Re: <nettime> Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

[Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com>]

Ok, I'll bite: why does digital technology entail the disappearance of a middle class ? Why cyber serfs instead of a cyber middle class? Some of the answer IS political and started when Reagan broke the air traffic controllers's strike and fired every one of them. The negative effects in terms of poor safety and the erosion of organized labor are still being felt. The new flex time in Spain is Orwellian in its language and  implications. The Economic IS Political. What's need is not healthy ignorance or cool detachment or neo-MacLuhanism aka the Californian Ideology, but connecting all the dots. I'm not talking about boohoo liberalism, but active defiance of the system. Not passive acceptance of what originates in the world of finance capital or the Politiburo. 

Btw: to disagree with a techo-determinist stance is not naive. It's a difference of opinion. Social analysis does not preclude economic analysis. One of the problems is the confrontation of the quantitative with the qualitative as modes of analysis. Pretending one or the other doesn't exist or is hopelessly naive is willful self-serving blindness. 

Keith Sanborn




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