My point was exactly that that movie justified, and promoted, a particular idea of what to do with your head. If you make it, bugger off to the technical intellectual strata (i.e. 'the good brains' who manage everyone).
>
>
> >On the one hand what's happening with information, in the case of
> >this MIT stuff, the Public Library of Science initiative, Open Source,
> >etc. is the organisation of a professionalization hierarchy on top
> >of the bedrock of 'free information'
>
> i will take the position here that there is no bedrock of 'free information'.
I don't follow here - when a field based on freely available information is stratified (e.g. by the distinction between Web Developers and 'real programmers') is that not a professional hierarchy developing on top of 'free information'? (The quotes are because the information is not truly free to access, requiring a certain education, time, computers, etc.)
>
> >(After all, it is much more
> >efficient in terms of human resource growth to have a massive highly
> >literate population, with supply and hierarchy regulated by
> >'professional' bodies, than to restrict the required literacy.) On
> >the other hand, there is an element of the 'subversion of
> >money as command' (where we are actually talking about 'cultural
> >capital' rather than money per se) which is possible, and to
> >some extent, actual when the academy is defined less by physical
> >exclusion and more by accredition.
>
> I'm not following you here.
>
The 'subversion of money as command' is a phrase I'm taking from a Harry Cleaver essay of the same name. Basically, what Cleaver talks about is how the cycle of reproduction of labour power involves the transfer of a certain amount of buying power, in the form of money, to the working class. This money is then used by the wc to buy the means of subsistence, thereby reproducing labour (leaving out the gendered aspects of unpaid work, which are of course important). The allocation of a certain amount of value (in the form of money) to the wc is the expression of a particular social relation - the point is not simply to transfer money but to reproduce the workers *as workers* (in autonomist theory, class, and thus your status as a worker, is not defined in some definitional sense, but rather in a relational sense - the enforcement of the capital relation forces you into the position of a worker every day.). The transfer of value, and its complex massaging (e.g. milk tokens at school, tokens for refugees in the UK, etc.) is a system of command.
However, the fact that money is a universal commodity means that (as opposed to e.g. in a situation where payment is made in kind) there is nothing forcing the wc to spend the money in the interests of capital. The universal nature of money means that the command inherent in it can be subverted - thus, e.g. my step-uncle in the UK, who has been smoking pot and painting pictures on the dole since the 1960s. Or, for instance, the members of Wildcat in Germany, who spent the early 1980s 'jobbing' - taking casual jobs as cashflow required, but also taking breaks for political and other activity.
My analogy is with the structure of e.g. the modern UK economy, where a highly literate population is controlled less by a 1930s style class system, and more by a complex network of tests and 'quality assurance' institutions. While the UK safety net is certainly vanishing, the idea of reverting to a 1930s style organisation of society is ludicrous - the 21st century workforce is kept in check with a complex network of diffuse power and outstanding credit card debt. The result is that any rebellion which happens in the UK today is likely to be literate, and increasingly connected via mobile phones, the Internet, etc. All these things - literacy, mobile phones, the modern Internet - are the result of a transfer of value towards reproducing labour. A brief glance at modern management literature will show how all of these things are meant to seamlessly flow back into profit taking, in a grand wave of synergy. Yet they don't always - they are subverted.
Similarly, imagine a transition from today, when 'academic' work is stuck inaccessible inside university libraries, to when it is plastered all over the Internet. I can certainly imagine uses for that - grabbing a course on chem eng from the Internet, and use it to build community knowledge around the technical jargon that a company uses to hide its toxic dumping. Lots more come to mind.
> >To put it simply: the library holds revolution to the extent that
> >through books we hold a dialogue much broader than possibile within
> >the confines of our everyday lives. Power maintains its centrality
> >by painting us as fragmented Others, each ghettoized in our minds.
>
> I fail to see how MIT's initiative does much for building solidaristic
> learning communities of the kind forged by freedom schools and work modeled
> after something like Salt Alinksy has done or what we did in the
> Centertown Project
It doesn't. Just like the Internet doesn't do anything for community building, and neither does the dole. Its not designed to. Ultimately communities are built in physical reality.
>
> >If capital is transforming, re-organising the ghettoes, then that
> >transformation can sometimes (like the old factories which become
> >social centres) be used in unanticipated ways.
>
> yeah, but MIT's initiative doesn't do much in that regard, which was the
> original point: Brad insisted that somehow Chuck, an autodidact par
> excellence, is giving up something as an individual if he even breathes
> critically on that press release!
Ok, so Brad is being uncritical. My point is simply that here is a resource - maybe a trend. Maybe something subvertible.
> > >
> > > >Peter
> > > >P.S. maybe I should go and register bitterautodidact.com right around
> > > >now. :)
> > >
> > >
> > > you're referring to me or you?
> > >
> >Well, me, originally.
>
>
>
> well, i don't understand why you are bitter?
>
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.... or rather, "The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital"
That 'absorbed' is a rather tame word for a rather horrific process.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B