Thesis 2 of 95: Talk To Me

Part of the blogging project about the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto

(first post)

"You've been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life."

Sometimes, I feel like this line from this Pavement song called "Shady Lane". Like the representation of "me" in the public eye is not "me", and whatever it is that seems to have replaced the real "me" in the public eye has more power to define me then I have on my own.

And I'm sure, what with all the privileges society has granted me, that some have it way worse.

It's easy, and frankly a bit boring to speak of how you "only see people as individuals". Besides, seeing everyone as "individuals" is usually the act of removing your prejudices from groups of people to all of mankind, asserting things about their "nature" which are just as destructive as asserting the same things about groups.

Removing prejudices against groups from your system of thinking is a process of talking and interacting with those people in a way that lets them show their true self, not simply dismissing any thoughts of groups existing on the basis of an idea about what the essence of every individual is.

That is, if the representation of "me" in the public eye is not the real me, you can correctly assume that it has to do with what group of people I belong to, but if you turn your view of me into a destructive universal view of "human nature", and avoid finding out how I really am, you've misrepresented me again, and you haven't understood me.

You have to inquire if you want to understand.

This is why seeing conversations as markets, a new form of value exchange in the era of the internet, is interesting. As I argued in the first post, markets should not be thought of the act of swapping material wealth, but any of form of significant exchange of values between human beings. Conversations, I argued, thanks to the internet, is emerging as a significant new form of value-exchange between people.

I would like to clarify why, if anybody is confused. Conversations haven't been markets now for a while. Commodity exchange and abstract human labor has. Sure, people might have individually had conversations were there has been a sense of value-exchange, but it cannot have been said to be a "market", since it didn't occur on a large scale as an important form of social activity. With the Internet, that has changed. Conversation and sharing of opinions is beginning to become a significant part of the common persons life, in a way that it can't be said to have been before. Anyway.

Lets introduce the thesis this post is about: "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors". If conversation is a new market, a form of social exchange which is emerging out of technological developments, what might be the "marketing" of this particular "market"?

Marketing, in the world of capitalism, is built on assumptions. Assumptions about groups, and about people in general. Marketing in capitalism is forced to make assumptions to succeed. It is not efficient to know exactly what everyone wants individually, so it prefers to keep things general. Those people seem to want this. These people seem to want that. It's simple,easy and for the purposes of capitalism, it works great. The purposes of capitalism, however, might not be the purposes of creating a better world.

The marketing of conversation, on the other hand, is built on something different. Talking to each-other as a form of value exchange requires some will to understand. Unless there is a will to understand by both parts or parties of the exchange, nobody is going to return to the conversation. That is, if I enter I attempt to start a conversation, and I talk to the person as if I'm talking to "an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to their life", I am not going to get a good response. Probably, what is going to happen is that they will stop talking to me after a while, and I can't exchange values with that person any longer.

There is, of course, nothing that says that this new market is, or will be, magical and perfect. Sometimes, I bet, it will even suck, bad. But it does present us with a radically new way of "marketing", one that needs to take actual human beings, not demographics, into account.

See you soon, thesis 3.

All posts that are or will be part of this project can be found here.

Thesis 1 of 95: Are conversations markets?

Part of the blogging project about the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto

Markets are not about selling or buying. Markets aren't about commodities. They aren't about investing in finance, money, not about the right to own property, and not a scheme to either liberate or enslave mankind, either.

Because we hear so much about markets, in their present form, about whether they're free or not, or whether they should be, what they should do, how it should be regulated or deregulated, if it turns us to economizing rational actors or irrational consumerists, etc. etc. we tend to assume that what we today call The Market (as if it was a singular thing) is The Market that would have happened 400 B.C, or in the Mesolithic period, or in the middle ages, or in the future, say some 500 years from now.

