Why raise the question then? Because it gives context to a query I’ve had for some time: to what extent does technology belong only to the economic system that created it? Basically, I want to know what we can take with us. If this ship is sinking, what can we use to construct our lifeboat? Allow me to tip my entire hand: I want to know to what extent social media is a capitalist instrument. What role, if any, can it play in a brighter, better future?

Few would dispute that capitalism uses social media to produce value. But are Facebook and Twitter always and forever instruments of alienation and exploitation? Rob Horning, over at The New Inquiry (a fantastic blog, btw), seems to think so. Here’s a snippet of his Marxian critique: “Our Facebook updates don’t allow us to express ourselves so much as allow consumerism to express itself through us while we provide the labor that sustains it as a communication system.” Point taken–and there’s a lot more to his argument by the way–but what about the role that social media has played in providing first-hand news during the Arab Spring? What about the way that Twitter told the story of OWS movements around the U.S., before mainstream news sources jumped on the bandwagon? This too belongs to consumerism, as a news source, but doesn’t it also have emancipatory dimensions?

We could at least invoke Michel de Certeau and say that while corporations may have strategic control over social media platforms, consumers have tactical control.  Those who use Twitter and Facebook can use social media in surprising and even emancipatory ways. Yet the deeper question remains–is there something inherently capitalist about social media (other than the fact that it emerged in a capitalist society)?

In Capital, when Marx critiques the machinery of large-scale industry he contends that large-scale industry converts “the worker into a living appendage of the machine” (614). [OMG you guys, are those human bodies feeding the illusion of the matrix!?] In Marx’s day the human-appendage phenomenon would have been easier to see. The machines belonged to the industrial revolution. They were visibly made for a specific mode of production, a specific division of labor. Can you imagine using the power loom in a system devoid of an antagonism between capital and labor?

But we can’t think social media in the same way we think a power loom. Horning doesn’t. To get at the “work” done in social media, he marshals Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labor, which “seeks to involve the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value.” By his lights, capital dictates and exploits our virtual ego-maintenance. [And I thought my pictures of macchiatos and updates about my son made the world a better place!] Again, while I do see social media working this way, I don’t think this represents the entire story. Social media poses a challenge to both capitalism and communism because it functions neither as private property nor as a true commons. Twitter owns the site, but who owns a private tweet? Many people can see my Facebook page, but only I can change it. Is it public space?

I suspicion then that social media belongs to a class of technology which has outpaced current economic forms and ideologies. In a letter to Buckminster Fuller, McLuhan writes, “If one says that any new technology creates a new environment, that is better than saying the medium is the message. The content of the new environment is always the old one. The content is greatly transformed by the new technology.” Doesn’t social media function thus? Social media has created a new environment.  What is the content of social media? To a large extent, it is the “private” lives of individuals, the humdrum rhythm of the personal, displayed in streams flowing down screens. My life is now, at least partly, enveloped by the environment of social media. The question then becomes, how has this changed the way that I live? How has it changed the way you live?

I don’t want to jump to an answer here. Why raise the question? Because it can give context to my initial queries about OWS. Perhaps we should not ask Occupy Wall Street to create an alternative system solely from the wreckage of the old. Perhaps we should view its first task  as catching up with where we already are. How do we build a system that makes sense of our current realities? In any case, I still don’t think this begins with a list of demands. What say you?

After scarfing a bowl of Corn Flakes there are two states of being that can arise: regret and curiosity. Both hit me like a speedball of high fructose corn syrup straight to the pancreas.

As my stomach churned through what it thought was food, I couldn’t help but wonder about the larger socio-political ramifications of Corn Flakes. After all, what I had just eaten was satisfying/unsatisfying in some sort of undefinable way. I was fuller than I had been, but also more hungry.

Just as the regret was wearing thin, the curiosity swung into full effect. What was it that I’d just eaten? I left the baby in the magic vibrating chair, and stumbled to the kitchen in a mixed state of rapture and disgust over what I’d just incorporated into my body.

But curiosity just bred more regret. Corn meal. High Fructose Corn Syrup. I ignored the rest and scanned further up the side of the box to the list of fortifications. A vast field of vitamins and minerals were arrayed before me. All of this in just one bowl of Corn Flakes? I was overwhelmed.

Then the thought came: “I”ll never need to eat anything but Corn Flakes ever again.”

My head swam as my heart sank. No longer will I have to go to the trouble of shopping for ingredients for balanced meals. No more of the hassle of fresh fruits and vegetables that go bad in like an hour. A box of Corn Flakes has a half-life of at least 2 years, right? No more cooking. No more group meals, which means never having to waste time talking with people while I eat.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, each in three minutes flat. I would never have to worry about wasting time enjoying a meal ever again.

