Heaven in Disorder by Slavoj Žižek

Author:Slavoj Žižek
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Bisac Code 1: POL000000
ISBN: 9781682192801
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2021-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Unlike the capitalist whose profit rests on the surplus value generated by waged workers through the production of commodities, the lord extracts value through monopoly, coercion, and rent . . . Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants.87

This is how Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google function. We retain the freedom of our personal choice, but the scope of this choice is determined by whichever corporation privatized the particular part of our commons: we search for whatever information we need through Google, we freely determine our public identities through Facebook, etc. These mega-corporations try to colonize our future (Gates regularly proposes schemes for organizing our future lives) and even outer space (Musk owns many satellites and plans to build settlements on Mars).

There is thus a grain of truth in the Trump “rebellion” against digital corporate powers. It is worth watching the “War Room” podcasts of Steve Bannon, the greatest ideologist of Trump’s populism: one cannot but be fascinated by how many partial truths he combines into an overall lie. His claim that under Obama the gap between wealthy and poor grew immensely and big corporations grew stronger is true, but under Trump this process only continued, in addition to taxes being lowered and money being printed to bail out corporations. We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or a nationalist populism which pretends to oppose big corporations but ultimately amounts to the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) in order that things basically remain the same.

So is there a third way, outside the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a corporate “great reset”? Yes: a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done—Greta Thunberg has made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis for what it is: part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over the economy. Third, we should rely on science, but without simply accepting it as the agent of decision-making. Why not? Let’s return to Habermas, with whom we began: our predicament is that we are compelled to act while knowing that we don’t know the full coordinates of the situation we are in, and non-acting would itself function as an act. But is this not the basic situation of every action? Our great advantage is that we know how much we don’t know, and this knowing about our not-knowing opens up a space of freedom. We act when we don’t know the whole situation, but this is not simply our limitation. What gives us freedom is that the situation—in our social sphere, at least—is in itself open, not fully (pre)determined.

Our present situation in the pandemic is certainly open. We’ve learned the first lesson: “lockdown light” is not enough.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.