4 ms·

I think the two key texts here are Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, specifically his riff on “market Stalinism”: > The idealized m

I think the two key texts here are Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, specifically his riff on “market Stalinism”: > The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.

ruined 5y ago
the worst part is, there's no way around it. if you're trying to motivate any individual or group whose desires are not fully coherent, no matter what your intentions and ideology are, any effort to incentivize and document performance approaches Borges. by transitive property the incentive is to create appeasing documentation. the strain of the actual loses out to the efficiency of the plausible. this is, i think in part, why there is a modern desire towards "local" products and personalities in media, and full diy cottagecore fantasies. it is the only way to at least convince yourself that you could confirm authenticity, even if that is a delusion, because anything else is obviously superhuman in scale. at least you can assign responsibility to a face at a farmers' market, even if they're no less hired than the person minding self-checkout at the grocery. at least a parasocial relationship with a social media personality feels realer and more responsible than traditional mass media, even if they're delivering the same talking points. the winner of this paradox will be either an anarchist culture relentlessly dismantling everything and enjoying the unknowable, or a vertically integrated police consciousness that simply is/does everything and doesn't need to convince/believe anyone else.
- moab 5y ago
  I found your comment hard to follow, but I think I got the general idea. I’m not sure I buy the last extreme disjunction you’re making though. Surely we can have some middle ground between anarchic individualism and a totalitarian thought-police. All long-term societies of the past and probably of the future are examples. The extreme societies historically implode or revert back to moderate patterns that compromise between diktat and individual speech, usually sometime after the death of the god-leader (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc.) I like your theory about local goods/thought products.
  - ruined 5y ago
    i'm definitely speculating. middle ground is just boring. if your benchmark is long-term societies, anarchic cultures are it, and anything else including our modern state is an outlying extreme. but here we are. technology provided the possibility of control, and by current trend, advancing it seems to make some of those possibilities more thorough and more resilient. but moving past the dialogue of incentive and metric by integrating all experience would be a different thing altogether. it's more of a singularity fantasy than anything a human could possibly worry about.
    - saimiam 5y ago
      I don’t see it the same way. Indian society - not the country because that’s a new creation - has been around for a few thousand years. It hasn’t devolved into anarchy, neither is it totalitarian in the way you are using the word. They (well, “we” since I’m Indian) figured out that imposing self-censoring through the caste system would lead to social stability. People were born into a certain way of life and they’d die inside it. From within the straitjacket of caste came inventions like 0, astronomical analyses, religions, Kama sutra, literature, languages, and engineering achievements. I don’t glorify caste. It’s wrong. But, a society between the two extremes you posited exists today and it exists because caste based social engineering worked.
      - Dracophoenix 5y ago
pjc50 5y ago
"Market Stalinism" is a great phrase. I've been referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement whenever I see excessive metric-driven workplaces.

ruined 5y ago

the worst part is, there's no way around it. if you're trying to motivate any individual or group whose desires are not fully coherent, no matter what your intentions and ideology are, any effort to incentivize and document performance approaches Borges. by transitive property the incentive is to create appeasing documentation. the strain of the actual loses out to the efficiency of the plausible. this is, i think in part, why there is a modern desire towards "local" products and personalities in media, and full diy cottagecore fantasies. it is the only way to at least convince yourself that you could confirm authenticity, even if that is a delusion, because anything else is obviously superhuman in scale. at least you can assign responsibility to a face at a farmers' market, even if they're no less hired than the person minding self-checkout at the grocery. at least a parasocial relationship with a social media personality feels realer and more responsible than traditional mass media, even if they're delivering the same talking points. the winner of this paradox will be either an anarchist culture relentlessly dismantling everything and enjoying the unknowable, or a vertically integrated police consciousness that simply is/does everything and doesn't need to convince/believe anyone else.

moab 5y ago
I found your comment hard to follow, but I think I got the general idea. I’m not sure I buy the last extreme disjunction you’re making though. Surely we can have some middle ground between anarchic individualism and a totalitarian thought-police. All long-term societies of the past and probably of the future are examples. The extreme societies historically implode or revert back to moderate patterns that compromise between diktat and individual speech, usually sometime after the death of the god-leader (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc.) I like your theory about local goods/thought products.
- ruined 5y ago
  i'm definitely speculating. middle ground is just boring. if your benchmark is long-term societies, anarchic cultures are it, and anything else including our modern state is an outlying extreme. but here we are. technology provided the possibility of control, and by current trend, advancing it seems to make some of those possibilities more thorough and more resilient. but moving past the dialogue of incentive and metric by integrating all experience would be a different thing altogether. it's more of a singularity fantasy than anything a human could possibly worry about.
  - saimiam 5y ago
    I don’t see it the same way. Indian society - not the country because that’s a new creation - has been around for a few thousand years. It hasn’t devolved into anarchy, neither is it totalitarian in the way you are using the word. They (well, “we” since I’m Indian) figured out that imposing self-censoring through the caste system would lead to social stability. People were born into a certain way of life and they’d die inside it. From within the straitjacket of caste came inventions like 0, astronomical analyses, religions, Kama sutra, literature, languages, and engineering achievements. I don’t glorify caste. It’s wrong. But, a society between the two extremes you posited exists today and it exists because caste based social engineering worked.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago

pjc50 5y ago

"Market Stalinism" is a great phrase. I've been referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement whenever I see excessive metric-driven workplaces.