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

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

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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