this image was created before Comcast acquired NBC/Universal
Disinformation operates everywhere with the continuing tendency to alienate the electorate as well as its historical consciousness of race and class. It seeps into discourse in a variety of venues and are a function of how social networks are integral to contemporary political discourse. It represents the inequality of power and wealth to proliferate mistruths and misdeeds in the public sphere. It represents the ability of capitalism to shape a message that allows the self-dealing and self-serving to maintain normalized, legitimated dominance over the dispossessed.
One’s impulse is to question the hegemonic power of those who own the networks that enable disinformation, but for many that is a step too far. “Rather, the question instead becomes that of how links between nodes are formed, what those links are, where the hubs are, and how it might become possible to form new networks.” That may be the best first step, to see how disinformation disrupts the mass media landscape and its communication networks and corrupts democratic processes.
disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.
"the recycling bins in the cafeteria are just feeble examples of their corporate greenwash"
An example of disruption of such new communication networks is disinformation at small and large scale levels. Disinformation is often referred to when producing conspiracy theories of the most absurdly debunkable variety — for example UFOs, birthers, truthers etc… OTOH, disinformation is also the weapon for state-sponsored psychological warfare operations (psyop), industrial greenwashing, and complex international negotiations. Needless to say, their megaphonic amplification comes through mass media monopolies/oligopolies that are an important use of political and cultural capital.
“The disinformation (dezinformatsiya) campaigns are only one "active measure" tool used by Russian intelligence to "sow discord among," and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.”
The Kremlin’s clandestine methods have surfaced in the United States, too, American officials say, identifying Russian intelligence as the likely source of leaked Democratic National Committee emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The Kremlin uses both conventional media — Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost always untraceable.
A simple small scale example will occur at Monday’s POTUS debate. The first ring of the 3-ring debate circus will feature some spectacular yet luridly minor disinformation sideshows involving micro-aggressive acts representing sex and money as they have during the entire US campaign:
“In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.”
Gennifer Flowers, who carried on a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton when he was attorney general and governor of Arkansas, might attend the debate at Hofstra University as Trump’s guest, BuzzFeed reported Saturday. The development grew from a Twitter broadside Trump launched earlier that day.
“If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to sit in the front row, perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!” he tweeted.
It was a shot at Clinton’s decision to seat Cuban, a frequent Trump critic, in the front row as her debate guest, and a signal that the Republican nominee might dredge up past Clinton scandals as ammunition...
The spectacle of the buxom blond lounge singer shooting daggers at Hillary Clinton — perhaps just a few seats away from her former lover, Bill Clinton, who is expected to attend — would only draw more eyeballs to a debate already expected to attract 100 million viewers.
In this debate example, the pathological issues from 1992 might be revisited if only to throw off Clinton’s performance, but its real function is to highlight the structural inclusion of a variety of disinformation campaigns ranging from data leaks, hacking, and collusion among foreign powers beyond the actual media institutions’ own ability to reproduce disinformation as they produce information. Social media amplifies the disinformation effects exponentially as the 2016 campaign has demonstrated.
Capitalist information industries are a key element of capital formation not simply because capital requires valuation data to measure wealth production but also to influence the manufacture of consent necessary to ensure stable capital accumulation and its requisite inequality of race/class.
Disinformation functions better as polarization increases and correspondingly trust/reputation erodes...
Trust – or rather, the absence of it – stands suddenly top of journalism’s talking shop. Gallup in the US releases another of its annual polls that shows trust in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” has dropped to its lowest level in polling history – with only 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of such confidence.
Those findings are down eight percentage points from last year. Compare and contrast a whopping 72% trust rating on parallel Gallups in 1972, opinions sampled directly after the Watergate heroics: different reputations, different times.
An essential disinformation as origin story comes with an quintessential entrepreneurial capitalist game, much like the false image presented by political candidates that they are either good stewards of a neoliberal capitalism or maverick venture capitalists whose success will flow like the metered water to the dispossessed in Mad Max Fury Road.
It turns out that Monopoly’s origins begin not with Darrow 80 years ago, but decades before with a bold, progressive woman named Elizabeth Magie, who until recently has largely been lost to history, and in some cases deliberately written out of it.
Magie lived a highly unusual life. Unlike most women of her era, she supported herself and didn’t marry until the advanced age of 44. In addition to working as a stenographer and a secretary, she wrote poetry and short stories and did comedic routines onstage. She also spent her leisure time creating a board game that was an expression of her strongly held political beliefs.
Magie filed a legal claim for her Landlord’s Game in 1903, more than three decades before Parker Brothers began manufacturing Monopoly. She actually designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time — people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.
And yet it was the monopolist version of the game that caught on, with Darrow claiming a version of it as his own and selling it to Parker Brothers. While Darrow made millions and struck an agreement that ensured he would receive royalties, Magie’s income for her creation was reported to be a mere $500…
More problematic are the continuing large scale disinformation campaigns that involve not only political campaigns
In his research from St. Petersburg, Chen discovered that Russian internet trolls — paid by the Kremlin to spread false information on the internet — have been behind a number of "highly coordinated campaigns" to deceive the American public.
It's a brand of information warfare, known as "dezinformatsiya," that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one "active measure" tool used by Russian intelligence to "sow discord among," and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.
"An active measure is a time-honored KGB tactic for waging informational and psychological warfare," Michael Weiss, a senior editor at The Daily Beast and editor-in-chief of The Interpreter — an online magazine that translates and analyzes political, social, and economic events inside the Russian Federation — wrote on Tuesday.
He continued (emphasis added):
"It is designed, as retired KGB General Oleg Kalugin once defined it, 'to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.' The most common subcategory of active measures is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish, if believable lies cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media outlets to make democratic nations look sinister."
From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs "was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person."
"Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history," Chen wrote. "And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space."
“There has never been a document of culture which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” Walter Benjamin
Badiou's diagram on how the petit-bourgeoisie's response to the failure's of 68 gave rise to misrecognition.
