> So it is possible to resist, but we are not all Jimmy Wales. The pressure to submit is overwhelming. On the level of the employee, there is the specter of unemployment. To willfully reject the logic of the market is to be rightfully terminated. But the pressure to conform to its demands exists at every level. The executive, though better paid, is essentially in the same position as the janitor. To resist is to go. Even the founder, the inventor, the owner, the celebrity is precariously positioned. While they might be spared termination at the hands of management, in the long run, they too end up in the same place. In 1938, Bill Paley, the chief executive of CBS, presciently stated that “too often the machine runs away with itself” (Friendly 168). To obstruct the machine is to be crushed by it. To refuse to go along is to be replaced. Everyone and everything is fungible.

> When it comes meaning in media, we are confronted with an unpalatable choice. Either stable meaning imposed through deliberative control by the few (as tyranny) or the autonomous, impersonal and invisible hand of the attention market, which, in the end, results in the “liquidation of meaning” (Baudrillard 84). Any point in between is an unstable equilibrium. And one can at least negotiate with a tyrant.

A slightly depressing ending to arrive at but an amazing read

I can rarely make heads or tails of the media theorists like McLuhan, Foucault, Baudrillard but this essay is both lucid and concrete. Well done to the author.

The Karl Marx quote about the Iliad and the printing press is interesting. I’m re-reading the Iliad at the moment, and I’ve thought about how different it must be in the original Greek, or recited orally. It’s still an incredible work, printed or not.

I guess it’s a bit like Marx wondering if “The Godfather” can exist in a world of 15 second vertical videos.

But it’s also an old question.

Socrates: Writing will destroy society.

Plato: [scribbles]

Socrates: Plato, what are you doing?

God, so much huffing and puffing. Such a wind bag. None of this guy’s stuff is pointing in the right direction.

He’s looking at twentieth century struggles, but the artifice that he grapples with in long form text is not what the drivers of change were.

What he points to is a microvave oven boiling water, in a kitchen with a grease fire. The technologies of socialization are like cotton candy, when stood next to the architecture of behaviors that insulate socialites and enable socialization at all.

But then again, I suppose he gets to show off all the books he’s read, and broadcast nerd signals about how much navel gazing he does. That’s what blogs are about, right?