Pam Brown's Blog l emission - control. net

The Ironic Shadow Cast by Steve Jobs' Death

The irony of Steve Jobs dying on the same day as the major Occupy Wall Street protest and march in New York City can’t be overstated, even though it has been completely overlooked by both mainstream and alternative media.  News stories celebrating Steve Jobs as the creator of a technological revolution trumped even local coverage of thousands of OWS supporters marching in the streets.  Of course, Steve Jobs' death and the occupation of Wall Street are unrelated events, yet together they represent the fundamental tension currently at play in American society today:  the crisis in our understanding of who we are as individuals and who we are as part of society. 

The underlying idea behind the OWS protest is that economic inequality, produced by the belief in the individual as able to function separately from the human collective, is misguided, unethical and unsustainable.  The cultural battle being fought at OWS seeks to reprioritize collective needs over individual desires by arguing to end the exploitation of the lower and middle classes by a small elite.  It is this exploitation that has produced economic pain in the form of lack of jobs and loss of economic resources for all but the top 1%.  It is this “failure” of capitalism to produce happiness and security for the majority, as well as its ability to camouflage the relationship between the 99% and the 1%, that calls attention to irreparable problems with the system, itself. 

Thoughts on Representing the West

Recently, I was in Denver, Colorado for a wedding and had the opportunity to visit two museums with radically different ideological projects:  The Black American West Museum and the Denver Art Museum.  It was interesting to have the opportunity to view these museums both on the same day and also with a group of lay people (my family), who had never thought about the role of museums in constructing a particular sense of history.

The Black American West Museum was founded in 1971 by Paul Wilbur Stewart, and developed out of his personal mission to uncover the history of black cowboys.  He began simply by speaking to patrons at his Denver barbershop, who began to bring him memorabilia and family photos, which he kept on display.  Once his collection out grew his barbershop, he established the museum by fusing his project with the project of commemorating the life of the first African-American female physician licensed in Colorado, Dr. Justina Ford. 

Exposing American Power in a Networked World

If nothing else, the ongoing Wikileaks event has certainly been fascinating.  The recent event highlights the dynamics of power in a networked world, from the inside look at the arrogant manner in which our diplomats perceive their colleagues in other nations, to the exposure of corporate influence on state business such as in the case of Mastercard and Visa in Russia, and Shell in Nigeria, to the manner in which the US government has used its influence to persuade "independent" corporations throughout the world to deny access to services including commerce and web hosting to Wikileaks.  Following are my preliminary thoughts on the essence of the events unfolding around the release of Wikileaks from the perspective of changes we are seeing globally as network society grows.

The Corporate State

In the case of Russia, we can observe the infiltration of the corporate into state functions, where President Obama has intervened on behalf of Mastercard and Visa in an attempt to thwart the creation of a Russian owned credit processing agency.  The potential loss of business for globally dominant credit card processing agencies was not only a matter for the state, but for the president, himself.  In the case of Nigeria, which happens to be the 8th largest supplier of oil internationally, Nigerian government interests (which at least claim to operate on behalf of its people) are shown to have been subverted by the installation of Shell executives at all levels of governance. 

And the reverse operation, using state power to influence corporate actions, is also in full operation.  Senator Lieberman brashly intervened with Amazon such that they have refused to host the Wikileaks website, a Swiss Bank is pursuaded to close the Wikileaks account, apparently for legitimate reasons that may or may not have been exposed without US state intervention, Visa and Mastercard are likely encouraged to refuse service to Wikileaks, while continuing to allow donations to organizations such as the KKK, and PayPal openly admits that they were caused, via a letter they received from the US State Department, to view Wikileaks actions as illegal, and thus, in violation of their service agreement, in spite of the fact that there are still no charges against the organization.

Sharing and Generosity: the Future of Society

Network technology is fundamentally changing social relationships and dynamics toward the human needs of sharing and generosity.  As we witness and participate in the breakdown of the current social order, it's possible to envision a totally new future for humankind, in which society will be less rigid and formed based on communities coming together as collectives working toward shared goals that impact all humanity.

