A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false…
This is just head in the sand doomerism. You’re deliberately ignoring the evidence of your own senses.
The internet has put the sum total of human knowledge in the palm of our hands. I have a universal translator in my pocket that I can point at a road sign or written document and see it translated in real time. These are changes that are fundamentally changing society the world over.
You could argue that the changes haven't been for the better, but the changes aren’t finished yet. These technological changes are causing social upheavals that likely wont be resolved for decades to come.
For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.
The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!
It's really so much more than that, though. Besides, the person I'm responding to said that technology hadn't advanced since the 1980s, and that's just not true.
I mean, there's more to it in that - as u/GenXen quoted - the internet has primarily brought about new ways of exerting social control, surveillance, marketing, financialization, and admin.
We all spend increasing amounts of time punching passwords into our phones to manage bank and credit accounts and learning how to perform jobs once performed by travel agents, brokers, and accountants
Graeber isn't saying that the internet isn't a technology that's developed, he's saying that it's been developed in forms that work against revolutionary or poetic activity. That's, like, the whole thesis. Unless you're suggesting that social media is actually good.
This is just head in the sand doomerism. You’re deliberately ignoring the evidence of your own senses.
The internet has put the sum total of human knowledge in the palm of our hands. I have a universal translator in my pocket that I can point at a road sign or written document and see it translated in real time. These are changes that are fundamentally changing society the world over.
You could argue that the changes haven't been for the better, but the changes aren’t finished yet. These technological changes are causing social upheavals that likely wont be resolved for decades to come.
It's really so much more than that, though. Besides, the person I'm responding to said that technology hadn't advanced since the 1980s, and that's just not true.
I mean, there's more to it in that - as u/GenXen quoted - the internet has primarily brought about new ways of exerting social control, surveillance, marketing, financialization, and admin.
Graeber isn't saying that the internet isn't a technology that's developed, he's saying that it's been developed in forms that work against revolutionary or poetic activity. That's, like, the whole thesis. Unless you're suggesting that social media is actually good.
I'm not arguing with Graeber, I'm arguing with OP.
This is a boomer-tier understanding of the internet and technology lol