>Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the 20th century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers.
Capitalism is like the presidency, as soon as the new iteration comes along, everybody looks wistfully back to the previous administration.
>Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced.
Should I laugh or cry at this? Where were these enlightened executives when...oh, yeah, they were asking governors to call out the national guard to roll out machine guns on flat cars and shoot striking strikers and burn their family's tents.
>This is not to suggest that our lives are best evaluated with spreadsheets.
If they were spreadsheets, the implication would be that someone human would eventually look at them. But the whole point is to abstract such away from the human.
I forget where I read it, but someone who studies these things, presented that during the middle ages, the so-called trial by ordeal was really about doing two things, [aka the touching, for example, of a hot iron the accused's arm or palm and then bandaging and seeing if it was healing or pussy after a set number of days] wasn't about belief in some supernatural judgement but a way removing both God and man from the need to make the decision. Really, have we gotten so far away from that?
Also, people downplay Foucault, but I think more and more that might merely because of how topical he is, even after all this time. The panopticon has become unclothed from its steel-and-concrete body to be reborn transcendent.
>A less tendentious, more dispassionate tone would make her argument harder for Silicon Valley insiders and sympathizers to dismiss.
Considering where this article is from (and thinking of Wallace Stegner, who was supported by the CIA in regards to the Iowa Writer's Workshop to attack communistic and other such anti-capitalist elements) I can't help but recall a passage in one of Stegner's own books on writing praising the dispassionate, which, along with 'show don't tell' were expressly promulgated to prevent and inculcate writers from undesired politics (and that isn't a joke[1]).
Capitalism is like the presidency, as soon as the new iteration comes along, everybody looks wistfully back to the previous administration.
>Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced.
Should I laugh or cry at this? Where were these enlightened executives when...oh, yeah, they were asking governors to call out the national guard to roll out machine guns on flat cars and shoot striking strikers and burn their family's tents.
>This is not to suggest that our lives are best evaluated with spreadsheets.
If they were spreadsheets, the implication would be that someone human would eventually look at them. But the whole point is to abstract such away from the human.
I forget where I read it, but someone who studies these things, presented that during the middle ages, the so-called trial by ordeal was really about doing two things, [aka the touching, for example, of a hot iron the accused's arm or palm and then bandaging and seeing if it was healing or pussy after a set number of days] wasn't about belief in some supernatural judgement but a way removing both God and man from the need to make the decision. Really, have we gotten so far away from that?
Also, people downplay Foucault, but I think more and more that might merely because of how topical he is, even after all this time. The panopticon has become unclothed from its steel-and-concrete body to be reborn transcendent.
>A less tendentious, more dispassionate tone would make her argument harder for Silicon Valley insiders and sympathizers to dismiss.
Considering where this article is from (and thinking of Wallace Stegner, who was supported by the CIA in regards to the Iowa Writer's Workshop to attack communistic and other such anti-capitalist elements) I can't help but recall a passage in one of Stegner's own books on writing praising the dispassionate, which, along with 'show don't tell' were expressly promulgated to prevent and inculcate writers from undesired politics (and that isn't a joke[1]).
[1]https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609383718/workshops-...