This is obviously false. The Market of Late Capitalism is different from markets as such. Let me quote some Marcel Mauss, from his analysis of gift-giving in archaic societies at you:

It has been suggested that these [archaic] societies lack the economic market, but this is not true; for the market is a human phenomenon which we believe to be familiar to every known society. Markets are found before the development of merchants, and before their most important innovation, currency as we know it. They functioned before they took the modern forms (Semitic, Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman) of contract and sale and capital. We shall take note of the moral and economic features of these institutions. The Gift: Form and Reason of Exchange in Archaic Societies - Mauss, Marcel 

Now, at first, this quote sort of annoyed me. Being the commie-pinko that I am, saying that markets is a "human phenomenon... familiar to every known society", especially in a book that was recommended to me as an example of how societies without markets can be sustainable, seemed to me as just a restatement of bourgeois ahistorical claims about how capitalism is "human nature". However, I quickly sobered up to what Mauss was actually saying. Of course, as I was well aware, Markets are Not Capitalism, and what markets Mauss were talking about seemed fundamentally different then what capitalist markets were about. Let's quote some more:

In the systems of the past we do not find simple exchange of goods, wealth and produce through markets established among individuals. For it is groups, and not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligations; the persons represented in the contracts are moral persons—clans, tribes, and families; the groups, or the chiefs as intermediaries for the groups, confront and oppose each other. Further, what they exchange is not exclusively goods and wealth, real and personal property, and things of economic value. They exchange rather courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts; and fairs in which the market is but one element and the circulation of wealth but one part of a wide and enduring contract. The Gift: Form and Reason of Exchange in Archaic Societies - Mauss, Marcel 

So, what Mauss is saying here is basically: markets are markets, regardless of what they exchange, and who is exchanging in it. The point here is not to romanticize these archaic markets, their hierarchy, patriarchy and spirituality, but rather to bring home the point: people exchange things. They all do. They don't have to appear in the form of the of the commodity, exchanged for money, nor do they even have to have anything to do with material wealth as such.

So, you may be asking now: cool, but what has this to do with the thesis?

Markets are conversations. It doesn't take much thought to understand the concept. But are conversations also markets? In the internet age, where conversation has entered a new paradigm, where media and commentary are in the process of being liberated from the high-overhead market that dominated, excluded and disengaged people just some decades ago from making their thoughts public, I'd say the conversation is emerging as a new form of market, where new values are exchanged. Of course, conversations have been had since time immemorial, but the act of communicating publicly is emerging as a new form of value-exchange.

Conversations, by the common man, used to be held in private, as a secondary, but still necessary act to the primary acts of making, buying, selling, and consuming commodities. Far away was the thought of the agora of Ancient Greece, where conversation-making and opinion-stating was the highest form of social activity. The philosophical, spiritual, scientific and political argumentation at the agora, which was also the commodity market of the Greek cities, fits neatly into the Maussian concept of a market being something else than just M-C-M^ exchanges.

Now, it is not my intention to praise the slave-owning and patriarchal Greeks, but I can't help but make the connection. A modern agora is reemerging, where I can have this opinion, you can read it, critique it, praise it,  respond to it, and share it. Understanding this as a market is understanding it has a new form of value exchange, just like the value exchanges in those old societies often labeled "communistic" were also markets. It is separate from capitalist markets in that it doesn't turn the basic necessities of existence into exchangeable goods and commodities.

Call it a market where losing out isn't that much of a threat to your basic rights.

See you soon, thesis 2.

Joining in on the Cluetrain Manifesto blogathon

Read about it here. Expect posts soon. :)

Note on Social Weakness and Strenght #1

Social "weakness" and "strength" are always relational to the burden society has been historically and socially determined to bear. A persons social weakness/strength depends on that persons ability to preform the tasks  the dominant ideology (consciously and unconsciously determined by the dominant class) considers socially necessary. Images and ideas about strength and weakness appear as quasi-objective measures of something essential to every human society, veiling the socially constructed and historically determined reality of it.

To see how strength/weakness is relational to the tasks that happen to be at hand, one need only look at the world of sports. When commentators and experts speak of the "strengths" and "weaknesses" of the players in a soccer game, they are speaking purely about their ability to play soccer. If a commentator were to say, that among soccer player X's strengths is that he knows a lot about marine biology, that would appear as an absurdity. It's very obvious why that is the case, since player X's knowledge in the field of marine biology is largely irrelevant to his ability to act as a team player in the game of soccer.

This example only goes so far in describing social weakness and strength in society at large, though. In professional soccer games, it is necessary for all the players to have conscious knowledge of the rules and objectives of the game. Here, we are talking about a form of strength/weakness which is, while being an example of the categories of weakness/strength being relational, not descriptive of the form of social weakness/strength I am discussing here. A soccer game is very much a consciously controlled and regulated game. Rules are written down, positions are given to players, judges attempt to enforce the rules and positions, and players attempt to perform the objectives of the game in a way in which all the players, judges, trainers etc. have close to exact knowledge of. The weaknesses and strengths of the game of soccer is constructed consciously, while the weaknesses and strengths of everyday society is constructed at a deeper, subconscious level.