The literal and figurative (dis)information factory has literal and figurative labor and in the information industry context is the critical intersection of labor and capital where epihenomenal capital as virtual is yet still material as the product of knowledge production and transactional network relations.
...the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cybercultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital. Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which the collective intelligence materializes.
For the modern CTM factory, cognitive labor or collective, cooperative and noncooperative action are both information labor information capital. Although in the current election CTM factories are really manufacturing conspiracy hypotheses as Trumpians move the US into complex codependency and overdetermination.
The market for memes creates interpretive algorithms that formulate the informational conflicts among the assertions (signs) produced in the dialectical conflict among memes and their reception in social media. For example, contradictory realities about the “factual” degree of domestic and international terrorism are “spun” as interpretive algorithms depending on the ideological position of media channel and their various agents’ trust/reputation. The invocation of Cold War espionage memes overlays the potential for economic espionage and the partisan political disclosure of hacked data during a divisive election campaign.
Capital algorithms are joint labor networks that constitute the organic intersection of labor and capital as message commodities capitalized as hacktivism, media audiences, and subsequent potential voters. Disinformation forms in the resistance to perceived hegemony making the act of challenging disinformation beyond so-called fact checking when critically engaging the conflicts of the ideal and the material revealed by ruthless criticism.
More technically, one can conceive of disinformation as in a (Badiou) extensional network constructing messages is constitutively constructing nodes, links among nodes, hubs, and their networks of information which transmit disinformation (the networks’ disruptor).
These technical terms identify specific agents for disinformation that reveal not only international actors but domestic sources that more often than not are neither critical nor candid about their own degree of disinformation. The recent reporting on the Trumpian agent, Carter Page as a “foreign influence” is one such example contextualized by disinformation campaigns in the context of intrusive Russian actions.
Fifteen years ago, the idea that foreign disinformation might be a problem for European countries seemed ludicrous. Free media looked as triumphant as free markets; Western television and newspapers had comfortable funding and big audiences. But the business model that once supported media across the continent, indeed all across the West, no longer works. Much Western journalism is poorly resourced, and the proliferation of information has made it harder for people to judge the accuracy of what they see and read.
At the same time, authoritarian regimes, led by Russia but closely followed by China, have begun investing heavily in the production of alternatives. Because national media is often weak, it has become far easier for channels such as RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik (a Russian “news” agency) to establish credibility in smaller European markets. But even in larger countries, the Russian use of social media as well as a huge range of online vehicles — “news” websites, information portals, trolls — are beginning to have an impact. Chancellor Angela Merkel tasked Germany’s spy agency with investigating the Russian use of propaganda in Germany after a fake story about a girl allegedly raped by a refugee blew up into a major scandal, thanks in part to a concerted Russian online effort.
The messages have little in common with Cold War propaganda. Russia does not seek to promote itself, but rather to undermine the institutions of the West, often using discordant messages. RT pumps out scare stories about migrants, and also portrays the West as racist and xenophobic. Russian-backed websites promote conspiracy theories — 9/11 was an “inside job,” Zika was created by the CIA — while ridiculing the excellent Western investigative journalism that revealed the ties among Russian politics, business, organized crime and intelligence…
Partly because the U.S. media market is so vast, there is still little understanding of how disinformation campaigns work here either. There is certainly no public analytical database of what Russia says, when and where. Nobody — even in the Western intelligence community — compiles transcripts. Nor do we know which elements of the Russian message are effective, who believes them and why. It’s high time we learned, because other countries, notably China, are beginning to use some of the same techniques. Fifteen years ago, the free press seemed unchallengeable; 15 years from now, we may find ourselves, as Ukraine did two years ago, the targets of disinformation campaigns we are unprepared to fight.
Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to Kremlin-generated disinformation campaigns.
“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.
“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”
Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”
The problem comes from how facts are identical with their narratives since the interpretive and explanatory come with every reportable description of actions, objects, or events. What becomes more insidious is the repetition of first impression messages to attempt to reify their meaning which relies often on the use of social media to mobilize / render viral the disinformation meanings.
Carter Page is a former Merrill Lynch investment banker in Moscow who now runs a New York consulting firm, Global Energy Capital, located around the corner from Trump Tower, that specializes in oil and gas deals in Russia and other Central Asian countries. He declined repeated requests to comment for this story.
Trump first mentioned Page’s name when asked to identify his “foreign policy team” during an interview with the Washington Post editorial team last March. Describing him then only as a “PhD,” Trump named Page as among five advisers “that we are dealing with.” But his precise role in the campaign remains unclear; Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks last month called him an “informal foreign adviser” who “does not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign.” Asked this week by Yahoo News, Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Page “has no role” and added: “We are not aware of any of his activities, past or present.” Miller did not respond when asked why Trump had previously described Page as one of his advisers.
Capitalist relations with the Soviet Union e.g. Armand Hammer among others, has been more fluid than the image of Lend-Lease aid during WWII and its economic history needs further research. The history of monopoly capitalism as a structural enabler of other forms of state capitalism needs additional work but the features are there.
(StaMoCap) State monopoly capitalism
an environment where the state intervenes in the economy to protect large monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from competition by smaller firms.[60]The main principle of the ideology is that big business, having achieved a monopoly or cartel position in most markets of importance, fuses with the government apparatus. A kind of financial oligarchy or conglomerate therefore results, whereby government officials aim to provide the social and legal framework within which giant corporations can operate most effectively.
So what does the Conspiracy-Theory Machine (CTM) factory look like… it is constituted by a complex dialectic dichotomy.
...the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cybercultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital. Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which the collective intelligence materializes.
