[Nettime-bold] Regarding Mumford

[jesse hirsh <jesse@tao.ca>]

I wrote a reflection piece after I read Mumford's Myth of the Machine
titled: "A Faith for the Possessive Individual"

http://jesse.openflows.org/mumford.html

Here's an excerpt:

"So what is the Internet? A wicked pyramid scheme; the perpetual war
economy; a get-rich-quick scam with free pornography; a fundamentalism for
fundamentalists; a faith for the possessive individual. Like all tools
that one would use, its shapes are that which make it, and how we make it
shapes us. Which in this case is an issue of identity (communications) and
possession (exchange). Created for war, and distributed by command, the
Internet is the autonomous agent of Capital accumulation, with the primary
commodity being intellectual property, in all its many forms."

...

"Of course this is not to suggest that reality has become fragmented,
rather it is society that is fragmenting, while reality remains unified in
the metaphor of mind (resident in the cultural construction of the
Internet). If we were to imagine this mind as manifest in the material
world, it would be a `MegaShoppingMall'. It's primary function would be as
a commercial space, designed to alienate, and constructed to contain
consumers, while capturing their capital. The faithful in this world, are
those who constantly accumulate anything they can, more often than not,
for no reason whatsoever (Pokeman). The power in this system exists
outside of it, parasitically removing the profit and value of the world.

The only real interaction the inhabitants of this world have with those
who control it, are via the security cameras in the ceiling, and the
marketing data generated by their purchasing patterns. It is a
self-contained, self-reflective, self-interpreting prison of habit and
anxiety. Its primary means of control are in fact the conformity and
totality of its commercialism. Anything can (and will) be bought and
sold.

Capitalism, as the system of economic control, fetishizes its own process
of commodification, offering it (consumerism) as a religion unto itself,
(foolishly) thinking that it can subject said religion to its (political)
economic concerns and mechanisms of control. Culturally this religion is
articulated as `Virtual Reality', which is another way of saying: unto
each person shall be granted their own reality, if that is, the price is
right, and their credit is good. The promise of this religion is that
anything is possible, and that the boundaries of reality have been
extended so far as to enable the instant actualization of that which we
can imagine."

 11:03am  up 46 days, 17:01, 10 users,  load average: 0.12, 0.11, 0.10


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