Choice Snippets from Ye Olde Dissertation · Tuesday August 14, 2007
“If you add in every small business in the world–and believe me, Google is thinking that way–you can sum up Google’s amibitions in the commercial world as this: the company would like to provide a platform that mediates supply and demand for pretty much the entire world economy. As Schmidt put it, ‘The sum of [Google’s addressable] market, if you include in the large companies and the small companies throughout the world, is the world’s gross domestic product.’ ‘We think of it as a marketplace,’ Schmidt added.”
from The Search by John Battelle (page 248)
“We should understand the society of control, in contrast, as that society (which develops at the far edge of modernity and opens toward the postmodern) in which mechanisms of command become ever more “democratic,” ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviors of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves. Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, monitored activities, etc.) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity.”
from Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (page 23)
“The idea of communicative capitalism helps explain how this democratisation in fact undermines democracy by transforming communication into its opposite…The convenience of the World Wide Web, for example, enables millions not simply to access information but to register their points of view, to agree or disagree, to vote, and to send messages. Facts and opinions, images and reactions circulate in a massive stream of content…a message is no longer primarily a message from a sender to a receiver. Uncopled from contexts of action and application – as on the web or in print and broadcast media – the message its simply part of a circulating data stream. Its particular context is irrelevant…In sum, communication functions symptomatically to produce its own negation”
from the essay The Networked Empire by Jodi Dean in Empire’s New Clothes
“In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration’, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle.”
from Discipline and Punish by Michael Foucault (page 308)
“Don’t Be Evil” – Google
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(0v0) writes:
The other day, R accidentally referred to Foucault’s oups as Discipline and Publish.
That’s grad school for you.
posted Aug 20, 12:45 PM ~ #