It has dichotomous constituents:
1. Virtual, Human, Inorganic/organic Capital an ephemeral but not epiphenomenal, electromagnetic message distribution system (often reified as medium=message) with its messages, on-air celebrity talent and digital production studio apparatus,. We ask if its abstract manifestation is the media industry itself or its articulation in a variety of circulation institutions, networks, stations, and the constitutive message audiences perhaps including the UX devices themselves in terms of their operating systems. (see Google-Android, Amazon-Prime, Microsoft-Windows, Apple-iOS)
2. Virtual, Human, Inorganic/organic Capital an ensemble of material reality, physical network infrastructure, and human labor. We ask if its concrete manifestation is like a 3-D printer or is it like the system/mode of production itself. It’s not so much a Rust-Belt factory as it is the offshored, globalized clean-room assembly of micro-chip (even now an anachronistic metaphor for the production of smartphones and all the associated computer and electronic hardware. (see Google-Chrome, Amazon-Kindle, Microsoft-Surface, Apple iPhone)
And then there’s CTM dynamic information/data communication content for the form(s) carrying the message(s)...the metaphorical fuel/blood for the rolling stock produced and circulating in the CTM factory as it sits within a circuit of capital as it generates commodities.
The dynamic elements are the organic labor forces holding and activating this Virtual, Human, Inorganic/organic Capital
Cultural production and the political economy of violence has commodity implication not only in the production of instruments of death like firearms but the production of meaning and messages that promote death as a commodity. These are components of a political economy of commodity/signs The political economy of networks are the dynamic accumulation of contingent knowledge capital and are as Castells has described networked capital as a space of flows (flow infrastructure (abstract)) carried on (stock infrastructure (concrete)).
www.polecom.org/...Corporate social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Weibo, Blogspot, LinkedIn etc.) all use a business model that is based on targeted advertising that turns users’ data (content, profiles, social networks and online behaviour) into a commodity. Commodities have producers who create them, otherwise they cannot exist. So, if the commodity of internet platforms is user data, then the process of creating this data must be considered to be value-generating labour. Consequently, this type of internet usage is productive consumption or prosumption in the sense that it creates value and a commodity that is sold. Dallas Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity has been revived and transformed into the concept of the internet prosumer commodity (Fuchs, 2012). Digital labour creates the internet prosumer commodity that is sold by internet platforms to advertising clients. They in return present targeted ads to users.
Digital labour on “social media” resembles housework because it has no wages, is mainly conducted during spare time, has no trade union representation, and is difficult to perceive as being labour. Like housework it involves the “externalization, or ex-territorialization of costs which otherwise would have to be covered by the capitalists” (Mies, 1986: 110). The term ‘crowdsourcing’ (Howe, 2009) expresses exactly an outsourcing process that helps capital to save on labour costs. Like housework, digital labour is “a source of unchecked, unlimited exploitation” (Mies, 1986: 16). Slaves are violently coerced with hands, whips, bullets—they are tortured, beaten or killed if they refuse to work. The violence exercised against them is primarily physical in nature. Houseworkers are also partly physically coerced in cases of domestic violence. In addition, they are coerced by feelings of love, commitment and responsibility that make them work for the family. The main coercion in patriarchal housework is conducted by affective feelings. In the case of the digital worker, coercion is mainly social in nature. Large platforms like Facebook have successfully monopolised the supply of certain services, such as online social networking, and have more than a billion users. This allows them to exercise a soft and almost invisible form of coercion through which users are chained to commercial platforms because all of their friends and important contacts are there and they do not want to lose these contacts. Consequently, they cannot simply leave these platforms.
In a passage in the Grundrisse, Marx (1939/1973: 462) makes clear the various components of alienation within capitalism. The worker is alienated from herself/himself because labour is controlled by capital, the material of labour, the object of labour and the product of labour. These four components of alienation can be related to a labour process that, in a Hegelian sense, consists of a subject, an object and a subject-object. We are talking here about alienation of the subject from itself (labour-power is put to use for and is controlled by capital), alienation from the object (the objects of labour and the instruments of labour) and from the subject-object (the products of labour).
All workers that are exploited by capital are alienated from the products of their work. In corporate social media, alienation takes on a specific form. Users are objectively alienated because in relation to subjectivity they are coerced by isolation and social disadvantage if they leave monopoly capital platforms (such as Facebook). In relation to the objects of labour, their human experiences come under the control of capital. In relation to the instruments of labour, the platforms are not owned by users, but by private companies that also commodify user data. In relation to the product of labour, monetary profit is individually controlled by the platform’s owners. These four forms of alienation together constitute capital’s exploitation of digital labour in corporate social media.
The problem for research is situating it in the circuit of capital with the issues of articulation of those institutional elements manifested as the social media conflicts demonized in the attacks on so-called “cultural marxism” wherein the Cold War memes return despite the family resemblances among state capitalisms in the West and East(sic).
In the late 20th and early 21st century, this strategy of Aesopian language backfired in a big way. On the paranoid right, the Frankfurt School has become a boogieman, the object of “a conspiracy theory that alleges that a small group of German Marxist philosophers […] overturned traditional values by encouraging multiculturalism, political correctness, homosexuality and collectivist economic ideas.” The strategy of Aesopian language makes the Frankfurt School look sly, whereas, Jeffries implies, it was just ineffectual:
The leading thinkers of the Institute for Social Research would have been surprised to learn that they had plotted the downfall of western civilisation, and even more so to learn how successful they had been at it.
According to Jeffries, the Frankfurt School latched onto the ideas of alienation through reification and made it the basis for their whole method of criticizing society. This was a power move because the manuscripts in which Marx had most fully discussed these ideas, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, were being published for the first time just when the Frankfurt School thinkers came into their own. But whereas Marx seemed to think reification of labor happened occasionally and to some people (the most exploited of wage-laborers), the members of the Frankfurt School proposed to think of it as a pervasive, inescapable social condition...
Under capitalism, according to them, we could interpret the objects onto which we projected our reified selves as if they were a collective unconscious. We could talk about fire trucks and merry-go-rounds and bonsai trees in a way that illuminated our own displaced problems...