Distributing Politics and the Future of Democracy

In a fascinating new study entitled "A Tale of Two Blogospheres: Discursive Practices on the Left and Right" researchers affiliated with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society found that left-wing and right-wing bloggers use technology differently.  Left-wingers are more likely to choose a collective approach and form sites with multiple bloggers and that allow reader participation than right-wing bloggers who tend to favor individual blogger sites. 

In some ways this isn't surprising because the major ideological distinction between left and right is how the collective and individual are valued, but what does this mean for the future of the internet?  And even more importantly, what does this mean for the future of democracy?  Can an individual use the power of the internet to influence politics more powerfully than in previous media environments such as print and television?  What are the differences in the ways an individual can impact power using network technology?  Is the internet just more of the same media power structure in a new form?  Or will it develop in a way that allows individuals a new form of power that enables greater social impact by the individual?  Can we envision a society with a new form of democratic public sphere in which power is distributed more equally because our individual voices are more powerful? 

It seems to me that if the left continues to dominate the blogosphere, it may be possible to develop a society based on a decentralized power structure.  It seems to me that the battles we are fighting today - from health care reform to Wall Street reform and to net neutrality - are over how power is distributed across the network of the new political economy we see taking form.

A Tale of Two Blogospheres

New Study: Liberals More Open Than Conservatives Online

The Sociology of Political Blogs: An Interview with Yochai Benkler

Critical Themes Wrap Up

The 2010 Critical Themes Conference was a huge success, and I'm glad to say that I was able to present some ideas that look at neoliberalism as part of the technological revolution unfolding before our eyes.  Here are a few links to articles I've written that are published online, as well as the complete video I excerpted during my presentation.  I will continue to post thoughts and articles as I work on the project over the next year.

Related articles online:

The Fiction of Unemployment Numbers

Progressives Need a Narrative that Resonates

Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?

Let’s Not Pivot to Jobs

Complete video from presentation:

Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?

via www.washingtonmonthly.com

In this cogently written article, Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation raise the issue of why the "elephant in the room" of corporate consolidation is not being debated within public discourse. Although it's not obvious when you're shopping at Bloomingdale's that you're actually shopping at Macy's, which now owns Bloomingale's, or that when choosing between milk brands you're actually only choosing between labels, I don't think this is a sufficient explanation for why consolidation has not been more discussed in the news or why the issue of corporate consolidation is not top of mind for the American public. I think the next step for collective inquiry is to ask why we have come to adopt an ideology that does not perceive this obvious undermining of the free market as problematic.

The article points out that in the past new technology has increased jobs, and uses this point to refute the relevance of technology to job loss. While I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that new technology has historically increased jobs, setting this point aside, I do feel that the article narrowly perceives technology only as a sort of tool that impacts efficiency.  Whereas technology can also be perceived as having a programmatic effect on human consciousness.  For example, the ability to read silently rose with the technology of the printing press, and industrialization changed our perception of time.  Once we perceive technology as potentially having a programmatic quality, we can pose the question of how new technology may be at the root of ideological change toward a social Darwinist belief that the "elephant in the room" deserves its social position of invisible domination.

Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine? - Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman

Chris Hedges: Fighting corporate rape of US

via www.youtube.com

In this interview Chris Hedges makes the critical connection between corporate fascism and branding as management of affect - mediating how we feel versus what we know.  I think the resonance of the neoliberal ideology that has led directly to a distinctly American form of fascism or as Chris Hedges puts it "inverted totalitarianism" may relate to this incorporation of our sensory world by corporate interests.  The images we see on screen become incorporated and merged with all of our other memories, including our sensory perceptions of ideals such as freedom - the brand has the power to make us feel more free, and we incorrectly identify our freedom with the corporation.

