[iDC] A Curmudgeonly Look at last month's Conference.

[Zac Zimmer]

Dear all,

I have been a reader of the iDC list, and I was a participant in the
conference, but this is my first post. I must say: I am taken aback by
Michael Goldhaber's aggressive and confrontational postings. I appreciate
insightful analytic observations, yet when they are presented in a way that
categorically rejects others' contributions, such observations actually
undermine the project itself, which seems to be founded on thoughtful
exchange and dialogue.

But to the substance: Michael Goldhaber says that the Internet may be,
arguably, the largest collective creation of humanity in all of history. He
does not, of course, *make* that argument. The reason I point this out is
because it indicates a methodological commitment that blinds Mr. Goldhaber
to other thinkers' contributions, both to this mailing list and to the
conference.

If we are talking about historical "collective creations of humanity," I
think it would be fair to invoke religion at least as a point of comparison,
both in its particular manifestations (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam,
Candomblé, etc.), their more generic forms (polytheism and monotheism, for
instance), and as one large "collective creation" i.e. religion as such.

Furthermore, the same could be said for "culture." Is, say, the historical
creation called "Chinese Culture" larger than "the Internet"? How do we even
begin to answer this question? What about "culture as such"? Does that
category subsume "the Internet"? (One can easily think of several other
examples: capital leaps to mind...)

These are the kinds of methodological questions that Mr. Goldhaber seems to
reject out-of-hand by omission. He asks "what do we say about the Internet?"
and he has little patience for those who ask the previous question: "how can
we even talk about the Internet?" Indeed, it seems Mr. Goldhaber's
"nightmare" is not the nightmare of human reason betraying itself, but
rather the nightmare of Scholasticism: a deference to textual authority that
passes for critical and theoretical thought. And here is the pitfall: it
seems that Mr. Goldhaber, even if he celebrates "transgressive thought"
(although I get the feeling he means something more along the lines of
"creative destruction"), he seems to take the very phenomenon--the
Internet--about which he writes as a given.

Those who ask the previous question--how can we even talk about the
Internet?--spend time trying to define the shifting boundaries of the
phenomenon: is it a tool of control? is it a cultural manifestation? is it
an advertiser's playground? is it an emancipatory advance in human
consciousness? These thinkers make recourse to metaphors that have been used
to describe other collective human creations. Some thinkers make creative
reuse of old metaphors, others maintain loyalty to old metaphors at the
expense of an accurate description of the contemporary situation. Mr.
Goldhaber's primary contribution is to decry those thinkers more loyal to
historical metaphors than to the contemporary situation. We should be
grateful for this. Yet to cite someone--either Karl Rove or Jacques Derrida,
I can't remember any more--metaphors matter.

Take the case of 'data.' It seems that "the Internet is made up of data" is
a claim that many of us can accept, especially if we specify and say "the
Internet is made up of many things, one significant element of which is
data." So those thinkers who reflect upon the way that the Internet handles
data are not engaging in trivial and/or insignificantly thoughtful
activities. Again: they are looking for ways to talk about *how* the
Internet deals with "data."

Mr. Goldhaber rejects any fidelity to the "Orwell metaphor." At best, he
implies, references to Nineteen Eighty-four are trivially paranoid; at
worse, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Yet when Frank Pasquale
counters that our contemporary situation lies under the sign of Kafka and
Huxley, rather than Orwell, we should all pause. For those of us who read
literature, this is a very useful correction. Kafka's literary creations
are, I dare to say, much more interesting, artful and challenging than
Orwell's novels. And I do think that Kafka, as an artist, can teach us a lot
about our world. This is precisely the kind of "transgressive" critical move
that Mr. Goldhaber seems to advocate, so I am puzzled by his silence
regarding the suggestion.

If that is what I take away from this particular exchange--I should read The
Trial tonight instead of Nineteen Eighty-Four--then I thank both Mr.
Goldhaber and Mr. Pasquale for leading me to that non-trivial revelation.
But folks: must a simple book recommendation be so antagonistic?

