Are We All Becoming Corporate Serfs?

Even if 'The Road to Serfdom' by Friedrich von Hayek was a warning at one point, it has now become a fact of history. Take the example of US, which is becoming more and more of a corporate serf to be exact, since the US is nothing but a big corporation, a formal structure by which a group of individuals agree to act collectively to meet some desired result. In the words of Mencius Moldburg,

" It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations. It is not the repository of our hopes and fears, the voice of conscience and the avenging sword of justice. It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets, has no clear idea of what it’s trying to do with them, and is thrashing around like a ten-gallon shark in a five-gallon bucket, red ink spouting from each of its bazillion gills."

So what is needed is a reactionary or a radical to bring about social justice to confront us from becoming corporate serfs. Well, neither gets us any closer to achieving social justice, since we might be equal and still not more equal than others, the catch is we are not onto designing any abstract-utopia, but trying to make head and tail of the world that is screwed up. Can this be done via Formalism, which draws out a matrix of who has what, rather than who should have what, since the 'ought' alluded to in the latter is a simple recipe for violence. The matrix could at least draw attention to identify the real shareholders and stakeholders (The 'We', 99%, or what have you?), and in the process help reproduce the distribution as closely as possible to reach autonomous public ownership and eventually mitigate the risk of political violence imagined through either reactionary or radical means.

I should apologize if there is a stench of libertarianism in this.......Let me have my political boots ready for others to have their say and for me to reboot mine...

read the original Who is Mencius Moldburg courtesy noir realism.

Figure/Ground interview with Richard Barbrook

Reblogged from here

Dr. Richard Barbrook is the author of Pluto Press’s Spring 2007 release Imaginary Futures and has also written a number of highly influential essays on the clash between commerce and cooperation within the Internet, including ‘The Hi-Tech Gift Economy’, Cyber-communism, ‘The Regulation of Liberty’ and, with Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology’, published in 1995 it was a controversial critique of the neo-liberal politics of Wired magazine. He has also recently published a book on the social groups shaping the information society, The Class of the New.

In the early 1980s, Richard was involved with pirate and community radio broadcasting. Helping to set up the multi-lingual Spectrum Radio station in London, he published extensively on radio issues during this period.

Having worked on media regulation within the EU for some years at a research institute at the University of Westminster, much of his material was published in his 1995 book Media Freedom. In the same year, he became the coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at Westminster’s Media School and was the first course leader of its MA in Hypermedia Studies.

The Media Ecology Association selected Imaginary Futures as the winner of the 2008 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book of the Year in the Field of Media Ecology.

Richard Barbrook is a founding member of Class Wargames and co-wrote the script to the group’s film: Ilze Black (director), Class Wargames Presents Guy Debord’s The Game of War.

Educated at Cambridge, Essex and Kent Universities, Barbrook is currently a Senior Lecturer of Politics at the University of Westminster.

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