In order to maintain that production system and secure the integrity of Capital's means of control and domination, after a certain point, it becomes necessary to insure that whatever skill and knowledge went into creating that production system, remains firmly in the hands of Capital. Hence, it is important to design systems that can not be re-appropriated or re-invented by Labor or by the consumer base. (CG)
Chuck, I have two problems here. First, while your proposition that "it becomes necessary to insure that whatever skill and knowledge went into creating that production system, remains firmly in the hands of Capital" has a certain nice zing to it, it is not really self-evident. It requires both argument and historical illustration. Secondly, your "hence" is not really earned. That may be the result (or, more accurately, one of the results) of changes in productive resources but I don't see how it follows from what proceeds -- and it is not self-evident that even the horror which is Windows illustrates your logic here.
In short, it would take a lot more evidence to convince me.
Carrol
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What did I have in mind? It's extremely condensed, probably to the point of obscurity. Part of it came from reading Michael Perelman's Class Warfare. Here is a brief quote from the section, Markets and Informational Efficiency,
``As we have already seen, management has made a concerted effort to wrest informational control from workers. Nonetheless, management has only partially succeeded. Given the importance of workers' admittedly diminished dispersed knowledge, management cannot presume to manage effectively from above without taking advantage of workers' knowledge (Minkler 1993). Even so, management resists acknowledging, let alone promoting the workers' information. We have already taken note to the length to which management will even go to undermine workers' information....
...In addition, I should mention that business goes to great lengths to maintain secrecy. As Thorstein Veblen observed many years ago, `Secrecy and mystification may be good for trade, but they are altogether bad for industry ... A trade secret is a `business proposition' and may be profitable to its keeper [but not necessarily for society as a whole]' (Veblen 1923, p.269). After all, information expands through use, not secrecy.'' (120p)
Part of the idea is also covered in Lessig through a different perspective. Here is a sample:
``In one sense, each [earlier section] has asked: How much control should we allow over information and by whom should this control be exercised? There is a battle between code that protects intellectual property and fair use; there is a battle between code that might make a market for privacy and the right to report facts about individuals regardless of that market; there is a battle between code that enables perfect filtering and architectures that ensure some messiness about who gets what. Each case calls for a balance between control and no control.'' (186p)
MP and LL put different contexts to related, but not quite identical ideas. What Lessig misses is the enormous domain of economic production, although he mentions commerce as the driving force behind the evolving direction toward ever larger and more comprehensive control schemes. I think it is here that the particular sorts of approaches to the control of information (skill/knowledge/base) were modeled in an evolving and practical way pretty much through out history. MP explores this latter development in its marxist form applied to work, production, and class.
To an extent the basic idea is very old and lays at the roots of class society. For example, at a certain period in Egyptian history writing was supposed have been a special form of skill held by a priestly class or at least their scribes. I am not sure this is still believed by egyptologists, historians and archaeologists, but that was the theory at one time. What is known now is that at some slightly later stage there were two forms of writing and that the one we recognize as hieroglyphics was considered something like the preview of the state and had become ceremonial.
So, I was referring also to this historical process and its manipulation by privileged classes. At some point, almost at the cusp of some form of skill/knowledge becoming trivial or common place, dispersed, then what you and Kelley referred to in later posts as a professionalization seems to occur. It is almost as if, just at the point where everyone should be able to re-gain a knowledge/skill base, extract it out of its original specialization, then new professional class grows into place to claim its preview, put on purple ropes and declare it all off-limits.
What I have in mind here is not the original development of some special and usually technical and difficult to learn field or skill. That originary process often does arise within a technical elite. What I am more concerned with is the next phase, were that specialist knowledge/skill becomes diffused and part of or at least opened to a general class. It seems to me, that at that point, there seems to be a re-imposition of control, to manage or limit this diffusion process.
In our case, Capital with its capital cee, arrives to discover that some potential broad market is making do with what is already available to anyone, and therefore Capital must figure out a method to impose its own forms of control in order to commodity what has become almost ubiquitous. So, a class of haves and have nots are continuously formed and reformed.
Since this has been going on for centuries, this process is now part of the specialist knowledge base of Capital, call it business school knowledge as opposed to say economics, which form a kind of self-consciousness of the process. Part of this knowledge of process is devoted to socially engineer a kind of blindness, a kind of ignorance.
Microsoft is a good example of this because they are so well known for their dis-information campaigns and their completely obfuscation revelations.
Below is the main personal example that I had in mind.
I took a course in Basic, then one in Fortran, and completely fouled up one in Cobol. Then I picked up again with Pascal and fiddle around in Assembler. Then I just threw in the towel. This was ridiculous stuff to learn. It was hard, I got over one hill only to find another and another and never arrived. Okay. About five years after all that I got my first PC and opened the book on DOS. I couldn't believe it. It was completely unintelligible. It made absolutely no sense to me at all. How could this be after taking intro programming in Basic, Fortran and Cobol?
I got over DOS's illegible opaqueness and just memorized the commands. It finally seemed to be pretty limited stuff, I thought. So, a few more years go by and I start in on FreeBSD. I recognized the look and feel of what used to run on UCB systems.
I was expecting exactly the same reaction as I had to DOS--this wall of obscurity. That's not what happened. With each little piece, more and more started to fall into place and make sense to me. So what was the difference?
The difference was that DOS manuals are written to obscure exactly what I was desperately trying to find out. That is, how is this put together, and how does this work? In DOS was expecting what had happened in my earlier attempts to learn programming languages, that at some certain point, what I was doing would start to make sense to me. Then, after that kind of learning didn't happen, I just got used to memorizing a command set without any expectation of understanding. I ust assumed that's what learning an operating system was all about.
To my amazement, what I found out trying to learn unix was that the process didn't resemble learning DOS, but the earlier experience of learning a programming language. The real problem with unix is that it is big. It seems to have an endless command set that never terminates. And, this ever growing set can be put them together in an apparently endless variety of ways. That's the problem. Not understanding any one of them.
Okay. when I moved from my limited experience in intro programming classes, to a user of DOS, I was being moved from a position of admittedly limited understanding, to a position of no understanding at all. I was being socially engineered into ignorance. I kept looking for concepts. There were none. It was a system of opaque procedures that could only be combined in a limited number of ways.
What finally cemented this impression into place was watching Joe, one of the guys at work take a few night classes and try to learn DOS, Windoz, and the standard office suite (word processor, database, spread sheet). I kind of expected he would be exposed to what I had been in the programming classes. That wasn't what happened.
For his DOS class, I used to help him get over the hurdles and did a couple of homework assignments for him--at least sketched out the general idea to get him going. I started thinking about his struggles. He wasn't learning anything. He was trying his damnest but he was getting trapped the same way I had. He kept thinking the light would come on, if he just kept at it. I finally told him, look this shit doesn't make sense. Just memorize everything. To help him study for his final, I wrote out a series of commands to perform some limited tasks like copying files from one drive to another and renaming them at the same time, adding files together end to end to make bigger files, and so. I told him, you do this, then you do this, then you do this.
I realized this was the worst kind of procedural learning, memorizing recipes. He didn't have to master concepts because there were no concepts.
Anyway, I hope this helped develop the idea better. This is already too long, as usual.
Chuck Grimes