Steve Fuller interprets the opportunism of the Continental movement [sic]:

Intellectual pathologies of our times I: Continental philosophy

Generally speaking, today’s stereotype of the intellectual is the continental philosopher – a quasi-literary, somewhat deep figure of French or German origin. The origin of this image is normally traced the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who regarded himself as a ‘universal intellectual’, very much on the model of an Enlightenment figure like Voltaire. However, this image came under serious reconstruction after the disappointments of the student revolts in the 1960s. At this point Michel Foucault emerges as a downsized and more academicised version of the Sartrean intellectual. Here we shall explore how continental philosophy provides intellectual rationalisation for political impotence that has spread to cover a wide range of movements, including feminism.

The third alternative is one which I am more familiar and sympathetic with. What needs to be determined here is the extent to which the blogosphere can be modelled on a public sphere. Unlike the Continentals, it is a perspective less preoccupied with the complexities of "the virtual", than the development of new concepts and their practical, collective applications, such as "information war". A key figure here is Frank Webster, who is one of the most renowned, sociologically influenced, critics of the idea of "the information society". A further advantage of his work is that it spares one from the option of having to endure the crude polemicism that oftentimes features in exchanges between the Continental blogosphere and its opponents. Like Fuller then, Webster has developed a detailed system of thought which offers the promise of constructive criticism when engaging with the mediation of ICTs by capitalist interests.

I did once come across a superb Adorno quote from Minima Moralia that speaks to the sense of how the historical moment can give the tenured Continental philosopher an innate sense that they are a fraud (which I'll have to track down again). It's particularly frightening when this sense of powerlessness is compensated for by the overzealous marking of students' work. The image which came to my mind was of some of the younger dons, who are more likely to perceive students as future competition, thereby increasing a feeling of insecurity, as resembling Jack Torrance in The Shining; except in the philosopher's case the university substitutes for the Overlook Hotel. In each scenario, the place where they toil merely teases out the innate destructive capacities by giving them a space for their free reign. Word counts and body counts hence become indistinguishable as writing transmutes into a form of serial violence repeated ad infinitum (Mark Seltzer style)........

But rather than end on such a pessimistic note, I can at least report that my preliminary research on the noosphere has yielded an interesting science fiction find: the anime, intriguingly titled, in light of my last remarks, Serial Experiments Lain. I hope I can track it down some time.

Oh yes, and I can't forget about some other pertinent observations concerning the death of libertarianism at this point in our economic history. It would follow that seasteading is merely a retreat into degenerate utopia once the signs of market failure have become too obvious to ignore (and in the case of the seasteaders, too obvious to deal with).

The banality of evil: of seasteading, Battlefield Earth, and other foolishness

Ahuthnance, we were riffing last night about how the mixture of unintentional side splitting hilarity mixed with the banality of evil, can make for a lethal cocktail. Few things can match seasteading in this regard, and it has to be said that one of its most offensive features is the dishonesty about its underlying motivations. Why don't they at least have the integrity to just come out and admit what they really are?: a sad example of "white flight" syndrome, who are opposed to any form of progressive taxation. Their existence merely confirms William Gibson's assessment that writing science fiction has become increasingly difficult because we are reaching a point where it has "colonised reality". No doubt the seasteaders would merely see this as an early confirmation of the "singularity" they are looking forward to. But I see it instead as testimony to the speed of the appropriation of critical impulses by a logic of commodification even more powerful than imagined in Marx's day. This suggests that Patri Friedman et al are less the brave pioneers they imagine themselves to be, than they are the contemporary equivalent of those who choose to move "offworld" in Blade Runner, having abandoned a crumbling terrestial public infrastructure (hey, until they can get to outer space, I guess they figured they'll have to make do with the oceans).
In Evolution and Ethics T.H. Huxley advocated "not the survival of the fittest, but the fitting of as many as possible to survive" (for some bringing to mind an ideal closer to Christian eschatology, say Noah's Ark). If we compare this to Friedman's dubious endeavors it is evident how low the morality of expectations has sunk in his case. What kind of society could ever have emerged and then being sustained if the governing prospective ideal was merely packing up and going somewhere else when the going got too tough? There is obviously nothing heroic or innovative about such a perverted, thin conception of citizenship, no matter how dressed up in futuristic garb it is. Seasteading abandons the imperative to learn to coexist with others who are different to you, some of whom you may even despise. It substitutes a serial logic familiar from dystopias such as The Possibility of an Island, or indeed, George Ritzer's thesis of the McDonaldisation of society. Seasteading is a "fast food" type dystopia, offering junk "solutions" for social ills.

Fortunately though, there is another wrinkle in this story, so seasteading need not be construed as further evidence of an intractable crisis faced by governments to finance public works through progressive taxation. As argued by Christopher May in The Information Society: A Sceptic's View, and contra Ian Angell's The New Barbarian Manifesto: How to Survive the Information Age, intellectual property laws can still perform a regulatory function, so some moderation of capital flight remains feasible. I'm not arguing that we should settle long term for nothing more ambitious than managed affluence when it comes to defining any given society's ideal of "public good", but it seems to me that May's argument cannot be easily dismissed: at stake is adjudication of the exchanges between sovereign states.

