@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit…
@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports.
That ‘the people’ is a thing, and must always be sovereign. So that any attempt to create a…
To quote Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins from their ‘On Kings’, on ‘the people’:
“Even when kings are deposed, the legal and political framework of monarchy tends to live on, as evidenced in the fact that all modern states are founded on the curious and contradictory principle…
This isn’t just a question for governance, Cory and many others for example take the same framework and apply it to economics too, with the focus on anti-trust. The intrinsic dislike of monopoly or hierarchy.
This ignores essential historical realities, to quote Graeber and…
It matters enormously that we understand the actual realities of human social and cultural life through history, rather than keep hitching our horses to an abstract Enlightenment ideal.
This is really a modern hatred of hierarchy itself, in all of its forms. It’s what Bruno…
Societies with revolutionary histories, like the US, are forever stuck in this rut. Everything will always be framed as the crowd or mob storming the Bastille.
Hierarchy, as Rene Girard so brilliantly described, is the way humanity has always protected itself from mimetic…
Hierarchy creates *distance*. It suppresses the escalation of mimesis. Mimetic rivalry is the origin of violence.
It recognises differences in value, it says this can be better than that, rather than ‘if you can amass enough opinions saying X is better than Y, then X is better…
Hierarchy embeds these distinctions in value. Not just in politics, in every part of human life. There are better and worse plumbers, electricians, economists, physicians, writers, drivers etc. etc.
How could we even want to deny that? Those hierarchies regulate life itself,…
In business, economies of scale do the same. And yet the iconoclastic framing can only ever see that as monopoly, as the people being screwed.
Of course hierarchies can be gamed. And the easiest and most dangerous way to do that?
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Pretend they don’t even exist. That we are all equal, in all things. Populism. That leaves the field wide open for every Trumpian half-wit to vacuum up vast masses of followers and rule the world, under cover of ‘taking down the elites’.
/9
While I enjoy the concept of enshittification, its colour, to me it’s pointing at the wrong problem. Of course a hierarchy will look to suppress competition. That’s what hierarchies are supposed to do.
A cowboy electrician *should* be driven out of business, by the hierarchy of…
And organisations of people, including businesses and States, should be allowed to become big, even enormous, to access economies of scale.
The real problem is somewhere else. What I’d call the ‘teamification’ of human life.
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Where an activity is transformed into imitative rivalries, with teams battling each other for status. Where no calming, rational, established hierarchy exists, or has been destroyed, to ‘regulate’ the claims for status.
We bizarrely celebrate this, as ‘activism’.
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As ‘democracy’ in action! The entire population splintered into a proliferation of teams in competition, in every granular detail of life now. Of competing ‘brands’, viral trends.
Even more perversely, this *is* the ideal world of the free market libertarians. Nature red in…
Shared by the anti-trust folk, in the same bed. Showing that these supposedly opposing groups are sharing the same underlying framework, and just become the teams in battle, within that framework, without ever leaving it.
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Team sports status battles are always the sign that mimetic rivalry is uncontrolled and may lead to mimetic crisis.
Human societies evolved mechanisms to control this, over millennia.
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It’s what monarchies and churches, mostly, have done over thousands of years. Controlled status rivalries by creating master-level status hierarchies at the centre of societies, to suppress lateral, perpetual rivalry everywhere else.
These mechanisms emerged. Nobody reasoned…