I'm simultaneously excited about Doug's teasers about Yanis's upcoming story, and cynical about the hyperindividualist tech company-men who subordinate themselves so utterly to their boss's interests. ("Anarchism for the privileged" isn't any decent kind of anarchism.)
I'm also excited over reading about highly participatory schools. More is naturally better. But to the extent that it's mainly privileged children who attend them and proceed to more effectively dominate other former children, there's also something horrific and terrible about their existence. I had such conflicting feelings of wonder and revulsion, the last time I stood in one of these schools and saw the happy/privileged children running around those benevolent/smug teachers.
All the best,
Tj
On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 1:27 PM, lasko <lascaux at riseup.net> wrote:
> 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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