Best,
zz


2009/12/20 Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh at well.com>

> Frank,
>
> I think both the points you make are mistaken, fairly trivially so.
>
> (a) Most people suffering from ill health are in no position to hide that
> fact. Why exactly should the ones who can hide it be singled out for
> protection? We do need a good law insuring everyone, while the Americans
> with Disability Act should already cover employer discrimination, or be
> strengthened if it does not. Meanwhile, there are many reasons a person who
> does not herself need a drug might look it up — for instance out of concern
> for a friend, out of curiosity about how a drug they have heard of works,
> out of interest in the originator of the drug, for possible investment
> reasons, because they are considering taking a job with the company that
> makes it, because they are in medical school, because they are writing a
> screenplay about someone who has the appropriate illness,  because they have
> hypochondria; ; if insurers or employers rely on data of such look-ups to
> decide on who to cover or employ they will make many mistakes  (and should
> be sued as well).  (Incidentally, the individual insurance market up to now
> has required that one list pre-existing conditions, drugs used, etc. As
> current law stands, if one gets insurance by  not stating a condition and
> then it becomes clear form the medical procedures covered that one has had
> it, one's insurance is then revoked. The doctor-patient relation is directly
> and legally broken by the insurer in such cases without any need to collate
> data from Internet searches,  which is another reason your example is of so
> little import.
>
> (b) The fact that the ACLU is worried about something is certainly good for
> them, but does not necessarily reveal that the rest of us should be worried.
> Like most other kinds of organizations like theirs they partially make their
> money  by invoking fears. They may well be quite sincere, but it does not
> follow that they are right. The fear of undisclosed algorithms may be
> different in kind, but not in degree from fears of Torquemada or McCarthy.
> These algorithms are just guesses,no more reliable than the kinds of
> misinformation used earlier.. The ACLU has certainly not shown that this is
> the primary means used to seek out suspects for arrest or prosecution for
> any kind of crime.
>
> In any case, if all this invasion of privacy is so effective, why is the
> government still so incompetent at finding  criminals? Bernard Madoff was
> subjected to preliminary investigation six times, and it appears that sheer
> incompetence in data analysis was the main reason he was never caught.
> Everyone knows that illicit drugs of just about any sort are easily
> available. Huge numbers of people have "illegally" downloaded music files
> and publicly boast  about that. Many murders go unsolved. Even the White
> House was easily breached recently. Even when the government does to try to
> prosecute someone, it often fails. Judges in New York City have recently
> admitted it is common knowledge that the police, when testifying,frequently
> lie. Etc. So just why we should fear collection of ever more data is
> unclear. The more data there are, the harder they are to sift through, not
> the easier, so more spurious and absurd correlations will show up, Thus we
> should perhaps worry about the data collection if we desire efficient crime
> solving, but not particularly because our basically innocent activities
> leave us more liable to prosecution.
>
>
>
> c) Something people have begun to worry about recently is that stuff they
> put out knowingly, directly and openly  on their blogs, or  to "friends" on
> Facebook  or like sites  might eventually embarrass them, and possibly cost
> them jobs at prestigious law firms or whatever. I suppose academics, on that
> basis, ought to be worried about putting forth insufficiently thoughtful
> comments. It hasn't seemed to have stopped many, so far.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Michael
>
> On Dec 20, 2009, at 1:18 PM, Frank Pasquale wrote:
>
> I have two specific points to take issue with:
>
> 1) You state that " the idea that there are some highly vital data about
> personal preferences that advertisers can grab hold of and somehow influence
> purchases strikes me as exaggerated, unimportant and of basically trivial
> impact on individuals."
>
> You give a few examples of why this type of data collection might not be
> effective for an advertiser.  But what about the larger cultural
> issue--that individuals are influenced and classified in ways that they
> cannot evaluate? The relevant databases are trade secrets, and good luck
> getting access to those.
>
> Rather than being "unimportant and basically trivial," data gathered on the
