He who creates does not produce. Who creates is not seen. Everything that is not produced by companies goes unnoticed. What is created and is not a product of capitalism is as if they do not exist. And so in the same way creators are non-existent for society. They're on the sidelines. In their creative corners where they despair and cry. Their creations are not products and they are not existent. Capitalism has made them useless. In the past, creators such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and others were welcomed at court, well-liked and in demand. But today's creatives and artists stay out of every door, unless they produce something "salable". This dead company is based only on earnings and money is killing the imagination.
I find myself wondering if really the society that man has built and is building, the technology he has developed, the answers of science, the law that protects us ... I wonder if really the wild life in the jungle is more cruel . Perhaps it is inherent in some men, that thought that creeps in and constantly suggests the echo of the so-called "golden age", but reading the newspapers, listening to the news, trying to understand why politics is so complicated since be made "on a human scale" - and certainly the average man (but I doubt that even politicians talk like that, in the absence of their lawyers ...) says so - it's hard to believe that an existence should in which it is clear in mind who to escape and who to trust (run away from the lion, caress the rabbit) is so terribly aberrant, compared to a society where you have everything you want, but a huge restlessness and the rotten blood.
Yes of course, if I woke up tomorrow in the midst of brambles and brushwood and had to run away from the hungry lion, I would be dead in less than half a minute, and surely having to pick berries to feed myself I would regret any supermarket.
But, here, I am not trying to say that man is demonic in nature or that progress is negative. I am only expressing my personal personal in realizing that this jungle we are in now is terrifying: an incomprehensible politics in which we, poor game, cannot understand the mechanisms or even glimpse them, a society that makes us stressed even on vacation , a collective anxiety, information that becomes a collective forum of opinions, subjectivity that becomes law, if you have enough power to buy a few journalists and have the right connections. Values become the object of ridicule and bullying, of the psychological one, of the slightly bad one. The believer becomes a bigot, "health-conscious" is almost a negative term, women are whores or puritans, drugs are a common good, the mafia is our neighbor, we eat antibiotics directly in the meat of the supermarket.
I'm allowed to doubt progress, but I'm not shocking enough to consider only one side of the coin.
What scares me is the human mind, the culture. it has always managed to survive: the inquisition, the censorship, the world wars. Even in Nazi prisons and concentration camps, the culture survived.
Will it survive the internet? Will he survive a world so hectic, so fast, so cruel, so ambiguous? to a jungle with rules expressed in decrees? If wikipedia tomorrow said that Napoleon never existed, that man is actually a bird, that gravity allows us to change color.
culture can really survive all of this, as the holders of classical music go to war with each other and are beaten by any pianist, writers scramble their strenuous writings to the most, beaten by teenage novels that will appear as best seller next to anna karenina and the leopard, painters and sculptors are ignored because the guy who ties a dog in a museum or who places himself as a sculpture is more "audience" and art critics talk about it more.
I am concerned about the voice of humanity: is it strong enough to withstand even this silent war? Or is this not a war, and this oppression, this anguish, this evil of living will remain a worldwide constant, and only a few will come out of it, like crazy astronauts?
Are you one of the more than seven hundred million users who use Facebook? Well, it means that almost every day you produce content for the network: content of all kinds, not least emotional and relational content. You are part of the general intellect of Facebook. In short, Facebook exists and works thanks to people like you. What is the Facebook name if not this collective intelligence, which is not produced by Zuckerberg and company, but by users? You actually work on Facebook. You don’t notice it, but you work. You work without getting paid. Others are making money from your work. Here the Marxian concept that comes in handy is that of “surplus labor”. It is not an abstruse concept: it means “the part of work which, while producing value, does not translate into wages but into the profit of the owner, as owner of the means of production”. Where there is profit, it means that there has been surplus labor. Otherwise, if all the work share were paid based on the value it created, well… it would be communism, the classless society. It is clear that the boss must pay less in wages than he will get from the sale of the goods. “Profit” means this. It means paying workers less than the real value of the work they do. For various reasons, the owner may not even be able to sell those goods. And so don’t make a profit. But this does not mean that the workers did not provide surplus labor. The entire capitalist society is based on surplus value and surplus labor. On Facebook, your work is all surplus labor, because you don’t get paid. Zuckerberg every day sells your surplus labor, that is, you sell your life (sensitive data, your browsing patterns, etc.) and your relationships, and earn several million dollars a day. Because he is the owner of the means of production, you don’t. Information is a commodity. Knowledge is a commodity. Indeed, in post-Fordism or whatever we want to call it, it is the commodity of commodities. It is a productive force and a commodity at the same time, just like the workforce. The community that uses Facebook produces information (on tastes, consumption patterns, market trends) that the owner packages in the form of statistics and sells to third parties and / or uses to personalize advertising, offers and transactions of various kinds. Furthermore, Facebook itself, as a representation of the largest network of relationships on the planet, is a commodity. The Facebook company can only sell information if, at the same time and relentlessly, it sells that representation of itself. This representation is also due to the users, but it is Zuckerberg who fills the bank account
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 