morlockelloi on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 04:20:32 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology


The apparent tremendous complexity of the situation stems from the inability to see the obvious and futile attempts to apply defunct notions and theories to the present.

In natural sciences and mathematics, a standard way of looking for explanation is to look at the extreme states, boundary conditions: what if technology retires all - or 99.99999% - of the human work?

The end game then is that a small number of families controls 'production' of everything on the planet, perhaps including O2 allowances. What is the 'market' then, and where is all the bs around it? No one needs your work at all. You can't 'buy' anything. Without need for work there is no need for market. The 0.000000001% is perfectly happy without your participation in anything whatsoever (except maybe as a game in reservation ... "get that fatty over there".) Even sex becomes, finally, free. Nothing much is being produced, the planet is clean and green, and you get shot by a drone if you step out of the reservation.

Large number of humans already live in such world (they don't frequent nettime.) We are also getting there - most of the investments go into creating unemployment: self-driving, self-fucking, self-reporting things. Remote-operated is a transition phase, you will fondly remember 'militarized police' when the 'police' part gets factored out.

It's hard to find anything that prevents the above scenario. Most 'employed' are already blindly following scripts on their screens, they are like the compulsory 'human driver' in the self-driving cars. The millions of technocrati believe that they are safe as programmers and maintainers (just saw a poll that 50% of twentysomethings want to work for two major corporations), but that's just underestimating the technology. There will be a need for few thousands, maybe.

The 'market' will not thrive even within reservations. That's a fantasy, as Zizek's rants that future social models will arise from Brazilian favelas.


prices. The volume of exchanges along with price discovery and the
gradual emergence of a "just price" for each type of product tells the
state not only what people value, but also, what is the most efficient
way to produce what people value. Every move of the state that furthers
the cheaper production of whatever people value is therefore legitimate
in neoliberal politics and foundational for neoliberal society. That is
the foundation of the ordoliberal state through a pure reference to the
market. So, why did Germany veer away from being a society oriented
toward labor unions, social welfare and complete inclusion, to gradually
become the society that promotes unequual competition and savage

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