Who knew the possibilities that a simple box of Corn Flakes could open up? Who knew that post-industrial food engineers could so completely satisfy the maintenance needs of this flesh machine? Who knew that Corn Flakes would give me the life that I never thought I could have?

I’m no longer Rekonstruct. Now I’m fortified with essential vitamins and minerals. Now I’m saving time as I save money.

Who knew it was so easy to live the dream? Who knew it came prepackaged? With coupons?!? Fortified and preserved and ready to save me from the inefficiencies of food. Thank you Corn Flakes. Thank you.

The ad went a little something like this. “Buy more of our stuff because we can save the average family three-thousand dollars a year.” I hope to keep this short and sweet, but there is a little back story necessary.

A couple of years ago I got into a minor argument with my Republican (closet Libertarian) uncle about capitalism. His point was that true capitalism (capitalism unencumbered by the institution of a real free-market economy), through competition, can theoretically drive the cost of a product down to zero. In essence, free-range capitalism is tasty because, once enveloped by the principle of free market, living doesn’t cost anything anymore.

This is not the only lie of capitalism, but it is a potent one. American capitalism is still stuck in the hyperreality of the early 20th century, where Enlightenment optimism, empirical ideals, and the hope of industrialization and nuclear power created a desert of economy where the history of a product was lost in conception of its circulation.

In short, America forgot that life cost something. Forget the existential crises of the 20th century, WW I and II, Hiroshima, the cold war, for the zeitgeist of economics had not yet fallen prey to the anxiety of the gap between the attempt to extend the model of the new real (the hyperreal) into the old one. Religion, philosophy, geo-politics, art, all seemed to grasp something that capitalism ignored: the ontological insubstantia of every model extended, superimposed, embossed upon the real.

Walmart is perpetrating this notion that living doesn’t cost (or to be true to their own wording, living costs less). In this sense, Walmart must be like heaven then, a place where thieves cannot break in and steal, because why would thieves steal something that didn’t have value. What we’re left with then, is the practical fallout of the capitalist nightmare. That capitalism does drive the cost down toward nothing, but not through some alchemical form of circulation.

But how? This is where we discover the lie. Walmart is cutting the cost of living for you by exacting that same cost from those who produce and sell their goods. They work hard so you don’t have to. They give up homes so that you can perpetuate the ongoing lie of the middle class. They go hungry so that you can put the excess in a landfill.

In this way, American capitalism is just feudalism writ large. The one with the biggest standing army, the one with the most impregnable castle can exact more than they need from those who actually produce it.

Not enough room left for Corn Flakes, or the cost of living. Stay tuned.

Recently I have started to read The Coming Insurrection (TCI), a revolutionary manifesto written by a french group named “the invisible committee.” I’ve been compelled by what TCI has to say about identity.  But first, a little context: TCI has been labeled a terrorist document by French authorities.  Recently they have arrested nine individuals on charges of terrorist acts, also claiming that this group authored TCI (check out the story at adbusters).  MIT press gives the following description of the work:

The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.”

I am currently working my way through the French version.  So far the committee gives some compelling diagnoses of some of the ills that plague capitalist society.  However, I find their call to a violent uprising simplistic and unimaginative.  When you start a creative nonviolent revolution, then you can count on me to throw my hat in the ring.  Back to identity.  One of the first worthwhile sections in TCI describes how capitalist society programs individuals to spend great quantities of energy maintaining their identities.  Here’s a taste (my translation):

If ‘society’ had not become this final abstraction, it would designate the ensemble of existential crutches that are offered to me for the price of my identity.  The handicap has become the model of the coming citizen . . . the pervasive injunction, “to be someone,” maintains this pathological state that makes this society necessary  (14).

Against this model of identity, where the self is the black hole that swallows one’s attention and keeps one reaching for new products, TCI proposes a net-worked view of identity, a worldly view:

The ‘me’ is not that which is in crisis within us, but the form that they seek to stamp on us.  They want to make us into “Me’s,” delineated, separated, classifiable and assessable by our qualities, in a word: controllable, when we are creatures among creatures, singularities among likenesses, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world.  Contrary to what we learn from childhood, intelligence, is not knowing how to adapt–or if this is an intelligence, it is a slave intelligence.  Our in-adaptation, our fatigue, are problems from the point of view of those who want to oppress us (17, 18).

I have become increasingly convinced that this is correct. Identity is something weaving and woven. We can only understand it in terms of systems.  The “I” is not autonomous or static, and it is not something that we accessorize.  The I is a fluctuating nodal point in a sea of overlapping systems.  I don’t think that this should lead us to attempt the “loss of self.”  But I do think it should push us to think of ourselves as more than just our favorite color, more than our actions, and more than our bodies (and less than the world).

[To check out TCI, you can download a French translation or a rough English translation here.  Or you can buy an english translation from Semiotext(e) here.]

