11–16 of 16 posts
> Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes. Hah! Imagine telling a developer at Twitter that they were conspiring to create a vacant vacuous idiot society! Imagine meeting someone at a bar and when they said they worked at Facebook letting them know that they were making the world a worse place!
Yeah, culture is not what it used to be, and even highly educated people read less and read less substancial works when they do read.
Nothing to do with the inherent quality of Benhjamin or Adorno's work.
> Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes. Hah! Imagine telling a developer at Twitter that they were conspiring to create a vacant vacuous idiot society! Imagine meeting someone at a bar and when they said they worked at Facebook letting them know that they were making the world a worse place!
There are lots of interesting and insightful critics of capitalism from a left point of view that don't rely on postmodern garbage. Read Russell, Orwell, Chomsky, Said, hell, anything but postmodern theorists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas etc. are definitely not "postmodern." (Said, on the other hand, often is considered po-mo.) Even if they were, you shouldn't simply dismiss them as "garbage."
What I find interesting is just how prescient a lot of the postmodern theorists were... Roland Barthes' death of the author? Seems spot on to me! Twitter and Facebook have ended the hegemony of the narrative and replaced it with a billion people all shouting at once. We end up with emergent and algorithmic storytelling that is truly not created by any single author. Jean Baudrillard's Hyper reality? Memes are a great…
A lot of non-European people complain that they are indiciferable or garbage just because they are not accustomed to their language and cultural references, which is not totally unlike Blub programmer complaining about the difficult LISP or Haskell concepts.
That and the anglo-saxon mentality on philosophy is radically different (not necessarily better, as its proponents claim).
(As for stuff like the Sokal affair, nobody batted an eye or called CS, physics, biology etc "bullshit" when when tons of Markov-chain generated "papers" were published in hard science peer-reviewed journals -- here's one such incident for reference: http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120... ).
"Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—presiding over unprecedented monopolies." As opposed to when? When William Randolph Hearst ruled the press? Dickensian England? Even Big Media of my 90s youth. Culture is always monolithic because it is shared behaviour. Go back to the salons of Europe or Ancient Greece and you would have this exact same argum…