Benjamin hoped that his kind of writing would be, as Jeffries puts it, “a kind of Marxist shock therapy aimed at reforming consciousness,” waking people up to the dream-world they lived in under capitalism. But along with the other thinkers of the Frankfurt School, he seemed to deny the possibility of any escape from that dreamworld. “This was to become one great theme of critical theory,” writes Jeffries: “there is no outside, not in today’s […] totally reified, commodity-fetishising world.” Or, as Benjamin more memorably put it, “There has never been a document of culture which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.”
As Washington investigates alleged Russian hacking of U.S. political systems, Russian propagandists are also at work across a wide front, aiming a firehose of falsehoods at ill-informed audiences, foreign and domestic. A recent RAND study reveals how this disinformation — intentionally false — leverages psychological vulnerabilities to sway audiences. U.S. leaders should raise public consciousness about its nature and dangers.
The explosion of new media is a boon for propagandists. RT, formerly Russia Today, spends over $300 million per year purveying a toxic mixture of entertainment, real news and disinformation across cable, satellite and online media. Dozens of Kremlin-backed proxy news sites blast propaganda while hiding or downplaying their affiliation. Russian trolls and hackers manipulate thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. This volume and multiplicity of media and modes has an effect; research in psychology shows that multiple sources are more persuasive than a single source.
Russia's approach to propaganda emphasizes creating first impressions, which tend to be resilient, and then reinforcing them through repetition. In this way Kremlin propagandists have persuaded some of the less informed that Ukraine's post-Maidan government is fascist. Contrary to credible findings of pervasive state-sponsored Russian doping at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Moscow's early and repeated denials have confused some audiences.
State capitalism as monopoly capitalism can be seen regardless of national origin as the centralized / concentrated ownership of the means of production, circulation, and consumption
State monopoly capitalist (stamocap) theory
1940, dissident Trotskyists developed more theoretically sophisticated accounts of state capitalism. One influential formulation has been that of the Johnson-Forest Tendency of CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya who formulated her theory in the early 1940s on the basis of a study of the first three Five Year Plans alongside readings of Marx's early humanist writings. Their political evolution would lead them away from Trotskyism. Another is that of Tony Cliff, associated with the International Socialist Tendency and the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), dating back to the late 1940s. Unlike Johnson-Forest, Cliff formulated a theory of state capitalism that would enable his group to remain Trotskyists, albeit heterodox ones.[45]
A relatively recent text by Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Class Theory and History, explores what they term state capitalism in the former Soviet Union, continuing a theme that has been debated within Trotskyist theory for most of the past century…
The theory of state monopoly capitalism was initially a neo-Stalinist doctrine popularised after World War II. Lenin had claimed in 1916 that World War I had transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopoly capitalism, but he did not publish any extensive theory about the topic. The term refers to an environment where the state intervenes in the economy to protect large monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from competition by smaller firms.[60]
The main principle of the ideology is that big business, having achieved a monopoly or cartel position in most markets of importance, fuses with the government apparatus. A kind of financial oligarchy or conglomerate therefore results, whereby government officials aim to provide the social and legal framework within which giant corporations can operate most effectively...
State monopoly capitalist (stamocap) theory aims to define the final historical stage of capitalism following monopoly capitalism, consistent with Lenin's definition of the characteristics of imperialism in his short pamphlet of the same name.
Occasionally the stamocap concept also appears in neo-Trotskyist theories of state capitalism as well as in libertarian anti-state theories. The analysis made is usually identical in its main features, but very different political conclusions are drawn from it.
A digital capitalist commons has some clear and present dangers. “...we find ourselves in an era where personal privacy and security are in competition with the desire of commercial firms to monetize the ability to capture and codify individual and network behavior. In this same space, those charged with protecting national security find themselves locked in a digital arms race with technologically-savvy groups that seek to carry out cyber-espionage and terrorism”
Freedom of expression finds its fullest flowering in the verdant pastures of public debate and deliberation. It has been argued by many advocates that the Internet has the potential to serve as this digital global commons. Under this utopian vision, competition and contention can lead to innovation and the cultivation of informed public opinion. Protecting these spaces from encroachment by selfish vested interests is especially critical in places where bad things happen to those who speak truth to power. And not only does the Internet have the potential to enable individual voice, it also can help those who wield power to be more transparent, accountable, and responsive to the needs and preferences of their constituents. However, both the desire to monetize the Internet and control it for security purposes erode its potential for meaningful encounter and engagement.
Those who would like to take advantage of the commercial potential of sites with high user traffic seek to tap into the network structure of online communities and mine these data rich environments. This flies in the face of individual privacy and the security of personal information. There is tension between wanting to know as much as possible about individuals and their affinity groups in order to make tailored product pitches, on one hand, and the amount of information those individuals and groups are willing to share about themselves beyond their own networks, on the other. Even people who want to reach broader audiences on matters of public interest are not necessarily open to making known their browsing and purchasing habits. So we find ourselves in an era where personal privacy and security are in competition with the desire of commercial firms to monetize the ability to capture and codify individual and network behavior.
In this same space, those charged with protecting national security find themselves locked in a digital arms race with technologically-savvy groups that seek to carry out cyber-espionage and terrorism. It’s a befuddling technological arena, the underlying codes and modes of which very few comprehend. blogs.worldbank.org/...
This is not the space of some imagined direct democracy enabled by digital network access or the utopian site of potential multiplayer role-escapism. Rather, it is as many have identified, a disintermediated site for value production, one where valorization and alienation take on more novel forms yet remain a disintegrated collective, general intelligence.
(Terranova, Tiziana, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy”, Social Text, 63 (Volume 18, Number 2), Summer 2000, pp. 33-58).
...It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole…
The increasingly blurred territory between production and consumption, work and cultural expression, however, does not signal the recomposition of the alienated Marxist worker. The Internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer, and every worker into a creative subject.
