3 May
2013
3 May
'13
7:53 p.m.
The "Proletariat & Lumpenproletariat" thread comes from Anthony's item
about oligarchy and crony capitalism.
1) Key to the kingdom: the thermodynamics of exploitation.
It's often been said that when you use a service that's "free"
(Facebook
and Google are the biggest examples) you're not the customer, you're the
product.
But it's worse than that. You're not the product, you're FOOD. F-O-O-D.
Food is stuff you consume that provides your body with energy and
nutrients.
WE are what the oligarchy consumes to provide itself with energy
(converted into the abstraction of money) and nutrients (converted into
the abstraction of "consent" even if only "consent-by-default").
In physics, "work" is defined as "energy conversion." (Physics geeks
are welcome to slap my wrist if I say something stupid here.)
Work is the conversion of energy from one form to another, for example
as a photovoltaic panel converts the energy of sunlight from photons to
electricity, and a battery attached to the solar panel converts the
energy from electricity to chemical reactions in the battery (and back
again to electricity, to power a device).
Thus, think of the word "worker" as meaning "energy-converter," and
you'll gain a whole new level of understanding.
You work at a job: converting the biological energy that runs your body,
into the abstraction of money (think of the battery). When you spend
money, you're converting energy again: from the abstraction of money
into, for example, food that supplies caloric energy to your body.
Along the way, your employer takes a cut in the money earned from your
labor. In a reasonable world, the employer's cut is sufficient to keep
the business running and provide a reasonable profit. In the present
world of social darwinist dystopia, the employer takes as much as
he/she/it can possibly extract without causing you to revolt in some way.
When you use "free" services, you're giving their owners a large chunk
of your biological energy converted to attention, in exchange for
emotional rewards that are associated with the product by clever
marketing. The oligarchy consumes your attention, but it also does
something else: it relentlessly collects data about you, that can be
data-mined and sold to others who seek to extract even more of your
energy, with or without your consent.
A popular catchphrase used by Big Data and its minions, is "prediction
and control." They want to predict human behavior, and they want to
control human behavior, right down to the level of the individual. For
what purpose? To extract more converted energy from humans, with or
without their consent. Advertising is the cover story, data-mining is
the real deal. The personalized ad flashing on your screen is the
distraction, to keep you mooing contentedly while you're being milked.
What "animal husbandry" is to livestock, "human husbandry" is to
people.
-G.