The New Metropolis: The Neoliberal/vectoral Carrots, labor and education.

[Patrick Lichty]

I’ve been sitting down here from my science fiction scenario perch in the 
Middle East, and see the following in my old home, the US, but see echoes in 
Europe as well. There is a cultural scaffold unfolding regarding education, 
labour, and capital that concerns me greatly, and most of the commentary I see 
is amazingly short term,a nd I would like to connect some dots for a longer 
term scenario.

Regarding education, I have seen devaluation of academic labor and revaluation 
of relatively unskilled labour.  This week, there was furor about University of 
Illinois Carbondale recruiting “volunteer” adjuncts to teach seminars, single 
classes for up to three years for Free. According to the Chancellor’s office, 
my understanding was that this was a chance to get teaching experience before 
becoming PAID adjuncts.  Being that getting a PhD often entails many tens of 
thousands of dollars to get to the point of being a graduate, the idea of 
allowing “free” adjunct labour is especially repugnant when these should be 
paid teaching assistantshipsor junior adjunct positions. In no way should this 
sort of arrangement be tolerated – as it reminds me of the common idea given to 
artists of gratis “exposure” 

Exploitative vectoral extraction of value is exactly what it looks like. Every 
time.

On the other side of the educational fence, news stories like the spurious Fox 
News report that put forth an invective about student being passed on, not 
studying, and if they engage, being indoctrinated with Left Wing values that go 
against the values that their parents had instilled them with (perhaps from Fox 
News…) Additionally, Gross and Marcus’ recent piece on NPR gives a strange 
mirror from the more progressive side – that higher-paying trades are begging 
while high schoolers are being sold questionable futures through a college 
education.

I see this as a tremendously fraught situation where an economic incentive is 
given to enter trades and not enter the university system, which might be a 
backhanded way for the working class (re: Fox News audience) to be enticed once 
again not to enter an environment that could run afoul of the ontological 
regime of neoliberalism.  While I am not against a good living for anyone, 
there was a time when higher education was about creating the citizen of a 
liberal society (as such, not in the pejorative political term), and not purely 
in the creation of Labor (i.e. “getting a job”). 

Being that total U.S. student debt stands at 1.4 trillion Dollars (Dr. Evil 
pinky pointed to mouth), the shift from federal support to private loans while 
administrative costs has gotten much  higher is something to consider.  The 
cost of higher education in North America, and especially the USA, has become 
onerous, and driven students increasingly into the strictly utilitarian camp.

Meanwhile, in the workforce, these trades might be extant, but on the left 
hand, jobs are either being replaced by automation, AI, or offered at fast-food 
wages.

The issue here is forcing a workforce to retrain at increasingly higher cost 
while the necessity for retraining increases (with the onus of paying for 
retraining being largely on the worker), where even fast food jobs are being 
replaced by automation, and the concentration of wealth continues to increase 
at exponential rates.

Secondly, the notion of Basic Universal Income, I still hold to my argument 
with Stanley Aronowitz’ regarding his 1990’s book, The Jobless Future, in that 
a large percentage of individuals, given the chance to be independent of paid 
labour, that the gainfully unemployed will take to ideas of enlightened 
self-interest, where my experience in Eastern Ohio in the USA would be to 
engage in less than gainful activities, not be involved in healthy behavior, 
and so on.  But on the other hand, this is not that I am supporting work-fare 
programs either, as they are intrinsically demeaning as they place difficult 
work requirements for little money who need to be searching for better jobs 
with that time.

But on the other hand, what if BMI is merely a strategy for vectoral extraction 
for consumer spending from the public sector while concentrating that wealth in 
the hands of the automators until… … … the reserves of capital are gone. 

This is, as I see it a scenario in at least the USA in 15-30 years.  At this 
time, I see an utter collapse of Western economic stability, shifting into 
Asian markets, or a huge redistribution of wealth, heralding an economic 
“Rebuilding of New Zion” after the reset of the Economic Mattix.

However, as Morpheus once said, “What is the matrix? Control.” Except in this 
case, instead of the Duracell battery (a historical stroke of brand placement 
genius), it is a dollar a shekel, a euro, to mirror the classic movie Network’s 
“Forces of Nature” speech.

Even with the rise of cryptocurrency, we have seen the regimes of traditional 
economic power rise to curtail the more anarchist 

Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?

[Alan Sondheim]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2018, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:




On Apr 27, 2018, at 6:07 AM, Alan Sondheim  wrote:

Query - again, I'm admittedly naive in these matters -

Here's a current stat on Fb - As of the fourth quarter of 2017, 
Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users. In the third quarter of 
2012, the number of active Facebook users had surpassed 1 billion, 
making it the first social network ever to do so. Active users are 
those which have logged in to Facebook during the last 30 days. (from 
statista.com) -


My assumption is that these stats are wildly exaggerated, and that the 
definitions of "active", "unique", "logged in" or even "users" have 
little to do with how these terms are commonly - na?vely - understood.


