2
" ...This is the arena in which a spiritualized disobedience means most. It doesn't mean a second New Deal, another massive bureaucratic attack on our problems. It doesn't mean taking to the streets, throwing bricks through the window at the Bank of America, or driving a tractor through the local McDonald's. It means living differently. It means taking responsibility for the character of the human world. That's a real confrontation with the problem of value. In short, refusal of the present is a return to what Thoreau and Ruskin called "human fundamentals, valuable things," and it is a movement into the future. This movement into the future is also a powerful expression of that most human spiritual emotion, Hope.
p.124 "
― Curtis White , Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work
6
" The most intensely value-laden artifacts of human creativity - works of art - are now the purist examples of that old capitalist alchemy: turning human value into exchange value. At a certain point, and that point has been passed, the art market will only be a mathematical exchange. Art is worth money, but what’s money worth? Money is the ultimate numbers game. What the furor over the art market brings tantalizingly close to the surface is the fact that it is not just the value of art that is dependant on a shared fantasy, it is also money itself.
Warhol is not the name of an artist, it is the name of a currency. “Warhol” is a big number because its denomination (soup cans, Brillo box simulacrums, etc.) is presumed to be stable and growing. But it can inflate or deflate like any stock or bond or national currency. Jeff Koons is also a currency but less stable. The only thing that really changes hands are the numbers that are for some reason associated with these opaque talismans called “artworks.” The billionaire buyers of these works have been reduced to South sea natives who insist on the magical properties of certain queer objects - a cornhusk doll with pearls for eyes and a colourful ribbon about its head - but are unable to say why they are so important or why their world would collapse without them. Investors in the art market need to fear bot only the economic boogies of bubbles and ponzi schemes but also that dreaded moment when they look at one another in panic and say, “What were we thinking? What is this stuff? What could have possessed us to say that a glass balloon dog is worth thens of millions? Sell! Sell! "
― Curtis White , We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data
11
" Through intellectuals like Cowen and Brooks, capitalism is enjoying its sweetest dream. It has dreamed a place where the wealthy consort only with their mechanical creations and servants. It is a place where industry makes mostly those things needed by the rich. It is a place without suffering and the complaints of workers and the poor, most of whom have now “rationally chosen” to live in poverty colonies in unfortunate climes. Perhaps it is only a dream, a piece of economic whimsy, but labor statistic and anecdotes about les miserables suggest that it is real enough.
These intellectuals are also making a wager: they are betting that the poor and low-paid half of the population will not know how to organize and will not revolt, especially if there is TV to watch and social programs that consist of not much more than free Hulu for the poor. Social isolation and anomie - the impotence of the canaille - is capitalism’s first line of defence against those it has dispossessed. They’re also betting that the poor will be mostly clueless about the reasons for and the meaning of their condition, so much so that they will be fervent supporters of the “freedoms” offered by their oppressors, especially the freedom to oppress.
Capitalism’s cyborg dreams only confirm that it is the enemy of all dreams. If we wish to reclaim our right to be the dreamers, rather than the dreamt, we need to take the first step and sat, as e. e. cummings wrote, “there is some shit I will not eat. "
― Curtis White , We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data
12
" Of course, for all their counterculture pretensions, corporations like Google, Amazon, and Apple are still corporations. They seek profits, they try to maximize their monopoly power, they externalize costs, and, of course, they exploit labor. The American technology sector has externalized the cost of industrial pollution to Chinas cities, where people live in a pall of smog but no one - certainly not Apple - has to bear the cost of cleanup. Apple/Foxconn’s dreadful labor practices in China are common knowledge, and those Amazon packages with the sunny smile issue forth from warehouses that are more like Blake’s “dark satanic mills” than they are the new employment model for the internet age.
The technology industry has manufactured images of the rebel hacker and hipster nerd, of products that empower individual and social change, of new ways of doing business, and now of mindful capitalism. Whatever truth might attach to any of these, the fact is that these are impressions carefully managed to get us to keep buying products and, just as importantly, to remain confident in the goodness and usefulness of the high-tech industry. We are being told these stories in the hope that we will believe them, buy into them, and feel both ip and spiritually renewed by the association. Unhappily, in this view of things, mindfulness can be extracted from a context of Buddhist meanings, values, and purposes. Meditation and mindfulness are not part of a whole way of life but only a spiritual technology, a mental app that is the same regardless of how it is used an what it is used for. Corporate mindfulness takes something that has the capacity to be oppositional - Buddhism - and redefines it. Eventually, we forget that it ever had its own meaning. "
― Curtis White , We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data
15
" Commentators, journalists, and, on exceptionally clear days, their audiences are beginning to wonder why it is that with fatal environmental problems bearing down upon us, with global warming threatening agriculture and our minimal ability to feed ourselves, the rich and powerful aren’t more actively attempting to remedy the situation. Worse, why do they so often seem to want to do just the opposite of what is required?
This question is easy to answer if we understand the psychology of the capitalist. Easy and disturbing. The logic of capitalism acknowledges that there will be destructive consequences for its activities. Economists even have a name for it: negative externality. This is also known as “externalizing cost” when it comes time for somebody other than the perpetrator to pay for the damage. It is a secular form of what the generals call “collateral damage,” which means that the wrong person got blown up. Or, as one might say, “We didn’t mean to pollute the river with coal ash. We were only pursuing private prosperity and personal happiness. In the meantime, we’re glad to have someone else pay to fix it.” But what do you do when it’s not a river - when it’s a whole world that has been trashed? Are taxpayers going to have to pay for a new planet?
So the oligarchs and their minions, the so-called 1 percent, aren’t missing anything. They’re not stupid. If they choose to do nothing about looming global catastrophe, it is because they don’t want to do anything. And they do not want to do anything because the threat of destruction is, frankly, not persuasive to them. Those who benefit from capitalism understand that it has always depended on suffering, and they have confidence that if someone is to suffer it won’t be them. “Let the songbirds suffer in my place,” they say. “Or those fucking - what do they call ‘em - manatees. There’s only about ten of them left anyway. And, we admit, the miscellaneous poor will suffer, here and in those faraway countries, but why shouldn’t they suffer? Look at them! They’re rather good at it. Besides, the humans could use a little downsizing.”
Pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim! "
― Curtis White , We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data
18
" … Communities repeat their central myths, the stories that make them a “cult” and give them an identity, in order to provide them a sense of social continuity. And so Americans tell themselves their “founding” stories over and over again, even though some of them are quite deranged and self-destructive: how the Founding Fathers were the homogenous embodiment of wisdom (when in fact the hated one another, mostly along Federalist and Republican lines); how these wise fathers created a Christian nation “under god” (when in fact many of them - Jefferson, Paine, Franklin - were Deistic skeptics) ; how the Second Amendment means that we all have the right to carry assault rifles; how everyone should strive for the American Dream understood as “success,” that “American bitch goddess” (William James), and so on. Deranged though they may be, these stories are comforting for many Americans, and so to challenge them is to invite vigorous debate if not a fistfight. "
― Curtis White , We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data
19
" The Middle Mind attempts to find a middle way between the ideological hacks of the right and of the theorized left. Unlike Middle-brow, the Middle Mind does not locate itself between high and low culture. Rather, it asserts its right to speak for high culture indifferent to both the traditionalist right and the academic left. The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the right's narrowness, and incredulous before the left's convolutions. It is adventuresome, eclectic, spiritual, and in general agreement with liberal political assumptions about race, gender, and class. "
― Curtis White , The Middle Mind: Why Consumer Culture is Turning Us Into the Living Dead