The sociologist Bourdieu famously said the “most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence”, and this is true for the ideological effects of social weakness and strength too. What is considered to be "strong" and "weak" appears objective, and we understand it without question. In other words, the relational, socially and historically constructed form of strength and weakness which is ideologically imposed upon the population by the dominant class appear as if it is a essential, trans-historical, and trans-societal measure of social ability. Unveiling the true nature behind what appears to be an objective measure of social ability, value and worth means creating an opportunity to transcend the limitations it imposes upon us, and to realize the social worth of all.

To be continued.

New Year, New Place, New Resolutions

This post is going to maybe bore some of you but there is very important info at the end so use what energy you might have left in your scroll  finger and scroll down to the bottom of the post

This blog has been dead for a long while.

But I haven't. I've been very much alive (most of the time). I've been doing a lot of stuff. And things. And the like. I've made a ton of new friends, I've studied hard, I've thought long and hard about the social meaning of time, labor and contribution, I've changed a lot of my views, and I've been sort of a shithead a lot of the time.

Most importantly, I've gotten my own place. I've been living with the parents for all my life, but a whole lot of things have created a need for me to get my own Domus (Latin for "home", yeah I know how to google translations for words Latin). I must say that its a nice place. Small and sort of far away from the city, but very good for a first place.

I used to live in Strängnäs, the small town built for old rich Stockholm retirees I spent all my teenage years in. I could probably arrange tours through this place to show people where all my life's most terrible events have occurred. I could also probably point people to where I played my first rock show at 12, or the rehearsing space where we all left hating each other and ourselves every Friday after school at age 15, or, maybe that was just me. I could show you the big church where I should've played a lackey to the Swedish king Gustav Vasa in a play, but threw up in an IKEA the day of the premiere and had to stay at home.*

I'm now in Hölö, which is in the municipality of Södertälje. Its really nice! There is a pizzeria here and a place to buy food. The only thing I really don't like is the commuting. The day before yesterday I attempted to get home after picking up laundry at my parents house, the trip was 2 hours prolonged and I lost my laundry bag on a train, admittedly due to some mistakes on my part, but I can't say I enjoy how the whole thing was being treated. I came home feeling like a piece of shit. Oh well. This is something I'll have to get used too. 

I was at an interesting New Years dinner yesterday. Besides attempting to ground coffee beans with hammers, and wrestling an old Christmas tree under the pretext of it being too god-fucking damned bourgeois, the people, mostly people I've never met before, were very nice and intelligent. We discussed the nothingness of Death, and the culture of violence and victim blaming and various things that are hard to phrase after half a bottle of cheap, way too sweet sparkling wine and a few too many IPA's. I almost lost my shoe.

This is, of course, a time of reflection and restarting, and regardless of how silly the idea of the New Years Resolution has become, I've made a few resolutions (one of which involves you, readers). Here they are, starting with the most cliche of them all:

1. Take care of myself. I'm forced to control my own diet now, and I want to make better food choices. I'm also gonna start working out.
2. Stop bringing myself down. I was practically born with low self-esteem, and I always thought that it was what is expected from me. I've come to realize that, first of, low-self esteem is not a good thing (duh), and secondly, I don't have any real reason to hate myself in the ways that I have these past years. I'm not doing any of that positive thinking liberal bullshit, but I'm not going to hate myself irrationally either.
3. Up my grades. I'm not doing the worst, but I can do way better.
4. Write more political stuff. Read more political stuff. Do more political stuff.
5. Learn to explain things better. Like, talking and typing and saying the thing.
6. Hi. This is where you come into the picture. This New Years resolution is not new. I've had this resolution since about March last year. I'm going to arrange for my lovely girlfriend from Australia to come over here to Europe, first for a month-long trip through the EU by train, and after that she'll stay with me until December. You guys already know about this if you've been reading my blog/tweets/tumblrs before, but we are in need of funding external to our own incomes. We were selling her debut novella, The Letter, to make stuff go around. We stopped promoting it for a while, but now we need to start back up again. We want to sell at least 100 copies before the trip in July. For this to work, we need you guys to help us like you helped us last time, and maybe even more. If you haven't bought the book, buy it. If you have friends you think would like it, tell them. Tell your twitter, your facebook and your blog, too. You get to read and share a great novel, plus help two lovers meet. Here is the link: lulu.com/spotlight/abovetheseaoffog. Please help us out. 

