More Culture Wars: Twitter Joke Theft Heres a heartwarming story of a regular Joe who dropped a 140-word poem in ode to relationships, heartbreak, & technology under late capitalism. The poem went nuts on twitter dot com, the popular words-sharing website. In a sudden burst of meritocracy, Joes brand exploded slightly, garnering a bunch of new followers and worldwide recognition. Then, the system started to re-assert itself. Actual meritocracy kicked in, with folks who had already achieved notoriety via diverse means attempting to garner some of the momentum behind Joes poem for themselves. This is basically joke-theft, & its not very interesting other than as a footnote to the inevitability of human social interactions within a society obsessed with accumulation. Where it gets interesting is the thoroughly postmodern turn of events wherein a famous comedian accused Joe of stealing the poem, & JOE STARTED TO BELIEVE HIM. Despite knowing, from his own lived experiences, that he hadnt stolen jack shit from anybody & found such theft of intellectual property distasteful, he was actually afraid hed done it. The famous dudes bold accusation, combined with the authority conferred by his blue-tick Verified account & large fan following, had Joe doubting HIS OWN CONSCIOUSNESS. Merit doesnt arise from any genuine authority, but it dies CONFER that authority by virtue of its assumed existence. That authority is very real, & very powerful. Its an important thing to understand about the way society works, because it has serious ramifications for the moral component of capitalism. Profits are supposed to reward producers of good products & services; in the anarcho-capitalist utopia, free markets reward the worthy & suppress the worthless, with the indifferent perfection markets are known for never, ever having. The mythical view held by many is that its not markets, but interference in markets (regulation) that causes these problems. The market will self-regulate if left unhindered. Of course, markets dont self-regulate - like water flowing over stones, they simply choose the path that offers most movement potential with least resource cost: the path of least resistance. My regular readers (lmao) may recall a story I linked a few days ago about US fighter jet procurement, detailing the ways it is more effective, profit-wise, for a defense contractor to sell a broken plane that costs a lot in repairs to the US government, than it is to sell them a reliable product. Profit is the goal of capitalism, not the generation of good products. Dont get me wrong, profit motive can definitely create some good-ass products, and its good at recognising demand. However, when demand is low, that doesnt make the profit motive disappear. There are other ways to generate the impression of value. If stealing a poem someone tweeted & making it your own nets you some attention, some cultural capital, some MERIT, then you can do that. Accurately denoting ownership of something not only doesnt improve your merit necessarily, it can lower it. Like the concept of a life without sin, capitalists dream of a world with unrestricted markets - not because its possible, but because striving for it is morally worthy in itself, like striving to escape Original Sin. Also like the pursuit of Christs example, it tends to reward those who disregard it in favour of those adhere to it. Consider that great yoke of the working class in Western societies, the Protestant Work Ethic. A heartwarming tale of PR success for capitalists, but kind of a self-defeating attitude for the working class to have. Again, like Joe the Poet being accused of joke theft despite KNOWING that he stole nothing - and coming to believe it - the working classes can be brought to actually believe theyre being indolent despite being faced with the daily reality that theyre the ones doing all the hard work. Now we live in a world where he took my job! is an actual serious complaint, & not a weirdly-phrased expression of gratitude. We actually believe in a world where we no longer have to work is possible, & rather than greeting this post-labour utopia as something desirable, we instead imagine that world as a terrible vacuum wherein nobody has any purpose or value. No one does anything there, we imagine, rather than a world where people are free to actually do as they wish for a change. Thus does authority outweigh the actual reality. When everyone failed to share things properly under the communist regime of the Soviet Union, everyone was convinced that sharing, as an economic model, was dead forever & was immoral to even consider. When markets fail under capitalism, we all shift uncomfortably & look at our shoes. We know that having existing cultural capital, like our famous comedian earlier, will net you an increased ability to manipulate social interactions to your advantage. It makes it easier to sell your product (whether its a physical object, or yourself as an identity, or some service or other). This has been the case FOREVER, weve always known thats how power works, & if we believe that somehow capitalism will nullify that market-tarnishing influence some day & well all be carried to free-market Valhalla, were very much mistaken.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 02:09:00 +0000
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