Gonna Fly Now
Metadata
Highlights
- It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
- The redemption in unveiling the “brutal exploitation” underlying everything — what was expected to justify it — was that everyone could get in on it. Capitalism never actually delivers on this; instead it generates vast and dynamic inequalities and cadres of broken, used up, and disposable people. But it must continually renew the expectation that one day you will be the exploiter and not the exploited.
- She concluded that “those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t” are the ones that go Nazi — i.e. people who need the market or a crowd or an algorithm to tell them what to do next — but along the way she also points specifically to those whose ambitions have been thwarted by the existence of an establishment.
- Owning a particular token can be made a prerequisite for permission to do things or use things: No reading an ebook without its token, for instance. No giving anything away without sending its original creator a royalty. No selling of anything to “the wrong sorts of people.” No watching a pay-per-view stream unless every wallet in the room has the necessary tokens. And so on. As with “smart” functionality — which does much the same thing — it will be implemented in situations where it doesn’t benefit the participants at all but serves outside interests. They will “communities” that people will be coerced into joining because they want to go to a concert or a basketball game and won’t be able to get tickets otherwise.
- NFTs are a way to record all of the “motley ties” that bind people to one another on the blockchain and make them usable by others, freely tradable. In a maximal vision of their potential, every obligation we might ever feel toward other people could be thereby codifed and traded, alienated and priced, rendered into “smart contracts” and made explicitly contingent on profit considerations. Perhaps the only thing more dehumanizing than the cash nexus is a programmable cash nexus.
Gonna Fly Now
Metadata
Highlights
- It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
- The redemption in unveiling the “brutal exploitation” underlying everything — what was expected to justify it — was that everyone could get in on it. Capitalism never actually delivers on this; instead it generates vast and dynamic inequalities and cadres of broken, used up, and disposable people. But it must continually renew the expectation that one day you will be the exploiter and not the exploited.
- She concluded that “those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t” are the ones that go Nazi — i.e. people who need the market or a crowd or an algorithm to tell them what to do next — but along the way she also points specifically to those whose ambitions have been thwarted by the existence of an establishment.
- Owning a particular token can be made a prerequisite for permission to do things or use things: No reading an ebook without its token, for instance. No giving anything away without sending its original creator a royalty. No selling of anything to “the wrong sorts of people.” No watching a pay-per-view stream unless every wallet in the room has the necessary tokens. And so on. As with “smart” functionality — which does much the same thing — it will be implemented in situations where it doesn’t benefit the participants at all but serves outside interests. They will “communities” that people will be coerced into joining because they want to go to a concert or a basketball game and won’t be able to get tickets otherwise.
- NFTs are a way to record all of the “motley ties” that bind people to one another on the blockchain and make them usable by others, freely tradable. In a maximal vision of their potential, every obligation we might ever feel toward other people could be thereby codifed and traded, alienated and priced, rendered into “smart contracts” and made explicitly contingent on profit considerations. Perhaps the only thing more dehumanizing than the cash nexus is a programmable cash nexus.
Gonna Fly Now
Metadata
Highlights
- It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
- The redemption in unveiling the “brutal exploitation” underlying everything — what was expected to justify it — was that everyone could get in on it. Capitalism never actually delivers on this; instead it generates vast and dynamic inequalities and cadres of broken, used up, and disposable people. But it must continually renew the expectation that one day you will be the exploiter and not the exploited.
- She concluded that “those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t” are the ones that go Nazi — i.e. people who need the market or a crowd or an algorithm to tell them what to do next — but along the way she also points specifically to those whose ambitions have been thwarted by the existence of an establishment.
- Owning a particular token can be made a prerequisite for permission to do things or use things: No reading an ebook without its token, for instance. No giving anything away without sending its original creator a royalty. No selling of anything to “the wrong sorts of people.” No watching a pay-per-view stream unless every wallet in the room has the necessary tokens. And so on. As with “smart” functionality — which does much the same thing — it will be implemented in situations where it doesn’t benefit the participants at all but serves outside interests. They will “communities” that people will be coerced into joining because they want to go to a concert or a basketball game and won’t be able to get tickets otherwise.
- NFTs are a way to record all of the “motley ties” that bind people to one another on the blockchain and make them usable by others, freely tradable. In a maximal vision of their potential, every obligation we might ever feel toward other people could be thereby codifed and traded, alienated and priced, rendered into “smart contracts” and made explicitly contingent on profit considerations. Perhaps the only thing more dehumanizing than the cash nexus is a programmable cash nexus.