The process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of a different (rather than completely new) logic of value, whose operations need careful analysis.6
However, the “informatics of domination” that Haraway describes in the “Manifesto” is certainly preoccupied with the relation between cybernetics, labor, and capital. In the fifteen years since its publication, this triangulation has become even more evident. The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing” (bringing supplementary work home from the conventional office). Advertising campaigns and business manuals suggest that the Internet is not only a site of disintermediation (embodying the famous death of the middle man, from bookshops to travel agencies to computer stores), but also the means through which a flexible, collective intelligence has come into being…
The open source movement is a variation of the old tradition of shareware and freeware software which substantially contributed to the technical development of the Internet. Freeware software is freely distributed and does not even request a reward from its users. Shareware software is distributed freely, but implies a “moral” obligation for the user to forward a small sum to the producer in order to sustain the shareware movement as an alternative economic model to the copyrighted software of giants such as Microsoft. Open source “refers to a model of software development in which the underlying code of a program—the source code, a.k.a. the crown jewels—is by definition made freely available to the general public for modification, alteration, and endless redistribution.”
Free labor, however, is not necessarily exploited labor. Within the early virtual communities, we are told, labor was really free: the labor of building a community was not compensated by great financial rewards (it was therefore “free,” unpaid), but it was also willingly conceded in exchange for the pleasures of communication and exchange (it was therefore “free,” pleasurable, not imposed). In answer to members’ requests, information was quickly posted and shared with a lack of mediation that the early Netizens did not fail to appreciate. Howard Rheingold’s book, somehow unfairly accused of middle-class complacency, is the most well known account of the good old times of the old Internet, before the Nettourist overcame the Net-pioneer …
Such a reliance, almost a dependency, is part of larger mechanisms of capitalist extraction of value which are fundamental to late capitalism as a whole. That is, such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive, entangled and crucially forged during the crisis of Fordism.
Free labor is a desire of labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field that both sustains free labor and exhausts it. It exhausts it by subtracting selectively but widely the means through which that labor can reproduce itself: from the burnout syndromes of Internet start-ups to underretribution and exploitation in the cultural economy at large.
Late capitalism does not appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its labor force and its cultural and affective production. In this sense, it is technically impossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the Net from the larger network economy of late capitalism. Especially since 1994, the Internet is always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy. The mistake of the neoliberalists (as exemplified by the Wired group), is to mistake this coexistence for a benign, unproblematic equivalence.
We could start with a simple observation: the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cybercultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital. Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which the collective intelligence materializes. The collective dimension of networked intelligence needs to be understood historically, as part of a specific momentum of capitalist development. The Italian writers who are identified with the post-Gramscian Marxism of autonomia have consistently engaged with this relationship by focusing on the mutation undergone by labor in the aftermath of the factory. The notion of a self-organizing “collective intelligence” looks uncannily like one of their central concepts, the “general intellect,” a notion that the autonomists “extracted” out of the spirit, if not the actual wording, of Marx’s Grundrisse. The “collective intelligence” or “hive mind” captures some of the spirit of the “general intellect,” but removes the autonomists’ critical theorization of its relation to capital…
The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense of a process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living, (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism.(Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 693.)
The Italian autonomists extracted from these pages the notion of the “general intellect” as “the ensemble of knowledge . . . which constitute[s] the epicenter of social production.” Unlike Marx’s original formulation, however, the autonomists eschewed the modernist imagery of the general intellect as a hellish machine. They claimed that Marx completely identified the general intellect (or knowledge as the principal productive force) with fixed capital (the machine) and thus neglected to account for the fact that the general intellect cannot exist independently of the concrete subjects who mediate the articulation of the machines with each other. The general intellect is an articulation of fixed capital (machines) and living labor (the workers). If we see the Internet, and computer networks in general, as the latest machines—the latest manifestation of fixed capital— then it won’t be difficult to imagine the general intellect as being well and alive today…
It is possible, however, that the disappearance of the commodity is not a material disappearance but its visible subordination to the quality of labor behind it. In this sense the commodity does not disappear as such; rather, it becomes increasingly ephemeral, its duration becomes compressed, and it becomes more of a process than a finished product.
The role of continuous, creative, innovative labor as the ground of market value is crucial to the digital economy. The process of valorization (the production of monetary value) happens by foregrounding the quality of the labor that literally animates the commodity. In my opinion, the digital economy challenges the postmodern assumption that labor disappears while the commodity takes on and dissolves all meaning. In particular, the Internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labor intensive. It is not enough to produce a good Web site, you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence. Furthermore, you need updateable equipment (the general intellect is always an assemblage of humans and their machines), in its turn propelled by the intense collective labor of programmers, designers, and workers. It is as if the acceleration of production has pushed to the point where commodities, literally, turn into translucent objects. Commodities do not so much disappear as become more transparent, showing throughout their reliance on the labor that produces and sustains them. It is the labor of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful Web site, and it is the spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labor that goes into it…
Within the Internet, however, this process of channeling and adjudicating (responsibilities, duties, and rights) is dispersed to the point where practically anything is tolerated (sadomasochism, bestiality, fetishism, and plain nerdism are not targeted, at least within the Internet, as sites that need to be disciplined or explained away). The qualitative difference between people’s shows and a successful Web site, then, does not lie in the latter’s democratic tendency as opposed to the former’s exploitative nature. It lies in the operation, within people’s shows, of moral discursive mechanisms of territorialization, theapplication of a morality that the “excessive” abundance of material on the Internet renders redundant and even more irrelevant.
The digital economy cares only tangentially about morality. What it really cares about is an abundance of production, an immediate interface with cultural and technical labor whose result is a diffuse, nondialectical contradiction
... Rather than retracing the holy truths of Marxism on the changing body of late capital, free labor embraces some crucial contradictions without lamenting, celebrating, denying, or synthesizing a complex condition.
It is, then, not so much about truth-values as about relevance, the capacity to capture a moment and contribute to the ongoing constitution of a nonunified collective intelligence outside and in between the blind alleys of the silicon age.
