Re: <nettime> The Californian Reality (from: New Geography)

[Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com>]

One detail, which begs others: California was NOT historically the
birthplace of mass entertainment. That dubious honor belongs to the
combined forces of NY and NJ. The industry moved west to avoid the grip of
the motion picture patents trust, for better year round conditions for
filming outside and in order to better bootleg existing product. I wonder
how many other details are incorrect in this essay? Not that the basic
narrative of stabilizing class divisions and downward mobility is not true.
The elephants in the room are the breaking of the unions (starting with
Reagan's breaking of the air-traffic controllers, a blow still being felt
both as implied threat and lowered safety of air travel in the us) and the
off-shoring of the jobs in the industries where unions were strongest.

The new oligarchs are frequently Randians, radical right "libertarians,"
when they are not Straussian elitists. They are hardly conservatives, a
term which has grown both useless and deceptive as it covers the radical
right aggressions of the Koch brothers with the mask of classical old
school stability and respectability. Defending "traditional" values like
the rule of elites through conscious mass-deception, slavery and wage
slavery, racism, the relegation of non-heteronormative behavior to pariah
status and the repression of women to the biological determinism of child
bearing along with corporate personhood.

Even this portrayal of things in Ronnie's home state is vastly understated.


> On Jan 21, 2014, at 5:05 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> In 2009 I had a visceral experience of the world described in this post.
 <...>


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