Archive for May 2006
wants to be free
A terrific passage from Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool:
Now, perhaps, we can understand the true meaning of the emancipation proclamation of the information age first uttered in 1984 by Stewart Brand, publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog: “information wants tot be free.” In the era of the Whole Earth Corporation, “information wants to be free” is ultimately how we are no longer allowed to say “we” want to be free. “We,” the subject and class of information culture, come fully to know our world only in the blinding moment of illumination when the world network routes around our knowledge – that is, the us in our knowledge that Fukuyama (in the other half of his thesis) terms “the struggle for recognition” and Castells (in the second volume of his Information Age trilogy) calls “the power of identity.” We do not even need the hyperbole of cyberpunk science fiction, with its unerring instinct for the mutilation of subjects (e.g., the silicon-punctured bodies and flat-lined subjectivities of Gibson’s Neuromancer), to grasp the intensity of our loss – nor the uncanny double of that intensity, the blurred anomie of it all. “X” marks the spot where the whole generation of incipient knowledge workers in the United States suceeding the baby boomers – the generation caught in the “pipeline” from education to the corporation – has been deleted from the network. Indeed, we may speculate that the purely generational identity of “Gen X” (and now “Gen Y” after them) looms large at this moment precisely because it is an empty solidarity reflecting – as if in cyberpunk “mirrorshades” – the hollow form of the corporate world’s own generational identity as “workforce 2000.” “We” are no more than this transient moment when we have nothing more in common – as Jean-Luc Nancy might say in his Inoperative Community – than our finitude, our extinction, our “death.” (69)
redistribution
Matt Christie’s got an excellent post up over at Long Sunday about an excellent piece in n+1 by Mark Grief. Go check it out. From Grief:
It’s finally become possible to take a better view: not unlimited laissez-faire hubris, and not irrational machine-breaking either. In a country where some portions of development have gone further than anybody would like, because of everyone’s discrete private actions (as in the liquidation of landscape and the lower atmosphere)–while other portions, as in medical insurance and preventive care, have not gone far enough–then intentional de-development might be the best thing that can occur. The eradication of diseases is not something you would like to see end; nor would you want to lose the food supply, transportation, and good order of the law and defense. On the other hand, more cell phones and wireless, an expanded total entertainment environment, more computerization for consumer tracking, greater concentrations of capital and better exploitation of “inefficiencies” in the trading of securities, the final throes of extraction and gas-guzzling and –to hell with it. I’d rather live in a more equal world at a slower pace.
ingles
The list of reasons to be proud to be an American shrinks by the minute.
The list, it’s getting awfully short…
possibilities
Owen Hatherley, at The Measures Taken (one of the best blogs going, btw), on just what’s so disturbing about the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new exhibition, Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939.
Rather, what disturbs here is what Jenkins, quite rightly, calls politics in the guise of art. One scribbled comment in the book asks why the connection between modernism and Nazism wasn’t emphasised (well, that would be because there wasn’t one), others use phrases like ‘cold’ or ‘brutal’…what the detractors have noticed is that much of this essentially comes from, or supports, the possibility of a system other than the one we are perpetually told is the only possible. Whether it’s the photos of militant stronghold siedlung Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, a huge model of the Vesnin’s Pravda building, Rodchenko’s oddly alluring workers’ overalls, Corbusier taking a pen and scribbling out the centre of Paris…there are hundreds of possibilities dotted around these Victorian corners.
UPDATE: And today there’s more, complete with a very provocative quotation from Stalin:
“The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficency is the essence of Leninism in Party and state work.”
Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, 1924
mindbending
Normally I’d feel a bit bad about stealing a post whole hog from another blog, but this one needs to be stolen I think. From an interview with Greg Palast on Democracy Now via Le Colonel Chabert.
GREG PALAST: Yeah, that’s why I wrote a book, because it does link the whole thing together. I mean, I just got back from meeting with Chavez, as you know, and you showed our interview a few weeks ago. He’s offered the U.S. $50-a-barrel oil. That’s a third off of what we’re paying right now. Now, you would think our president would be down in Caracas kissing Hugo Chavez’s behind and saying, “Thank you, thank you for dropping the price of oil by a third, and let’s make a deal,” because Chavez wants a deal.