> web may have a devastating impact on indviduals. For example, a person who's
> looked for drugs for cancer treatments might be classified as a bad risk on
> the individual insurance market.  It is easy to imagine an alliance
> between online databrokers and "medical credit scorers," just as insurance
> companies use applicants' prescription records to deny coverage (see article
> at
> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_31/b4094000643943.htm
>
> 2) You also dispute that "we are supposed to be very worried about
> governments finding out our political convictions or other damaging
> information.  Since when do inquisitions bother with accurate fact
> collection?"
>
> The people at the ACLU who worry about these issues for a living are not
> worried about the return of Torquemada or McCarthy.  They are
> instead alarmed about new government data collection facilities (like fusion
> centers) that create probabilistic profiles of suspicious individuals using
> undisclosed algorithms.  Thousands of US citizens have been placed on "watch
> lists."  This article describes one tip of this iceberg:
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231
>
> "At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion [NSA data center] will be
> one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy
> as every house in Salt Lake City combined. . . .  [A]t the NSA, electrical
> power *is* political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm
> is the kilowatt. More electrical power ensures bigger data centers. Bigger
> data centers, in turn, generate a need for more access to phone calls and
> e-mail and, conversely, less privacy. The more data that comes in, the more
> reports flow out. And the more reports that flow out, the more political
> power for the agency."
>
> In other words, there is a self-sustaining dynamic of surveillance at work
> here, which has less to do with persecution of any given group than with
> bureaucratic empire-building familiar to any student of public choice
> theory.  The ACLU report "What's Wrong with Fusion Centers" also describes
> some of the dangers:
>
>
> http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/whats-wrong-fusion-centers-executive-summary
>
> "Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the
> intelligence process, breaking down the arm's length relationship that
> protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of
> these companies, and increasing the risk of a data breach."
>
> Their reports give examples of invasive surveillance, garnered via online
> sources, designed to harass political activists.  It's no wonder that large
> internet companies, such as Google, are in no mood to disclose their degree
> of cooperation with such entities:
>
> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/google-talks-out-its-portal/
>
> "We asked Google some simple questions about how much user data it turns
> over to the government. . . .Google, however, declined to address the
> question adequately."
>
> Glenn Greenwald has observed that this fusion of public and private is a
> hallmark of our age, nearly as strong in the Obama administration as it was
> in the Bush years: "In the intelligence and surveillance realms<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/15/amnesty/>,
> for instance, the line between government agencies and private
> corporations barely exists<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/radio/2008/07/30/shorrock/index.html>.
> Military policy is carried out almost as much by private contractors<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/scahill_video2>as by our state's armed forces.  Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle
> between the public and private sectors<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/01/08/mcconnell/>so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded."
>
> We need more people studying these connections. The new "inquisition" will
> probably not be a direct persecution of unpopular groups, but will instead
> take place in the form of a subtle, steady, and stealthy erosion of millions
> of individuals' life chances via unaccountable computerized decisionmaking.
> Kafka's and Huxley's worlds, not Orwell's, are the dystopias we should be
> concerned about--a point made eloquently by the work of legal scholars
> Danielle Citron ("Technological Due Process") and Daniel J. Solove ("The
> Digital Person").
>
> In conclusion: I have no idea what Marx would think of this conference.
> But as a legal scholar frustrated by the bloodless, piecemeal cost-benefit
> analysis of individualized disputes now dominant in my field, I was very
> grateful for the number of speakers who dared to take
>
> --Frank Pasquale
>
> Frank A. Pasquale
> Professor of Law, Seton Hall Law School
> One Newark Center
> Newark, NJ 07102