------------------------------------------------------

*Swedes are not at IKEA all the time I just happened to be at an IKEA that day gosh dangit

Sometimes, it's what the government doesn't do which constitute its evil.

A lot of time, anti-statism is focused merely on its interference with the freedoms and direct violations with human rights. This is of course nothing illogical, there's no doubt a huge chunk of the evils of the state - its police force, it's military, it's prisons, its unjust legal system, it's land-grabbing, it's constant transformation of complex, voluntary human interaction into arbitrary  simplified, taxable and/or profitable units - are mostly in its actions, i.e the evil in the state is in what it DOES. However, a lot of the time, it is what it DOESN'T do, it's in-actions, which constitutes it's evil. Though a lot of the present day evils of the bourgeois states inaction can more often than not be traced back to a past, historical action, one can't always change the historical injustices done through a state without the state itself playing a role, as it sometimes is too heavily involved in a certain injustice to completely bypass it.

Take the tax system: while ultimately, every anarchist (and even some Marxists, in the long run) is opposed to taxes, at least in their present form, but in the context of a nation state, who and who is not taxed plays an enormous amount of difference, and currently, the rich ARE paying way to little in taxes. The wealth that the rich holds is largely due to structural monopoly and subsidies designed and enforced by the state, and as long as they exist, it is only fair that they, the only people who benefit from government in a REAL sense, they should be paying a LOT in taxes, compared to the worker and unemployed, who only benefit from the government in the sense that it is more profitable to have people not starve to death, because it is well known that living people have stronger consuming power. In the end of the day, an anarchist wouldn't want to tax the rich, because radical leftists in general don't want to have many rich people, but contextually, it is a given that the state being inactive in collecting taxes from the people who owe the most to the taxpaying population  is an evil.

Another way the state hurts people through inaction is by not protecting their rights and persons. It is curious how the U.S protects a hateful organization which continually promote ideas that reinforce abuse of minorities, but didn't do the same for Occupy? How about the police in India, who refused to protect striking Suzuki workers from the hired bouncers of the company? The police in Greece, who turns a blind eye to the abuses carried out by Golden Dawn?

The states inaction in these regards is proof of its complete lack of democratic control. The modern nation state, and the global and transnational institutions, refuse to act when the people they should be answering to command them to. The denial of popular control over the means of communication and decision-making is one of the core evils of the state.

October Funding Goal!

Comrades!

As most of you should be aware right now, me and my girlfriend are trying to fund a trip, to get her over from Australia to me here in Europe! I wrote a blog-post detailing the whole thing. The way we are going about this is selling our art, which thus far is Kahtia's book. We've also been taking donations, which you can message either me or Kahtia about through your preferred social medium, if you want to. We reached our funding goal for September, and we're grateful to all the people that helped out!

We're still far from were we need to be to completely cover the trip and related expenses, so we will still have to keep linking the book on twitter and other places. We've set up some goals for the coming months (depending on how much we sell in a month, of course), so we'll be able to stay on track.

The funding goal for this month is 20 copies of Kahtia's book, which is about $130 AUD, $132 USD, 102€ £82 GBP and 880SEK.

PLS BUY

Here are some reasons, besides the gripping and tear-inducing story of transcontinental lovers, of course, to buy the book:

1. The author is hella cool. I know I'm biased, but she really is. Nevermind the fact that she wrote a book, she is also a feminist, student of formal logic, ukulele player and film-maker. Wouldn't you buy a book from such a person? I bet you would.
2. The book is very good. Written in the style of absurdism, it is a hilarious, thoughtful book written in an original style, were the dialogue and the characters are more of a driving force than the plot, setting and cheap Hollywood suspense-tricks. 
3. You support independent art. When the revolution comes, there will be no Lady Gaga's, Stephanie Meyers and Zac Efrons. 
4. Reading makes you smart. At least reading smart things. This is a smart thing. Read it. 

If you've already bought the book, or donated money, or you're completely broke, you can help by spreading the word, through twitter (make sure to @ us using the handles @sushi_goat and @obscurity_goat), via blog, on facebook, just whatever you feel comfortable using.

In the future there will also be more art to be sold. I'm in the process of writing an album, which I will sell at bandcamp for a very low price. Look out for that.

Until later, have a cool life
//Jakob