Re: [microsound] confusion

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/12/06, Jason Hollis <contact@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> "and to the person who thinks myspace is a free market-driven
> meritocracy: you're kidding, right?"
>
> Um, no.
> You're both massively oversimplifying what I said and missing the point
> completely.



That seems a bit contradictory to me.  If you're "massively
oversimplifying," then you're not exactly  "missing the point completely."
An oversimplification suggests that a point has been gotten to some degree,
if not entirely or close to mostly.

I refer to the concept commonly referred to as the 'marketplace of ideas',
> wherein what can be described as market forces act on all abstractions.



Except for the abstractions inherent in this definition presumably.  This
sounds like market-driven reductionism.  What exactly is a "marketplace of
ideas?"  Ideas are not selected like fruit preferences.  The validity,
soundness, and persuasiveness of concepts are driven by analysis, not market
exchange-value, at least outside the Bush-world of slavish,
commerce-centered life.  And what exactly is meant by "market forces act on
all abstractions"?  Market forces--production, consumption, and
exchange--operate on everything concrete.  The only way that market forces
act on ideas is in the way the media and public discourse refuse to allow or
give credence to any questioning of their assumptions as to how economic
life should operate.  And that's certainly nothing to praise.

MySpace itself has meritocratic tendencies insomuch as users choose what
> they like and massively cross link it, share with friends, etc, so the
> cream
> can rise-



Sounds very much like you're pushing forward the idea of a market-driven
meritocracy after all--no missing the point or oversimplification here.
You're saying it straight up.  The cream here is not the natural selection
of a disinterested market but the publicity surrounding chance-driven
encounters misread as "merit" rather than an operative form of capital
process (communal publicity) grooving well with the instrumental motives of
the website and its operators/inventors.  you have to have a critical
superego to see it though.  You can't be a market-driven ideologue or else
you end up permanently mistaking the effect for its cause and vice versa.

If none of this is gelling for you, nothing more I say will help and I
> suggest you read up on the subject.
>

That's a convenient way to slip out of backing up your assertion that your
discussant is both missing the point entirely and oversimplifying the point
all at the same time.  What else should we ignorant masses be reading up on
apart from the Microsound list and of course the call to 'read up.'


-- 
"If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the
same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter
of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same
newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of
classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the
preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying
population....The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they
find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen
equipment."--Herbert Marcuse