The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever

In The Growing Underclass:  Jobs Gone Forever, nytimes.com Economics Editor, Catherine Rampell, points out that a major obstacle for job growth is that jobs in certain industries have completely disappeared.  In addition, because of the housing market decline, many job seekers will find it impossible to move for better work.  While I agree that those factors are significant, it concerns me that technological change is rarely mentioned as a critical factor in labor market analysis.  Further many of the reader comments pointed the finger at illegal immigration.  Several readers even commented that the problem is foreign competition - more "efficient" factories abroad.  Perhaps they're not aware of many of the things Naomi Klein discusses in No Logo - the corporate tax holidays and cruelly exploitative conditions of the workers.  Another comment was from a reader in Berlin, who thought it was crazy that the American government wouldn't take on the retraining of its citizens.  All in all, my feeling is that until we really begin to incorporate the issues related to changing technology and resultant changes to our political economy into our dialogue, we will not be able to find solutions that address the true underlying problems.  In other words, we'll just be chasing our tails.

I posted the following comment to the Economix Blog:

"This is likely to be an extremely unpopular comment, but I feel it needs to be said.  Either we turn our backs on the unfortunate who have permanently lost their livelihoods and develop something in the neighborhood of 40% poverty rates (like many of the countries that have instituted similar neoliberal economic policies - see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine) or we will have no choice but to develop social programs that may need to include "basic income" or similar ideas (to increase consumption). The global trend is toward reduction of work opportunities, as productivity has increased exponentially due to changing technology. From an historical perspective, each time human beings have undergone a major technological revolution, a new political economy has formed. (Consider the printing press and capitalism...) It concerns me that technological change as a critical factor in labor markets is not being discussed in the media. It seems to me that many of the ideas as to how to impact unemployment rest on incorrect assumptions that weigh past performance too heavily in a fundamentally changed economy."

Progressives Need a Narrative that Resonates

Let’s face it - January was an unimaginably rough start to the New Year for progressives.  First, the painful and surprising loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat to a crass, pickup truck driving teabagger, who tried to sell his daughters on national TV, and who promised the country to derail health insurance reform.  Then, the announcement of the big, unfathomably huge, gargantuan Wall Street bonuses totaling almost the exact amount that taxpayers had forked over in the bailout, ultimately culminating in a 100 million dollar payday for Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankenfein, and the need for anti-nausea drugs for the rest of the country.  With the administration’s most important social policy change unlikely to result in anything meaningful, and the financial crisis turning into a coup for banks, burning rage for the people, and a public relations nightmare for the beleaguered administration the week before the State of the Union speech, things didn’t seem like they could get any worse.  And then - whammo – seemingly out of nowhere, the Supreme Court rules that corporations can make unlimited campaign contributions, expediting the retreat of democracy to an insidious and uniquely American form of corporate fascism.  On the year anniversary of the election of the first black president, and just after our national reflection on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., there’s every reason for progressives to ask, “why, oh why?” 

 

Some answer that it was a failure of the democrats to support Martha Coakley that led to the humiliating loss of the key seat.  Others blame her for an untimely holiday vacation.  Others say she was simply a bad candidate, and mean that she didn’t come across well enough on television.  Some argue that we should have let the banks fail.  Others that they had a gun to their head and a bomb strapped to their back, and we had no choice but to hand over the dough.  Still others feel that allowing corporations carte blanche contributions won’t change much at all – either the people will still prevail, or it’s merely the breakdown of an illusion anyway. 

 

But while all of these points speak at some level to the issues at hand, they also all fail to address the big picture:  the progressive narrative of interdependence, a “level playing field” and social welfare is failing to strike a chord, while the conservative narrative of freedom, individuality and the invisible hand sounds in tune with what many in the country believe on a gut level.  I would argue that the impact of changing media technology on these classic American narratives is the strongest and most difficult force to reckon, blowing back very rational progressive solutions to problems that will determine the future success of this country.