The New Bubble: the Internet will Set Us Free
An LA Times editorial by Randall Rothenberg, director of intellectual capital at international consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, proves once again that even capitalism wants to be set free. It too wants consumers to be turned into producers: and its emancipation proclamation is a price tag. This time the revolutionary moment is Google's billion-dollar purchase of YouTube, which Rothenberg declares a victory of radical left politics. The hammer and sickle are flying high in Silicon Valley tonight. People of the World Unite!
Once again, bandwith has proven to be worth money, YouTube aggregates sticky eyeballs at a furious rate. Value is created out of thin air: anyone can post a video, however stupid, and get attention and become a media mogul. Rothenberg is like an uncanny double of a critical theorist: he quotes Adorno, Riesman, culture industry, philosophy and tells us that YouTube, once purchased by Google, provides a challenge to older ways of doing business and making culture. Consumers, you have become producers! This stuff will scare the pants off media managers and make them think that it is time once again to sing the praises of the New Economy where we learned that play = work, bohemians = profit, creativity = value added, commodity = brand, and experience = 0, or everything that you knew is worth sh@# since the New Economy has made trillions without exploiting or hurting a single human being. It was a new form of capitalism all together, capitalism that didn't hurt the land by cutting ugly black craters into the hills in order mine for coal, it didn't turn children blind by tying them to looms or carts, it didn't break the back of the worker at the assembly line, it hardly even caused carpal tunnel's syndrome since the new bosses offered yoga on the premises. Only work will set us free, because, it seems to be so much like play.
Rothenberg proves once again that the intellectual capital consultants need intellectual material - to pervert. But I suppose his library looks more like mine than that of the average businessperson. You can read that between the lines: but all his intelligence is being used to glorify something so out of proportion with what he promises - the David/YouTuber triumphing over Old Media/Fox News... the victory of the people over the power bloc as Ernesto Laclau once put it. Another quick-talking New Economy promoter, Pierre Levy, declared ten years ago in Minneapolis that we would have globalized democracy since we could all be shareholders of international companies. This is the same song played once again, but it scares me, because things actually got worse on a material level for workers the last time the Pied Pipers of Hamelin laughed all the way to their yearly bonuses. I'm just wondering: is it just going to be inflated sparkling water costs or Las Vegas real estate? I'm afraid it will be much worse.
Once again, bandwith has proven to be worth money, YouTube aggregates sticky eyeballs at a furious rate. Value is created out of thin air: anyone can post a video, however stupid, and get attention and become a media mogul. Rothenberg is like an uncanny double of a critical theorist: he quotes Adorno, Riesman, culture industry, philosophy and tells us that YouTube, once purchased by Google, provides a challenge to older ways of doing business and making culture. Consumers, you have become producers! This stuff will scare the pants off media managers and make them think that it is time once again to sing the praises of the New Economy where we learned that play = work, bohemians = profit, creativity = value added, commodity = brand, and experience = 0, or everything that you knew is worth sh@# since the New Economy has made trillions without exploiting or hurting a single human being. It was a new form of capitalism all together, capitalism that didn't hurt the land by cutting ugly black craters into the hills in order mine for coal, it didn't turn children blind by tying them to looms or carts, it didn't break the back of the worker at the assembly line, it hardly even caused carpal tunnel's syndrome since the new bosses offered yoga on the premises. Only work will set us free, because, it seems to be so much like play.
Rothenberg proves once again that the intellectual capital consultants need intellectual material - to pervert. But I suppose his library looks more like mine than that of the average businessperson. You can read that between the lines: but all his intelligence is being used to glorify something so out of proportion with what he promises - the David/YouTuber triumphing over Old Media/Fox News... the victory of the people over the power bloc as Ernesto Laclau once put it. Another quick-talking New Economy promoter, Pierre Levy, declared ten years ago in Minneapolis that we would have globalized democracy since we could all be shareholders of international companies. This is the same song played once again, but it scares me, because things actually got worse on a material level for workers the last time the Pied Pipers of Hamelin laughed all the way to their yearly bonuses. I'm just wondering: is it just going to be inflated sparkling water costs or Las Vegas real estate? I'm afraid it will be much worse.
2 Comments:
In this regard, I can also recommend a recent New Yorker article on microfinance and EBay. It's an interesting case of Adam Smith meeting Antiques Roadshow. The new economy not only turns consumers into producers, but theorizes them as entrepreneurs: every "housewife" an entrepreneur. Perhaps the implicit gendering of the entrepreneur in that article shows that “recycling” has taken over the position that “reproduction” held in the old production/reproduction dichotomy.
Brilliant comment! I just saw that the "Chicken Soup" series latest publication is aforementioned balm for the "Entrepreneur's Soul."
All consumers producers is just a lead up to the fantasy of all workers can become entrepreneurs! Umm...I'm my own brand and I exploit my own labor!
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