> (973)-642-8485 (w)
> (201)-988-5774 (c)
>
>
> PS: on the topic of "medical credit scores," this article is good: Robert
> Berners, *Hospitals X-Ray Patient Credit Scores: More and More are Buying
> Credit Data to See if the Sick Can Afford Treatment*, Businessweek, at
> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_48/b4110080413532.htm?chan=magazine+channel_what%27s+next
>
> I'm still working through it, but I've seen nothing so far i the Senate
> health reform bill to stop that practice.
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  That's so even assuming, which is often not the case, that these data are
> at all useful in drawing Internet users' attention to what is advertised.
> These ads rarely work, because we are already inundated with too many ads,
> leading us to ignore them however they are presented. Further, knowing that
> somebody was interested in a category of item or service as recently as  as
> a few minutes ago may be utterly useless in reaching  that person now,
> because they quite likely already made a relevant purchase and do not want
> more ( A new suit? A new mortgage? A new plane reservation? —Too late,
> already chosen or rejected.)
> Likewise, we are supposed to be very worried about governments finding out
> our political convictions or other damaging information. Since when do
> inquisitions bother with accurate fact collection?  Domestic spy agencies
> from the KGB to the FBI act on the basis of misunderstandings, rumor,
> innuendo, outright lies, prejudice, corruption, etc. By asserting that “Big
> Brother is Watching” we only help spread the paranoia that in Orwell’s
> novel  the slogan was designed to create. Detailed and precise data
> collection has very little to do with it.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:55 AM, Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh at well.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> Missing the Forest for the Trees: A Curmudgeonly Look at the IPF
>> Conference.
>>
>> As with others, if a bit belatedly, I join in offering kudos to Trebor
>> Scholz and everyone else involved in bringing about and running the
>> conference, handling the complex logistics, volunteering their time, etc.
>> The conference was a success for me in stimulating a lot of thoughts,
>> introducing me to some quite interesting new people, as well as renewing a
>> few old friendships.  What I heard from  Catherine Driscoll, Gabriella
>> Coleman, Fred Turner and Chris Kelty seemed especially fresh a nd
>> insightful, and it was probably no accident that the last three spoke in a
>> session delightfully moderated by Ted Byfield.  There were more than a few
>> other talks I was sorry to miss. However, based on the majority of the
>> sessions I ended up attending, including the final plenary — and maybe I
>> chose badly —  what I heard had also had a negative side, which I think is
>> worth addressing.
>>
>> The Internet is arguably the largest collective creation of humanity in
>> all of history. In various degrees it has incorporated an ever-growing
>> series of inventions, modes of participation and very widespread involvement
>> in one or another of its forms, from e-mail to blogs to social media to
>> search engines etc, etc. All of this activity I think fits neatly under the
>> broad rubric of work and/or play, to which the conference seemingly was
>> addressed.  Yet I think from Trebor’s intro on, the conference on the whole
>> mischaracterized this vast and unparalleled achievement, seeing it as
>> primarily a source of profits for capitalists. The prime evidence, beyond an
>> ideological bias in favor of such views, comes from the fact that
>> corporations officially own many websites and try, sometimes with some
>> success to make money, principally by selling advertising and by offering
>> data they collect as tools for advertisers.
>>
>> In order to be outraged at this, a number of speakers at the conference
>> take it for granted or loudly proclaim that very bad results can come from
>> this, including the highly nonsensical claim that extracting data on from
>> the actions, say, of Facebook users, amounts to infinite exploitation. This
>> is a total misuse and misunderstanding both of what goes on with advertising
>> and of Marx’s (anyway antiquated) formulations. Marx would have laughed
>> uproariously at this absurdity, I suspect.
>>
>> Incidentally, the same person who made that bizarre claim misstated
>> Google’s stock policy — falsely asserting that employees do not own shares —
>> and misunderstands Facebook’s terms of service — implying that the company
>> asserts rights to use  personal creations in other settings for its own
>> reasons, rather than to permit users to post pretty much where they expect
>> to while still acknowledging their ownership of their own “intellectual
