[iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory

[Sean Cubitt]

This is the nub -- what is a social good?


On 7/06/09 7:29 AM, "Joe Edelman" <joe.edelman at gmail.com> wrote:

> I won't rest until we get to the
> ubiquitous availability of physical resources like cars and trucks,

Cars are not a good. As a lifelong cyclist, I know how dirty, dangerous and
anti-social cars are. And as to the ubiquitous availability issue, there are
not enough  rare earths on the planet for even China to have the density of
wasteful duplication of devices we have (even with careful shepherding I
have four DVD players in my house)

Tye proliferation of consumer goods, and the detouring in desire towards
consumerism, is about as utopian as the desire - instinctive I believe - for
order when it becomes the fascist manipulation of anxiety towards the
terrorised society


"Universities, who have long claimed to elevate
and connect through scholarships and the like, are closed to most
participants, and can take six years and a great deal of expense to
effect the same power shift that can be accomplished by a disempowered
group on facebook or twitter in a few weeks."

The kind of change we bring about in education is rather longer term than
what can be achieved on Twitter. We have, admittedly, the luxury of thinking
forty years into the future -- the likely working life of a student
graduating today.That means we balance between the usual corporate horizon
of three to five years (like any other business) and the longer term, which
entrepreneurs and corporations cannot afford to thing about. More
critically, the more "advanced' capital gets, the more *schools* - by which
I mean schooling between 5 and 14 years of age -- become competitive, with
the bestschools going to the children of the wealthy

Capital is now, as it always has been, a lie founded on a bad pun: the
"freedom" of the market has nothing whatever to do with human freedom, any
more than the 'survival of the fittest' describes the fit of a species in an
ecological niche.

Sorry to be argumentative: it's late, I'm tired, and I blew the weekend
writing when I shd have been outdoors

sean

Prof Sean Cubitt
scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
Director
Media and Communications Program
Faculty of Arts
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The University of Melbourne
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