I'm not sure of this - what is your assumption based on? Do you have 
alternative stats to back it up? In any case, there are huge numbers of 
users of course -




I keep coming back to this enormity which stresses across any number of 
cultures/population segments and wonder how this might be governed at 
all - given the number of empty accounts, bots, etc. And what are the 
mechanisms of control that anyone might apply to this quantity - as 
well as the quantity of material YouTube, say, handles daily? It's one 
thing to theorize what is to be done or not done, or whether Z. should 
be jailed or not; it's another to deal with this flood of material. As 
a problematic user, I'm always amazed at the naked control Fb exercises 
- the simplest example being the top stories trope over the recent. 
What may be turned off varies from week to week, but basically, 
nothing.


Facebook makes its users hysterical: about intimate stuff, about 
politics, and even more so about Facebook. One example would be the 
issue with "top stories", which I assume is the outrage about specific 
content that appears or fails to appear in what Facebook users tend to 
call "their feed", and the conclusion that secret "algorithms" have 
begun to take control of their lives. Even though the same is true for, 
say, my own - self-hosted, self-programmed, 
not-platform-or-silo-dependent - blog, if I had one: some things appear, 
some don't, I might even "personalize" content in a way that is 
intentionally intransparent, and if you don't like it, you're free to go 
elsewhere.


Even my old unused blogs have everything I put on them still in place. And 
there's a basic difference between 'top stories' and 'most recent' or some 
such - the former involves content algorithms, which is where shaping 
comes into play; the latter might be nothing more than a simple temporal 
ordering.


The third of the world that is on Facebook didn't get there as a result 
of enslavement by a global corporation. They're on Facebook because they 
love it. Maybe, since you explicitly use the term of "control" to 
describe the mechanisms at work here, it's worth to take yet another 
look at the little text, written and published in 1989/1990, that 
introduced this term - to me, but (I guess) to many others around here 
as well:


"We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. 
Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, 
or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between 
the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted 
money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to 
floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by 
a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the 
space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. 
We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the 
serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of 
living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a 
discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, 
in orbit, in a continuous network." (1)


"But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in 
production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the 
complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a 
capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials 
and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products 
or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants 
to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for 
the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is 
essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the 
corporation." (1)


"The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any 
element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal 
in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), 
is not necessarily one of science fiction. F?lix Guattari has imagined a 
city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, 
one's 

Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?

[sebastian]

> On Apr 27, 2018, at 6:07 AM, Alan Sondheim  wrote:
> 
> Query - again, I'm admittedly naive in these matters -
> 
> Here's a current stat on Fb -
> As of the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active 
> users. In the third quarter of 2012, the number of active Facebook users had 
> surpassed 1 billion, making it the first social network ever to do so. Active 
> users are those which have logged in to Facebook during the last 30 days. 
> (from statista.com) -

My assumption is that these stats are wildly exaggerated, and that the 
definitions
of "active", "unique", "logged in" or even "users" have little to do with how 
these
terms are commonly - naïvely - understood.

> I keep coming back to this enormity which stresses across any number of 
> cultures/population segments and wonder how this might be governed at all - 
> given the number of empty accounts, bots, etc. And what are the mechanisms of 
> control that anyone might apply to this quantity - as well as the quantity of 
> material YouTube, say, handles daily? It's one thing to theorize what is to 
> be done or not done, or whether Z. should be jailed or not; it's another to 
> deal with this flood of material. As a problematic user, I'm always amazed at 
> the naked control Fb exercises - the simplest example being the top stories 
> trope over the recent. What may be turned off varies from week to week, but 
> basically, nothing.

Facebook makes its users hysterical: about intimate stuff, about politics, and 
even
more so about Facebook. One example would be the issue with "top stories", 
which I
assume is the outrage about specific content that appears or fails to appear in 
what
Facebook users tend to call "their feed", and the conclusion that secret 
"algorithms"
have begun to take control of their lives. Even though the same is true for, 
say, my
own - self-hosted, self-programmed, not-platform-or-silo-dependent - blog, if I 
had
one: some things appear, some don't, I might even "personalize" content in a 
way that
is intentionally intransparent, and if you don't like it, you're free to go 
elsewhere.

The third of the world that is on Facebook didn't get there as a result of 
enslavement
by a global corporation. They're on Facebook because they love it. Maybe, since 
you
explicitly use the term of "control" to describe the mechanisms at work here, 
it's
worth to take yet another look at the little text, written and published in 
1989/1990,
that introduced this term - to me, but (I guess) to many others around here as 
well:

"We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals 
have
 become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it 
is
 money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since 
discipline
 always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, 
while
 control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate
 established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the 
animal of
 the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. 
We have
 passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the 
system under
 which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with 
others. The
 disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of 
control is
 undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network." (1)

"But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, 
which
 it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles,
 metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. 
It no
 longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys 
the
 finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but 
what it
 wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for 
the
 product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially 
dispersive,
 and the factory has given way to the corporation." (1)

"The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element 
within an
 open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in 
a
 corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science 
fiction.
 Félix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's 
apartment,
 one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card 
that
 raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a 
given day
 or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that 
tracks
 each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation." 
(1)

"Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of 
threatening
 the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; 
they