I break it down by saying that human agency in the midst of larger societies wherein social relations are reified as blind forces, almost forces of nature, is darn near impossible, or downright ineffective. For every action in such a society there is an unequal and unexpected reaction. There are of course those capitalist apologists who fetishize the unknowing invisible hand in everything, making it into another idol, but for me its just like a blind man flailing about with a stick in a pool of muddy water. You can act, sure, but in a globalized world with eight billion people, there is no way of knowing the results of that action: youll just end up falling into confirmation bias or ex post facto justifications about how x was essential but y was totally a historical accident. Owl of Minerva and all that. Which is just a long convoluted way of saying that the problem lies not in design, but in scale.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:51:10 +0000
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