Richard Barbrook, “The Digital Economy,” (posted to nettime on 17 June 1997; also at www.nettime.org; “The High-Tech Gift Economy,” in Readme! Filtered by Nettime: ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, ed. Josephine Bosma et al. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1999), 132–38. Also see Anonymous, “The Digital Artisan Manifesto” (posted to nettime on 15 May 1997).
What is important for out CTM factory is that it is still a circuit of capital albeit in “blind alleys” disintermediated and hence susceptible to disinformation as social media has given us new means for immediate gratification while performing often transgressive and micro-aggressive acts of barbarism. The aggregation of explicit ignorance persist as the levers of power continue the will of their owners.
Theorising and analysing digital labour: From global value chains to modes of production Christian Fuchs www.polecom.org/...
Corporate social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Weibo, Blogspot, LinkedIn etc.) all use a business model that is based on targeted advertising that turns users’ data (content, profiles, social networks and online behaviour) into a commodity. Commodities have producers who create them, otherwise they cannot exist. So, if the commodity of internet platforms is user data, then the process of creating this data must be considered to be value-generating labour. Consequently, this type of internet usage is productive consumption or prosumption in the sense that it creates value and a commodity that is sold. Dallas Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity has been revived and transformed into the concept of the internet prosumer commodity (Fuchs, 2012). Digital labour creates the internet prosumer commodity that is sold by internet platforms to advertising clients. They in return present targeted ads to users.
Digital labour on “social media” resembles housework because it has no wages, is mainly conducted during spare time, has no trade union representation, and is difficult to perceive as being labour. Like housework it involves the “externalization, or ex-territorialization of costs which otherwise would have to be covered by the capitalists” (Mies, 1986: 110).
The term ‘crowdsourcing’ (Howe, 2009) expresses exactly an outsourcing process that helps capital to save on labour costs. Like housework, digital labour is “a source of unchecked, unlimited exploitation” (Mies, 1986: 16). Slaves are violently coerced with hands, whips, bullets—they are tortured, beaten or killed if they refuse to work. The violence exercised against them is primarily physical in nature. Houseworkers are also partly physically coerced in cases of domestic violence. In addition, they are coerced by feelings of love, commitment and responsibility that make them work for the family. The main coercion in patriarchal housework is conducted by affective feelings.
In the case of the digital worker, coercion is mainly social in nature. Large platforms like Facebook have successfully monopolised the supply of certain services, such as online social networking, and have more than a billion users. This allows them to exercise a soft and almost invisible form of coercion through which users are chained to commercial platforms because all of their friends and important contacts are there and they do not want to lose these contacts. Consequently, they cannot simply leave these platforms...
In a passage in the Grundrisse, Marx (1939/1973: 462) makes clear the various components of alienation within capitalism. The worker is alienated from herself/himself because labour is controlled by capital, the material of labour, the object of labour and the product of labour.
These four components of alienation can be related to a labour process that, in a Hegelian sense, consists of a subject, an object and a subject-object. We are talking here about alienation of the subject from itself (labour-power is put to use for and is controlled by capital), alienation from the object (the objects of labour and the instruments of labour) and from the subject-object (the products of labour).
All workers that are exploited by capital are alienated from the products of their work. In corporate social media, alienation takes on a specific form.
Users are objectively alienated because in relation to subjectivity they are coerced by isolation and social disadvantage if they leave monopoly capital platforms (such as Facebook).
In relation to the objects of labour, their human experiences come under the control of capital.
In relation to the instruments of labour, the platforms are not owned by users, but by private companies that also commodify user data.
In relation to the product of labour, monetary profit is individually controlled by the platform’s owners.
These four forms of alienation together constitute capital’s exploitation of digital labour in corporate social media…
If you explore your apartment, office, public space or means of transportation, it is likely that you see at least one computer, laptop or mobile phone that is connected to the internet. And, it is likely that any given device has a label on it that says one of the following: Acer, Apple, Asus, BenQ, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, Huawei, Lenovo, LG, Logic Instruments, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, MEDION, Panasonic, Quanta, Samsung, Sony, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Wistron, Wortmann Terra, ZTE. When asked ‘Where does your computer/phone come from? Who has produced it?’ one may, therefore, be tempted to answer, ‘Well, it has been produced by company X.’ But these companies are merely the actors that sell these devices and profit from the sales. The production process itself contains multiple forms of labour that are invisible to the user. Yet without this labour ICTs would not exist. They are objectifications of complex human labour processes that are organised in an international division of digital labour (IDDL).
This work asks the questions: ‘Where does the laptop/computer/mobile phone come from? Who produces it? Which forms of labour are involved?’ The arguments presented here are developed further in the book: Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Fuchs, 2014; see also Fuchs and Sandoval, 2014). It analyses and theorises the steps in ICT production processes by discussing specific cases of ICT work: the extraction of minerals in African mines; ICT manufacturing and assemblage in China; software engineering in India; call centre service work; software engineering at Google in the context of Silicon Valley; and the digital labour of internet prosumers/users.
The method of analysis entails the presentation of existing empirical data and empirical research results and their theoretical interpretation. The theoretical framing is achieved by applying Karl Marx’s modes of production schema to the ICT industry. The various forms of ICT labour that connect the end user to the internet on their phone, PC or laptop involve a multitude of labour forms. They include mineral extraction, hardware manufacturing and assemblage, software engineering, service work and users’ productive consumption. All of these labour forms are objectified in a single ICT device. Such devices have a complex spatial and temporal history of production that involves an IDDL, in which different forms of labour create the use-values needed for obtaining a computer or mobile phone. These different use-values, created at different times in different places in different working conditions, become objectified in single ICT devices. This occurs within an international division of labour and articulated modes and forces of production...
