[lbo-talk] Yannis and new queer agenda show...

lasko lascaux at riseup.net
Mon Jun 25 04:27:14 PDT 2012


On 6/25/12 6:31 AM, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> Some resources to momentarily sate those impatient to hear more about
> Valve's workplace...

I'm not sure what this shows except that capitalist enterprises can function without managers or by making everyone into a manager - that's what the Github experience is, apparently:

"It's often cited that GitHub doesn't have managers. In my opinion, a better way to describe the phenomenon would be to say that everyone at GitHub is a manager. Instead of assigning 100% management duties to individuals, the basic role of management is spread between 1.) every single employee, and 2.) a set of custom in-house tools that serve to keep everyone in the know with regards to other projects."

http://tomayko.com/writings/management-style

It is possible to frame the cultivation of your inner mini-manager combined with technologies of surveillance in a less positive fashion.

Furthermore, the essential capitalist relation of production - private property - is still intact. The broader relations of production beyond a group of elite programmers at a single company is unaddressed.

With Valve, a producer of "first-person shooter" games, you have not just "the perfect place to test things like virtual currencies, real-time econometric modeling, and democratic, egalitarian, long-term public planning," but also the reproduction and intensification of less desirable activities. Refer to Valve's scholarly publication "Rendering Wounds in Left 4 Dead 2."

Yannis' second blog post, in describing the gamer economy within Valve's Steam platform, repeats what someone following Graeber might call the barter fallacy. On examination, Steam's barter economy would seem to confirm Graeber: it arose in a currency-less virtual world populated by people already accustomed to real-world currencies. The upcoming development of their "virtual currency" is taking place in a virtual world where the entire population has the role of soldier.



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