Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Episode 149: Watching the World Go To Health
Play Now!You exercise, and for what? Today, the devices that help you work out work against you, reducing your fitness sweaty efforts into further fodder for surveillance profits. That's what I cover in this Episode 149: Watching the World Go To Health.In this episode, I read from Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future At The New Frontier of Power. Again, this is a book well worth the slog, even through the notes.I play: audio I pulled from a video sent to me by C-Realm host KMO of Professor Zuboff sharing her research and observations. Music-wise, I include: Lee Rosevere doing "Betrayal"; and Podington Bear doing "Rarified". KMFDM backs Professor Zuboff herself for a new surveillance capitalism opening; and Julie and Rolf lead the campfire gang in "Over the Rainbow" once again.I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike, and non-commercial episode.
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Hello Jim.
ReplyDeleteThis is Chad from the Hipcrime Vocab blog. We talked a while back about doing a podcast, and now I'm just sheltering away in place, so if you're still interested, I'm available. You can contact me at hipcrimevocab.blog@gmail.com
I just listened to you on the C-Realm podcast. FWIW, here are my thoughts on the immediate topic.
I think what we're experiencing is simultaneous technological advancement in the midst of social degeneration. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I call it High-tech feudalism.
I recall reading recently (I forget the actual reference) about how rapidly social programs like Social Security were rolled out and implemented back in the 1930's. Of course, there were fewer Americans back then, but they didn't even have computers! Imagine such a nimble response today, in a country that can't even roll out Obamacare (remember the crashes on the exchanges?). Unemployment offices are looking for FORTRAN programmers because the IT infrastructure is so outdated by design. And remember the "voting app" (Shadow!) that destroyed the Iowa Caucuses for the Democrats?
What is the use of all this technology if we can't put it to usable ends in the interests of societal advancement?
And now, we're told, even the Post Office will go bankrupt in a few months due to deliberate sabotage. We can't even do things we could in the 1800s. Technological advancement, sociopolitical decay. Ian Welsh commented:
New Zealand, which has handled this pandemic in exemplary fashion, has noted that they have done what they were taught to do by Americans. Americans can no longer do these things. Jane Jacobs, in her book “Dark Age Ahead”, said that the key sign of the oncoming Dark Age was old knowledge being lost; that things which we could once do, we no longer could. She actually used the CDC as an example, and that was decades ago.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-sheer-awe-inspiring-american-clusterfuck/
I recall reading parts of Dark Age Ahead, and it seems that, as was the case so often in her career, Jacobs was ahead of the curve. Here's a mention by Richard Florida:
[Jacobs] went on to worry about the eventual decline of the United States, noting that “the collapse will come about as a banal thing.” One can only imagine how unsurprised Jacobs would be by the evolution of America’s economy and society in the decade since her death—particularly the hyper-gentrification of great cities, the growing social and economic divides, the continuing erosion of scientific norms, burgeoning celebrity culture, and, most recently, the rise of Donald Trump—in many ways the symbol of it all.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/05/jane-jacobs-100th-birthday-cities-predictions-dark-age/481077/
And I found the following passage in the Wikipedia entry on the book exceedingly relevant:
Jacobs argued that the very concept of "ideology" is fundamentally flawed and detrimental to both individuals and societies, no matter what side of the political spectrum an ideology comes from. By relying on ideals, she claimed people become unable to think and evaluate problems and solutions by themselves, but simply fall back on their beliefs for "pre-fabricated answers" to any problem they encounter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead
Finally, given the name and content of this podcast, I think you'd find the following posts on Reddit enlightening:
https://old.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/comments/fnns55/uthisisnotapostitsyou_on_the_negative_effects_of/
https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/fn68kj/why_dont_we_just_ban_targeted_advertising/fl7yi7t/
Cheers,
CH
Hey, Chad! Good to hear from you again.
DeleteYou put quite a bit out there, so I'll share my immediate, unfiltered thoughts.
I think what we're experiencing is simultaneous technological advancement in the midst of social degeneration. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I call it High-tech feudalism.
I would only suggest that "degeneration" might not be the word, since it suggests decay. (It was coined originally, as you may know, to denote distance from Creation.) You and I may not like this new feudalism, but it hardly represents evil, just a condition that favors people who are not, well, us.
It certainly does jives with observations Piketty made in his Capital. r > g and all that, which fit right in to society before the Industrial Revolution.
More and more, today's investment dollars are pooling into schemes (mostly involving rent taking) that would make the folks in the manor house proud.
"New Zealand, which has handled this pandemic in exemplary fashion, has noted that they have done what they were taught to do by Americans. Americans can no longer do these things."
Germany can make the same complaint, though we yanks don't hear about it because we don't, as a rule, follow German newspapers. The New Deal progressives convinced their Generals, like Ike, to restructure German industry and journalism, since both the industrialists and the newspapers that Hitler left intact largely abetted the Nazi rise. Those restructurings stuck, even when they were here in the US simultaneously but slowly undermined by corporate shenanigans.
To this day, Germany has: far less unemployment and more job security; and, in a country as wired with broadband as the US (if not moreso), they still have vibrant, thick, print newspapers… that are read daily.
Your Jacobs observation about ideology strongly reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's new book (which I haven't read, but whom I heard in interviews). In this case, I guess, ideologies are synonymous with heuristics.
Which also makes sense: we're in a crisis; and crises in general involve stress. People lose several points of IQ in times of stress, so it makes sense that they frame their surroundings, however novel or unique, based on existing frames of reference that may, or may not, be in any way relevant.
I'll wade today through the other links you left. And yes, expect me to get in touch soon and take advantage of your sequestration!
Cheers,
—Jim
Yeah, degeneration is a tricky word. More accurate is *loss of state capacity*.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to hearing from you.