To be honest, I’m a little confounded that the (not so) free market of American capitalism has shot itself in the foot like it has. Then I rethink that confusion and realize that our capitalism is not so different from theirs, but that not so different has enormous ramifications.

Both China and America sport government control over the economy. Both countries manage their economy for profit (or, to be specific, they manage their economy by turning resource into capital). Both have great natural resources. Where’s the difference?

One is corporate, the other is corporate. Wait… What does that mean?

In China, corporate refers to the governing posture. Decisions are made with the many in mind. China has yet to change that definition like America did. In America, corporate does not even refer to people. It doesn’t refer to the many. Instead, corporate America refers to businesses not people. That is the irony of American business. Once something has become incorporated (literally within bodies), it ceases to be human.

The American business model has managed capital for the express purpose of protecting corporate America (not people).

In a way, China is beating us at our own game: capitalism. Staunch capitalists will say that capitalism is the only economy (actually, they tend to think of capitalism as a way of governing) that protects the human spirit. The sad truth is that American capitalism gave up on human beings a long time ago. In that sense, the current collapse of our economy is not the failing of American capitalism, it is it’s culmination.

What do dragons and the frozen credit market have in common? A lot. Maybe. Just tag along with the analogy for the moment, I think it ends up revealing interesting qualities of capitalism and the standing reserve.

The deal is this. Dragons don’t like to spend money. What do dragons like? Pillaging, burning villages; eating toasty, roasted knights in shining armor; amassing large piles of gold, jewels, crowns, your basic treasure collection. Now, Reaganomics suggests that this treasure is like clouds. Once the dragon’s horde is big enough, coins start to form like moisture and rain down on the poor, disenfranchised villagers.

Here’s the rub. The purpose of a dragon’s treasure (aka standing reserve) is most certainly not market liquidity. The dragon has no interest in spending the mass of capital. This is the unconscious neuroticism of Western Capitalism: capital is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself. Capitalism (big “C” Capitalism, note I am not talking about the simple fact that human beings work and consume) is a posture of transformation. The often unspoken point of it all is to transform resource to capital. It is worth noting that this posture is preceded by a way of seeing: the world as resource.

That’s the analogy–the gaints of capitalism are like dragons. It is not their nature to liquidate their resources. In fact, because Capital is an end in itself, these giants have no resources, only standing reserve. Standing reserve is not for spending, it is for having. There is no economic purpose to the standing reserve. It is a neurotic posture that stems from our antagonistic relationship toward the world. In short, it is a misappropriated fear of death.

The man who has been the puppet of the free market (aka de-regulated cronyism), neo-con agenda stood in front of a camera in the east wing of the White House during prime time and said that the free market economy was broken. Broken? Really? (It took you this long to notice?)

“It’s the nature of a stream to flow when there is nothing blocking it,” says the koanish theory of trickle down economics. After eight years of de-regulation, the economy should be a raging torrent, no? Every American should be swimming in piles of money like Scrooge McDuck by now.

Instead of being inundated with wealth, the average American is swimming in debt. How did this happen? To answer this question it is necessary to venture briefly into the realm of philosophy.

What is Capitalism? This is the first question we have to ask. The simple answer is that Capitalism is the effort to transform resource into capital. Heidegger suggests that the western mind is compelled to this action by Enframing. In simple terms Enframing is the compulsion to turn everything into a standing reserve. Forests become lumber, rivers become hydroelectric power, oceans become the industries of fishing and drilling. The end of this compulsion is to turn human beings and finally Being into standing reserve. Oblivion is the result of realizing the standing reserve. So says Heidegger anyway.

This is what we have seen play out in the last 80 years of American Capitalism. It is no accident that Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929) and the Great Depression came at the end of eight years of economic de-regulation by Harding and Coolidge. The cliff note version is that speculation on stocks and buying on margin falsely inflated the stock market creating a hyperreal state of economy. The bubble burst in 1929 as America got a real taste of the fruits of a trickle down economy.

The American dream, manifest destiny, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–they all hang on an idea. That the the vast wilderness and natural resource that became the United States of America could never be tapped out. Looking west from the Mississippi, who would thought that the land could be tamed? American Capitalism has as its fundament the tacit promise that the resources of this land are a well of bottomless prosperity.

But who could have forseen the rates of our consumption? So, when Capitalism began to run low on the resources of the land, it turned its attention to human resources. The twentieth century saw Americans turned into a standing reserve as debt.

Finally, we are witnessing the unraveling of the Capitalist economy as investors work to transform capital itself into a standing reserve, creating an economic system that sustains itself almost completely in the realm of the hyperreal. By generating the transaction of ‘real’ economy on speculation, we discover the full and final realization of the lie that founds Capitalism: infinite resource.

American Capitalism is dead. Cheap oil, foreign investors, and American debt has kept it on life support since World War II. As the president said in his address, the free market is broken. What comes next?