>> property.” In each case, the bias is towards making capitalism re the
>> Internet seem considerably worse than it actually is.
>>
>> It is not just one person's shocking incomprehension that is at issue, for
>> a number of other speakers focussed on the practice of collecting data from
>> users as the basis for their intense criticism of the Internet, as well as
>> for proof that it is fundamentally a capitalist tool. Advertising is an
>> annoyance at best, in my view, but the idea that there are some highly vital
>> data about personal preferences that advertisers can grab hold of and
>> somehow influence purchases strikes me as exaggerated, unimportant and of
>> basically trivial impact on individuals. That's so even assuming, which is
>> often not the case, that these data are at all useful in drawing Internet
>> users' attention to what is advertised. These ads rarely work, because we
>> are already inundated with too many ads, leading us to ignore them however
>> they are presented. Further, knowing that somebody was interested in a
>> category of item or service as recently as  as a few minutes ago may be
>> utterly useless in reaching  that person now, because they quite likely
>> already made a relevant purchase and do not want more ( A new suit? A new
>> mortgage? A new plane reservation? —Too late, already chosen or rejected.)
>>
>> Likewise, we are supposed to be very worried about governments finding out
>> our political convictions or other damaging information. Since when do
>> inquisitions bother with accurate fact collection?  Domestic spy agencies
>> from the KGB to the FBI act on the basis of misunderstandings, rumor,
>> innuendo, outright lies, prejudice, corruption, etc. By asserting that “Big
>> Brother is Watching” we only help spread the paranoia that in Orwell’s
>> novel  the slogan was designed to create. Detailed and precise data
>> collection has very little to do with it.
>>
>> Anyway all such data collection is  done only because capitalist firms
>> have found few other ways to make the Internet — and the services through it
>> that people enjoy — pay for themselves. Advertisers and governments are
>> always desperate for new tools, but that doesn't imply that  the tools on
>> offer will be of any great use to them, or even that very much will be paid
>> for such data or for very long. Meanwhile, the Internet keeps functioning in
>> other ways of much greater import. As I have long argued, and find more
>> valid than ever, the Internet  is primarily a system for individuals to
>> obtain attention for themselves, even if they do make use of channels
>> provided by corporations. (By the way, Lenin supposedly said, more or less,
>> “the capitalist will be happy to sell you the rope you will use to hang
>> him;” why do I suspect some at the conference would say, ”Don’t buy the
>> rope; the capitalist will make a profit” ?) Using these tools adroitly we
>> may get some form of socialism, or we may simply find that those who do use
>> them have created a new kind of post-capitalist class economy. In the latter
>> case, would-be supporters of socialism would certainly need to understand
>> the new system if they hope to make progress in their preferred direction.
>> For those wearing the heavy blinders that many did at this conference, no
>> such enlightenment would be possible.
>>
>> As is typical of most academic conferences, a great many of the papers
>> only discuss trivia because that is the route to academic success. This
>> seems particularly true in the sorts of theories put forward under the guise
>> of cultural studies; I found it indicative that after the conference several
>> people think the most exciting thing that occurred was a discussion of in
>> terms of Said’s “Orientalism” as applied to a miscellany including the
>> “Mechanical Turk” and and Chinese ‘World-of-Warcraft gold” hunters. The
>> point is not wrong, and it may reveal a bit of bias, but given that numerous
>> participants in Internet firms hail from or work in various Asian countries
>> and are treated with just about the same respect as anyone else, the charges
>> of Orientalist exoticization seem overwrought and beside the point. This is
>> simply not anything to get excited about except for scoring purely academic
>> points. It says nothing about the value of the Internet, or even about how
>> it might better promote international exchange and understanding.
>>
>> Along the same lines, another conference participant is fond of asserting
>> that billions of people have been disposessed by capitalism. As he uses it,
>> this seems more a rhetorical stratagem to criticize capitalism than any
>> indication that he wants to try to see how the Internet might be used to
>> help ameliorate that suffering. In some ways capitalism is to blame for such