According to Jairus Banaji (2011), Marx’s theory of the mode of production shows that “capitalist relations of production are compatible with a wide variety of forms of labour, from chattel-slavery, sharecropping, or the domination of casual labour-markets, to the coerced wage-labour peculiar to colonial regimes and, of course, ‘free’ wage-labour” (Banaji, 2011: 359).
This insight helps us to understand the digital media economy because it involves various modes of production and organisations of productive forces. Variations of work within a specific mode of production will be articulated, including slavery in mineral extraction, military forms of Taylorist industrialism in hardware assemblage, informational organisation of the productive forces of capitalism that articulates a highly paid knowledge labour aristocracy, precarious service workers, imperialistically exploited knowledge workers in developing countries, along with highly hazardous informal physical e-waste labour.
My approach derives from the Marxist tradition that stresses class contradictions in the analysis of globalisation. In this context, the mode of production concept can be connected to the concept of the new international division of labour (NIDL). An overview of the dimensions inherent to the relations of production and the productive forces are provided in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Dimensions of the productive forces and the relations of production.
The idea of the mode of production stresses a dialectical interconnection of class relationships (relations of production) with the organisational forms of capital, labour and technology (productive forces). The class relationship determines who owns private property and who has the power to make others produce surplus-value that they do not own. This surplus value is appropriated by private property owners. Class relationships involve an owning class and a non-owning class—the non-owning class is compelled to produce surplus value that is appropriated by the owning class.
The relations of production determine the property relations of labour power (who owns which share—full, some, none—the means of production, and products of labour), the mode of allocation and distribution of goods, the mode of coercion used for defending property relations and the division of labour. Class relationships are organisational forms of the relations of production, in which a dominant class controls the modes of ownership, distribution and coercion necessary for the exploitation of a subordinated class. In a classless society, humans have the control of ownership and distribution in common.
Every economy produces a certain amount of goods per year. Specific resources are invested and there is a specific output. If there is no contraction of the economy due to a crisis, then a surplus product is created, i.e. an excess over the initial resources. The property relations determine who owns the economy’s initial resources and surplus. One can distinguish between various modes of production (patriarchy, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, communism) based on various modes of ownership, i.e. property relations (see Table 2).
The mode of coercion takes the form of physical violence (overseers, security forces, military), structural violence (markets, institutionalised wage labour contracts, legal protection of private property, etc.) and cultural violence (ideologies that present the existing order as the best possible, or only possible order that obscures the causes of societal problems by scapegoating). In a free society, no mode of coercion is needed.
The mode of allocation and distribution defines how products are distributed and allocated. In a communist society, each person gets whatever they require for survival and needs satisfaction. In class societies, distribution is organised in the form of exchange, such that one product is exchanged for another. If you have nothing to exchange because you own nothing, then you cannot get hold of other goods and services, except those that are not exchanged, but are freely available. There are different forms of organisation: general exchange; exchange for exchange-value; exchange for maximum exchange-value; and exchange for capital accumulation.
The division of labour defines who conducts which activities in the household, the economy, polity and culture. Historically, there has been a gender division of labour, a division between mental and physical work, and an international division of labour shaped by the globalisation of production. In contrast, Marx imagined a society of generalists that would overcome the divisions of labour. Such a society would be comprised of well-rounded, universally active humans (Marx, 1867/1976: 334f). Marx (1939/1973) says that in class society “labour will create alien property and property will command alien labour” (238). The historical alternative is a communist society and mode of production, in which class relationships are dissolved. The surplus product and private property would be owned and controlled in common.
The relations of production are dialectically connected to the system of productive forces (see Figure 2): human subjects have labour power within a labour process that interacts with the means of production (object). The means of production consists of the object of labour (natural resources, raw materials) and the instruments of labour (technology). In the labour process, humans transform the object of labour (nature, culture) by making use of their labour power in tandem with the instruments of labour. The result is a product of labour, which is, as Marx says, a product, in which labour has become bound up in its object. Labour is objectified in the product and the object is, as a result, transformed into a use value that serves human needs. This is a material expression of Hegel’s subject-object relation. Figure 2 summarises the dialectical subject-object process in the economy. The productive forces are a system, in which subjective productive forces (human labour power) make use of technical productive forces, which are part of the objective productive forces. This transforms parts of the natural productive forces (which are also part of the objective productive forces) such that a labour product emerges. The development of the system of productive forces increases the productivity of labour—that is, the output (amount of products) that labour generates per unit of time. Marx (1867/1976: 431) spoke in this context of the development of the productive forces. Another goal of the development of productive forces might be the enhancement of human self-development by reducing necessary labour time and hard work.
Figure 2. The dialectical triangle of the work process: Productive forces and the labour process as dialectical subject-object
The instruments of work can be the human brain and body, mechanical tools and complex machine systems. They also include specific organisations of space-time. This incorporates specific locations of production that are operated over specific time periods. The most important aspect of time is the necessary work time that ensures productivity and the survival of society over a given year. The objects and products of work can be natural, industrial, informational or a combination thereof.
The productive forces are systematically organised to create use-values. There are different modes of organisation of the productive forces, such as agricultural productive forces, industrial productive forces and informational productive forces. Table 1 gives an overview.
Mode
Instruments of work
Objects of work
Products of work
Agricultural productive forces
Body, brain, tools, machines
Nature
Basic products
Industrial productive forces
Body, brain, tools, machines
Basic products, industrial products
Industrial products
Informational productive forces
Body, brain, tools, machines
Experiences, ideas
Informational products
Table 1. Three modes of organisation of the productive forces.
Classical slavery, serfdom and wage labour are three important historical forms of class relations that are at the heart of specific modes of production (Engels, 1884/1942). Marx and Engels argue that slavery and private property are family-based. The first historical form of private property can be found in the patriarchal family (Marx and Engels, 1932/1976: 52). It is a mode of production in which labour power is not a commodity, but organised through personal and emotional relationships. These result in certain commitments, including family work that is unremunerated. This, in turn, contributes to the reproduction of the human mind and body as well as broader social relations. It can therefore also be called reproductive work.
