Re: <nettime> Means of production: The factory-floor knowledge.

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>]

I think this strangeness is what this thread is about.

On one level there is a $value chain. Like it or not, most proles do
subscribe to the $value of things and phenomena, and any distribution
of production from the silo-ed factories/newsrooms to masses will
reduce the $value. We live in a highly ideological times, and $value
ideology is blinding.

On the other level, there is what you are describing as complex
shifts and emergent phenomena that happened when DTP, publishing,
or whatever, got de-silo-ed - and they did happen. But they do not
matter, the amount of academic papers notwithstanding: the real net
effect of the Internet is that more people get commercial shit content
for free and everyone is tracked. One needs to be blind (or young and
illiterate) not to see the death of the content and 'epic' rising of
the rule of the lowest common denominator, likes and dislikes.

To put it in simple terms: the bare-bones-primitive $value of
anything today is a piece of meat. The fine superstructures, complex
relationships, fantastic possibilities, poetic and esoteric phenomena
accompanying it, are the cloud of flies around it. Acute observers
keep their eyes on the meat: is it guarded and expensive, or is it on
the ground and free. Some keep their eyes on the flies and imagine
that the flies will somehow make the difference, one day.

I find the elective blindness to $value among fly watchers
fascinating. Shifts will not happen by liberating bits and thus
destroying their $value. They may happen by empowering more entities
to create $value by protecting their bits and selling them. Fuck the
sharing culture. Capitalism is great, but it's so hard to achieve it.



> More and more, I find that something very strange -- and strangely 
> unremarked -- has happened. People don't really know how to listen to
> music or watch TV or read books or look at pictures now. It used to 
> be simple: there was a pimitive temple to the music gods






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