>> immiseration, but the situation is complicated. So many would not be
>> suffering were it not that since the advent of industrial capitalism
>> population has grown rapidly as famines and infant mortality have been much
>> reduced, even in the worst-off countries. This due in part to better food
>> distribution, higher crop yields, better hygiene, vaccination, some spread
>> of drugs such as antibiotics, and the like, for which capitalism certainly
>> deserves some credit.
>>
>> In most social systems historically, there were many who were
>> supernumerary; in the past most such people were killed in infancy, starved
>> to death or had to to take up vows that kept them from reproducing. Less of
>> that happens now, though they still live with much less than others in the
>> same culture, and very often live permanently quite close to starvation. It
>> is a huge and horrendous problem, but not one that should be used for
>> scoring purely rhetorical points. The Internet does hold out great promise
>> in this regard, but that is not a promise that many at the conference seemed
>> much interested in investigating, forwarding or even discussing.
>>
>> Another comment at the final session, from Jodi Dean, struck me. It is
>> that she had finally been convinced by Christian Fuchs that “communism”
>> cannot be achieved without “computers.” One reason this struck me is that it
>> is such an old idea, dating back to the 1950’s, when the Soviets and others
>> — such as the Western economist Wassily Leontief —  in fact devoted
>> considerable efforts to  investigating how to use mainframe computers to do
>> better with central planning. But I also found it odd that in the context of
>> this conference Professor Dean would say “computers” rather than “the
>> Internet,” which has much more promise in terms of bringing about some sort
>> of participatory socialism.
>>
>> Jodi Dean is well-known for promulgating the thought of “communicative
>> capitalism” to describe the Internet,,etc. It’s very easy to claim that
>> whatever change has occurred is just some new sort of capitalism, but this
>> hardly an analytic success, as I see it. Of course any term can be stretched
>> to mean whatever one chooses, but hiding distinctions in this way is not
>> necessarily perspicuous. To be sure, Dean is far from alone in engaging in
>> such broad use of terms like capitalism and capital.  “Human resource”
>> people widely speak of “human capital,” though it hard to see how a human a
>> can be capital (for herself), and certainly not simply by being educated as
>> they imply. Likewise, Pierre Bourdieu was fond of such terms as “cultural
>> capital,” which again is certainly not capital in the Marxian sense, and
>> does not suppose the same sort of exploitation as plain old capital. Many on
>> the left, such as David Harvey, and many not at all on the left take most
>> changes in the life around them to be proof of the continued strength of
>> capitalism, when an entirely different possibility is utterly neglected.
>> Inflating a formerly precise term in this fashion should be avoided if one
>> wishes to speak  with any sort of intellectual or analytic precision,
>> certainly in a conference such as this one. But that is not widely done.
>>
>> All this highlights for me that what some cleave to as “theory” does not
>> seem deserving of that name. I started out my professional life as a
>> theoretical physicist, and as I changed fields still referred to myself as a
>> social theorist. I love theory, if it is good theory — of many sorts from
>> astronomical to zoological, from political to literary theory.  By good
>> theory  I mean a search for new understanding , often through new concepts
>> of what the world is, how it works, how it can work, and what it should be.
>> Such theorizing has to be self-examining, subject to doubt and critique,
>> always a bit tentative, and certainly constantly tested for its coherence
>> and meaningfulness  against new ranges of experience, as well as in
>> comparison with other theories. It should of course strive to be rational,
>> but it can never and probably should never be that purely. To get anywhere,
>> not all hypotheses can be put in question at the same time, yet nothing
>> should be beyond examination. Theory must always be seeking to add  new
>> kinds of observations and predictions, examining how it comports or
>> contrasts with other theories, whether it can be improved in its logic and
>> strength of conclusions, where it is on possibly shaky grounds , in what
>> ways it can be useful rather than merely descriptive or pejorative, when it
>> is prematurely reductionist, when it can no longer easily be extended, when
>> there are aspects of the world it has has overlooked, etc.
>>
>>
>> Good theory must always be — to use a favorite post-modernist term —
>> transgressive —as well as audacious, surprising and  offering up new
