[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> A review of Negri and Hardt's Empire from ananarchist perspective

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@panix.com>]

Bradford DeLong wrote:

>With respect to being a truck driver or a grocery store 
>scanner-driven checkout clerk, "postmateriality" shows up as your 
>bosses knowing exactly where you are, or how many items you have 
>scanned in the past minute. It shows up as real-time maps showing 
>where you are or where you need to go, or as an enormous reduction 
>in the cognitive commodity price memorization load of the job. Those 
>are important changes. With respect to the rural Third World... Stan 
>Fischer said in the late summer of 2000 that what struck him the 
>most was that he no longer thought it weird for his phone to ring 
>while he was in a canoe in the Niger Delta and for Michel Camdessus 
>to be on the line, or for him to be watching the Republican National 
>Convention on the banks of the Zambezi one evening, and then going 
>in to the villages the following day and finding that the village 
>elders had also been watching the RNC and had strong views about it.
>
>It's not all sweetness, it's not all light, it's not the 
>transformation of work into "intellectual, immaterial, and 
>communicative" labor. But something is coming...

And something is already here. No question about that. But the first 
things you mention - knowing just where a driver is, or how many 
items a cashier has scanned - is a kind of nightmare perfection of 
Taylorism. Or to mix symbolic personages, Henry Ford would be jealous 
of this control over workers. As for Stan Fischer in the Niger Delta, 
sure he can take a call, but it's doubtful many of the peasants he 
could see (if he bothered to look) would be so positioned. For 
Fischer, it's kind of a nightmare perfection of colonialism. If Kurtz 
had had a satellite phone, he might not be dead!

Doug

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