Before changing tack in this post, I can only hope that Patri Friedman does not return to this blog with more of his "disorganised swearing": hyperaphoristic concentrations mixed with generation of antinomian energy (i.e. profanity). I could almost picture him willing himself forward in his "blitz" style attack, prior to committing intellectual suicide by failing to respond to any of the specific critiques in my original post (mind you, his blog reveals this to be his usual practice).
More important background reading can be found in the thorough expose of the fraudulent legacy of the Nobel Prize winning Chicago School of Economics, on the FAQ on Liberalism website (which can be found on Acheron's sidebar).

I am also aided here by Borsook's investigation of the milieu which has shaped Friedman's [entirely] conventional thinking on these matters:

Cyberselfish By Paulina Borsook
Paulina Borsook has been stirring up a ruckus in Silicon Valley since her days as a regular contributor to Wired magazine. She will ruffle feathers again with this spirited, funny, gimlet-eyed look at the worldview of the digerati -- one she terms "violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation".
In Cyberselfish Borsook journeys through and rants about high tech culture, profiling the worlds of ravers, gilders, cypherpunks, anarchocapitalists, and other Silicon Valley life forms; and exploring the theory and practice of what she dubs "technolibertarianism" in all its manifestations. Whether she is attending Bionomics conferences or hanging out with Wired staffers, reading personal ads or evaluating high-tech's sorry philanthropic record, Borsook is full of original observations, mordant wit, and furious passion that readers wake up to the social and political consequences of having computer geeks run the world. Cyberselfish is sure to raise the hackles of high techies and to clarify what makes the rest of us so nervous about the brave new cyberworld.
More details
Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech
By Paulina Borsook
Published by PublicAffairs, 2000
ISBN 1586480383, 9781586480387
276 pages

Ok, now is the time to change tack a bit. I see this stuff as still related to the psychopathologies of Friedman and his fellow seasteaders. It's the old sociological chestnut about the consequences of reflexive anomie, which I've mentioned previously on this blog in terms of "opportunity costs" etc. Derridata passed along a clip of actor Will Smith lost somewhere in the stratosphere of dianetics. It is the most shocking display I've seen since the Tom Cruise incidents we are all familiar with. This compelled me to dig back into the archive to find the Hollywood star vanity project, also Scientology inspired, Battlefield Earth. Although certain social critics (i.e. Robert Putnam and fellow communitarians) may at times be prone to cynical exaggeration, the thesis of the decline of social capital consequent upon the intensification of individual experience is understandable in light of the cabinets of horror I am posting about here.
I've concluded that when a self is thrown back on its own resources, it can easily fall prey to opportunistic substitutes for a responsible social philosophy. Indeed, these substitutes characteristically masquerade as the new "emancipated" form of individual "authenticity". Adorno's warnings appear all too prescient in this context. He remained highly critical of the “jargon of authenticity” as an ideology which desocietalized human subjectivity through its emphasis on self-control. By such means “a bad empirical reality” is transformed into “transcendence” as the impotence and isolation from a societal perspective are used to secure the self as the only “unloseable possession” (Adorno 1973: 116).

By extension, one can easily imagine not only the beleagured Scientologist, but also the augmented transhumanist seasteader, as resembling Travolta's stupendously bad attempt at characterisation in the following clip, cackling evilly as he dispenses some rough justice to "the norms" barred admittance to paradise (except maybe as a service/slave class):

And then there is further evidence of an attempt to transform a bad empirical reality. Another way of saying the same thing is that it resembles the conversion of sour grapes into sweet lemons (as per Jon Elster's book). For what else is a Hollywood "star" if not the metaphorical embodiment of the kind of transcendence Adorno describes?:

Besides talking pure nonsense to a bewildered Smiley for several minutes, Smith used a very strange phrase about halfway through the clip. He talked about "feeling like you're at effect," which means...well, frankly, this Hubbard jargon means anything you want it to mean, so what the hell.

"I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt," Bunker says about Smith. "But how do you absorb 'being at effect' without taking courses? I suppose it's possible he picked it up from his equally certain, equally high-strung pal Tom Cruise. But it's not an ordinary buzzword out here in the wog [non-Scientology] world." To Bunker, the clip is evidence that Smith has been taking Scientology courses for some time, and has absorbed the Hubbard way of thinking.

What we found even creepier comes later in the clip, when Smith starts talking about creating matter with his mind. Smiley's expression is priceless as Smith talks about the power of his brain: "I can create whatever I want to create if I can put my head on it right, study it, learn the patterns..."

Hey, that's just what Hubbard's other minions believe, that after a few more classes (each costing about the same as a luxury car), they'll get so powerful they can create things just by thinking about them!

Hey Will, we hope you keep studying all the way to OT VIII so you can start bending the universe to your will (so to speak). Then maybe you could think real hard about a film with you in it that doesn't suck, so that one magically appears!
more: Featured, Scientology
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2008/09/will_smith_show.php
Clive Hamilton lecture: Reclaiming Morality from Conservative Dogma and Postmodern Indifference:

Significant as an example of a discourse attempting to galvanise wider debates beyond the walls of the academy. To be sure, it sacrifices the complexities and nuances of those authors identified as "postmodern" in some respects, but remains valuable chiefly for its indictment of the sociocultural legacy of neoliberal "freedom" [sic]
http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/sydney_ideas_speech.pdf