>> concepts, which lead to new percepts. But even the best theory, by the time
>> it is articulated and typeset, is surely wrong in some significant aspects.
>> It always must be subject to critique, modification, enlargement, and
>> eventual abandonment. Any textual formulation of it is by no means Holy
>> Writ. It is not to be quoted with an air of devotion, or as if by itself it
>> stands for or can prove anything.
>>
>> For too many people at the conference, I found, too much is taken for
>> granted; too much is asserted without compelling argument; existing texts
>> are treated as if sacrosanct and unarguably correct, as if they were bits of
>> the Bible and we were fundamentalists; and metaphoric or analogical points
>> are taken for logic or careful analysis. (Though thought — as Derrida among
>> others has indicated — can never fully escape metaphor, that is no reason
>> not to seek to do so.) Again, too much that is said seems to be intended as
>> nothing other than academic preening. That leads to highly mistaken
>> assumptions, focussing on trivia, unwarranted smugness, and other irksome
>> behavior. It makes intrinsically intelligent people come off as fools or
>> jerks.
>>
>> Three things are widely held to be true in the western world today: first,
>> that we live in a more or less strictly capitalist society; second, that,
>> except possibly for some sort of socialism, nothing other than capitalism is
>> possible; and third, that capitalism is much to be preferred to socialism.
>> (What socialism is generally taken to mean — especially in the US, but
>> increasingly elsewhere — is usually some variant of Stalinism. With this
>> definition, if the first two hypotheses are taken as correct, a good
>> argument can indeed be made for the third.) Many or even most participants
>> at this conference reject only the third hypothesis, pointing to or taking
>> for granted the evils of capitalism, while also leaving unstated and little
>> thought how a humane socialism would work. But how do we know that our
>> system is primarily capitalist? Certainly not just by assertion. Nor by
>> metaphor. And equally not by superficial observation of capitalist forms and
>> notions, for the question has to be what other forms might be present at a
>> less explicit level. In other words, without new concepts we cannot  clearly
>> perceive what is around us.
>>
>> But having made the conceptual break with capitalism, perhaps most
>> participants find it too hard to take a further step; perhaps many of you
>> already feel yourselves too far out on a limb. Or, as I suspect, an
>> adherence to Marxism is enough to secure a comfortable academic niche, so
>> why even think of questioning it? One can publish endless papers finding
>> some way to  criticize, say, the Internet as inherently and irrevocably
>> capitalist, without having to have any thoughts of doing anything about it.
>> (One speaker even sneeringly joked that he was going to use Facebook to
>> organize a march on Washington in favor of single-payer health care. Many
>> smaller but effective organizing projects have in fact been accomplished
>> through Facebook, but the built-in sneer evidently better preserves his
>> academic pretenses.)
>>
>> That’s not how to do good theory. The humanist tradition quite honorably
>> has taken up exact quotation, and  a desire to get back to the text, in the
>> case of poetry —in the largest sense —  or in studying what a particular
>> author thought or said.  Such activities are commendable, but they should
>> not be mistaken for theory, any more than a portion of a painting or
>> snatches of a symphony would be . Not even a  mathematical formula, not even
>> “E equals m c- squared,”  can rest in that light.
>>
>> All this is true of scientific theories, but it is even more vital to
>> consider when dealing with theories that refer to the state or the future of
>> humanity, for through its own actions the human word is in endless flux.
>> What were indisputable “laws” cease to be, what was the state of affairs has
>> changed. Marx himself wrote in 1851, “The tradition of all dead generations
>> weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Whatever he exactly
>> meant by that then, it has value for us only if reinterpreted to apply to
>> now. Marx’s own work and that of everyone who came after him — in whatever
>> tradition — is today part of a similar “nightmare.”   To live now,  we
>> must be fully awake to now, not letting the clanking chains of our dreamt
>> ghosts entrap us in fears and formulations of the dead past., not the past
>> of the1860’s, nor the 1960’s, nor even more recent times.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>> Michael
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
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