But he’s not doing that, our president, even though the high prices are costing about a million jobs right now. And the reason he’s not is that what Chavez will not do is that Chavez will not return the money. It’s not about petroleum, it’s about petrodollars, as I explain in the book. In other words, when George Bush rides around King Abdullah in his little golf cart on the Crawford ranch, he’s not trying to get Abdullah’s oil. Abdullah can’t drink the stuff. He’s got to sell it to us and Japan. But Abdullah takes the money back from the — when you fill up your SUV, you give your money to Saudi Arabia, the big oil companies, Saudi Arabia. But then he returns it the form of petrodollars, and that is what is funding George Bush’s mad spending spree.
We have a president who has racked up $2 trillion in extra debt, you know, stone sober, apparently. And someone’s got to pay for that. And basically we’re paying for it by effectively an oil tax, which is returned to us, because the Gulf states and our other trading partners are now buying up $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds and debt. So, in other words, they’re recycling the money back and paying for George Bush’s spending spree on ending inheritance taxes, you know, several wars, etc.
Now, Hugo Chavez says, “I’ll give you cheap oil, not only to the poor, but to everyone. But I’m not giving you back the money. That money is going to stay in Latin America to build our nations.” And he just withdrew $20 billion out of the U.S. Federal Reserve. You have to understand, this is a punch in the face of the U.S. administration, far more than withholding oil, withholding and withdrawing petrodollars, as I explain in the book, and that’s why you have that little nice floater from — balloon thrown out by Reverend Robertson, Pat Robertson, saying “Hugo Chavez thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, and I think we ought to just go and do it,” because they have got to get that — it’s not that they need that oil, they need that oil money. And if they can’t get it, they have to eliminate Hugo Chavez.
AMY GOODMAN: Is the war in Iraq a war for oil?
GREG PALAST: Is the war in Iraq for oil? Yes, it’s about the oil, but not for the oil. In my investigations for Armed Madhouse, I ended up with a story far more fascinating and difficult than I imagined. We didn’t go in to grab the oil. Just the opposite. We went in to control the oil and make sure we didn’t get it. It goes back to 1920, when the oil companies sat in a room in Brussels in a hotel room, drew a red line around Iraq and said, “There’ll be no oil coming out of that nation.” They have to suppress oil coming out of Iraq. Otherwise, the price of oil will collapse, and OPEC and Saudi Arabia will collapse.
And so, what I found, what I discovered that they’re very unhappy about is a 323-page plan, which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq’s oil, written by the big oil companies out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but this is exactly how they do it. It’s quite wild. And it’s all about a plan to control Iraq’s oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, “enhances its relationship with OPEC.” In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia.
And this is one of the reasons they absolutely hate Hugo Chavez. As you’ll see in next week’s Harper’s coming out, which is basically an excerpt from the book, Hugo Chavez on June 1st is going to ask OPEC to officially recognize that he has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This is a geopolitical earthquake. And the inside documents from the U.S. Department of Energy, which we have in the book and in Harper’s, say, yeah, he’s got more oil than Saudi Arabia.
AMY GOODMAN: And is it accessible?
GREG PALAST: That’s the trick. It’s accessible, but the price of oil — it’s heavy oil, which means it costs about — you need oil to be about $30 a barrel, less than half of what it is now. Chavez says, “Cut a deal with me. Oil will never drop below a minimum price, but we’ll get off this insane world-destroying $75 a barrel. I’ll give you cheap oil, but you just put a floor under it.” He shook hands with Bill Clinton on the deal. And Bush came in and spit on his hand, to say the least. He had the guy kidnapped back in 2002. Bush does not — you have to remember, he doesn’t like cheap oil. When we talk about paying $3-a-gallon gasoline, Bush’s benefactors, donors and his own family collects the $3 a gallon.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
GREG PALAST: Well, we’re paying three bucks a gallon. ExxonMobil is collecting $3 a gallon. There’s a chapter called “Trillion-Dollar Babies.” When Bush came in, we had oil as low as $18 a barrel. It was like water. Bush has successfully built up the price of oil from 18 bucks a barrel to over $70 a barrel. That’s the “mission accomplished.” He didn’t make a mistake here. That’s the “mission accomplished.”
ExxonMobil, which after Enron is the biggest lifetime donor to the Bush campaigns, its value of its reserves, of its oil reserves, because of the Bush wars and Bush actions, has gone up by almost exactly $1 trillion in value. Just one company. A trillion-dollar windfall to a single company. That’s the Bush benefactors. And you have to look at where’s Bush make his money.
Go read the whole thing.
