Gordon wrote:
>> Well, you're missing all the wonderful inventions the 23nd
>> century will bring us. Eating your heart out?
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> Walter Benjamin wrote: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of
> human nature, writes Lotze, is, alongside so much selfishness in
> specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays
> toward the future. Reflection shows us that our image of happiness
> is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own
> existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse
> envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we
> could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us.
> In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with
> the image of redemption" (at
> <http://iwebs.upol.cz/kw/texts/history.htm>).
In effect, then, technology, in presenting us with new things, satisfies no deep longing or important desire, generally speaking. We do not miss what we never had. Before we can experience the deep desire, we must first become addicted to the substance which occasions it. Or as Uncle Karl was just quoted in this mailing list,
'Production produces consumption: (1) by providing the material
of consumption; (2) by determining the mode of consumption;
[and] (3) by creating in the consumer a need for the objects
which it first presents as products' (Marx, A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy, Progress 1970, p. 197).
So, as I said, scarcity turns out to be a product -- a product which is produced and sold in order to maintain the class system. "We" do not have authority and hierarchy in order to produce complexity; "we" produce complexity, and the scarcities thereof, in order to have authority and hierarchy.