Morlock Elloi on Mon, 19 Mar 2018 02:33:50 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Troll factories in some shitty St Petersburg office?


This becomes patently obvious when one tracks actors - dozens of people who envisioned, decided, approved, designed, implemented and maintained particular mechanism of social engineering.

None of them were even aware of these ideologies that are claimed to govern their actions. They acted based on prevailing beliefs, personal interest and available tools. Of course, a claim can be made that the invisible hand of the ideology they never heard of guided them, but that's nonsense. Ideology is not law of science, and can never predict anything. It's a viral implant that's supposed to modify one's behavior - but you need to get infected first! Otherwise it would be a scientific theory, and it's not.

So this parallel construction where neoliberalism is a puppet master is total nonsense. I think that the concept of neoliberalism is the last gasp of 'left' thinkers, a desperate attempt to remain relevant and offer explanations.

Frankly, I simply do not understand some posts on nettime. I get the words, I'm reasonably sapient, but there is a total vacuum inside: circular references, name dropping, banking on the supposed shared consensus, an empty elaborate ritual, like a religious chant whose purpose is to reinforce, not mean. It's not even a cargo cult - there is no backbone of intent.



I know apres Harvey the left thing to do is draw a straight line from
the Chicago School to Chile et al., as if all 'ruling elites' had to
do was devise a program and administer it on the world. But that's bad
history as well as bad theory and is closer to rightwing
conspiricizing ("inter-elite conflicts") than Marxist analysis.

Does this bad theory matter ultimately? Probably not, but only because
people resisting the current world tend to not care when intellectuals
(or is it soothsayers?) notify them that the endgame is here. Just as
the intellectual/philosophical reasonings behind neoliberalism came
only after their policy tenets were implemented, so left conjunctural
analysis tails popular movement, but usually does it poorly and misses
the point.

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