A wage worker’s labour power has a price, namely its wage, whereas a slave’s labour power does not have a price as it is not a commodity. However, the slave him-/herself has a price, which means that their entire human body and mind can be sold as a commodity from one slave owner to another. The current slave owner commands the entire life time of the slave (Marx, 1939/1973: 288f). The slave in both ancient slavery and feudalism is treated like a thing and has the status of a thing (Marx, 1939/1973: 464f).
In the Grundrisse’s section “Forms which precede capitalist production” (Marx, 1939/1973: 471ff) as well as in the German Ideology’s section “Feuerbach: Opposition of the materialist and idealist outlooks” (Marx and Engels, 1932/1976), Marx discusses the following modes of production:
1. The tribal community based on the patriarchal family;
2. Ancient communal property in cities (Rome, Greece);
3. Feudal production in the countryside;
4. Capitalism.
Table 2 provides a classification of modes of production based on the dominant forms of ownership (self-control, partly self-control and partly alien control, full alien control).
Owner of labour power
Owner of the means of production
Owner of the products of work
Patriarchy
Patriarch
Patriarch
Family
Slavery
Slavemaster
Slavemaster
Slavemaster
Feudalism
Partly self-control, partly lord
Partly self-control, partly lord
Partly self-control, partly lord
Capitalism
Worker
Capitalist
Capitalist
Communism
Self
All
Partly all, partly individual
Table 2. The main forms of ownership in various modes of production…
Digital labour has thus far mainly been employed as a term which characterises unpaid labour conducted by social media users (see the contributions in Scholz, 2013). We can conclude from the discussion in this article that social media prosumption is just one form of digital labour that is networked with, and connected to, other forms of digital labour. Together, all forms of digital labour constitute a global ecology of exploitation that enables the existence of digital media. It is time to broaden the meaning of the term digital labour to include all forms of paid and unpaid labour that are needed for the production, diffusion and use of digital media. Digital labour is relational in a twofold sense. It is a relation between labour and capital and relational within the global division of labour. This is shaped by articulated modes of production, forms of the organization of productive forces and by variations involving the dominant capitalist mode of production.
Figure 3. The complex network of cycles of digital labour.
Figure 3 shows a model of the major production processes that are involved in digital labour. Each production step/labour process involves human subjects (S) using technologies/instruments of labour (T) on objects of labour (O) so that a product emerges. The very foundation of digital labour is the agricultural labour cycle, in which miners extract minerals. These minerals enter the next production process as objects such that processors based on physical labour create ICT components. These components enter the next labour cycle as objects; assemblage workers build digital media technologies and take ICT components as inputs. Processors and assemblers are industrial workers involved in digital production. Such labour produces digital media technologies that enter various forms of information work as tools for the production, distribution, circulation, prosumption and consumption of diverse types of information. ‘Digital labour’ is not a term that simply describes the production of digital content. I use the term in a more general sense for a whole mode of digital production that contains a network of agricultural, industrial and informational forms of work. Together, these forms of work enable the existence and usage of digital media. The subjects involved in the digital mode of production (S)—miners, processors, assemblers, information workers and related workers—stand in specific relations of production that are either class relations or non-class relations. So what I designate as S in Figure 3 is actually a relationship S1–S2 between different subjects or subject groups. In contemporary capitalist society, most of these digital relations of production tend to be shaped by wage labour, slave labour, unpaid labour, precarious labour, and freelance labour. People working under such class relations must emancipate themselves so that a communist mode of production can emerge that contains a communist mode of digital production alongside non-digital communist modes of production.
tails. Near as I could discern, the entire internet is an organ of misinformation; everything we see and hear from the MSM is a load of horse$h!t. And Russia and Karl Marx somehow involved. Something like that.
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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Rather a lot to absorb, although thanks for the intensive labour going into this. This is something I'll need to get back to when feeling a bit livelier, not having the background or currently the mental acuity to even make the necessary connections I'm sure that I'm missing.
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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Words like hegemonic, quintessential, epiphenomenal, dialectical, a (Badiou) extensional network, reify, dichotomous, disintermediated, valorization. These aren't even the block-quoted parts.
I edit college-level and some graduate-level textbooks and they aren't usually this dense with multiple syllables.
All to say that the media lies and Trump is ahead because Russia is helping him? It's not because Clinton is a terrible candidate and probably also a terrible person?
If that's not your point, then I missed it in the verbiage.
OK, you're smart. Or have a serious way with a thesaurus. I still think Clinton is losing to/tied with Trump because she's terrible, and Russia is irrelevant.
Whew. My eyes hurt.
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Comments
Couldn't make heads nor
tails. Near as I could discern, the entire internet is an organ of misinformation; everything we see and hear from the MSM is a load of horse$h!t. And Russia and Karl Marx somehow involved. Something like that.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Rather a lot to absorb,
Rather a lot to absorb, although thanks for the intensive labour going into this. This is something I'll need to get back to when feeling a bit livelier, not having the background or currently the mental acuity to even make the necessary connections I'm sure that I'm missing.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Jeebus. Words, words, lots of words.
Words like hegemonic, quintessential, epiphenomenal, dialectical, a (Badiou) extensional network, reify, dichotomous, disintermediated, valorization. These aren't even the block-quoted parts.
I edit college-level and some graduate-level textbooks and they aren't usually this dense with multiple syllables.
All to say that the media lies and Trump is ahead because Russia is helping him? It's not because Clinton is a terrible candidate and probably also a terrible person?
If that's not your point, then I missed it in the verbiage.
OK, you're smart. Or have a serious way with a thesaurus. I still think Clinton is losing to/tied with Trump because she's terrible, and Russia is irrelevant.
Whew. My eyes hurt.
Please check out Pet Vet Help, consider joining us to help pets, and follow me @ElenaCarlena on Twitter! Thank you.