“Cutthroat Capitalism” and the East Hamptons

Wired magazine has an article about a new game called “Cutthroat Capitalism.” The game is wonderful, if only because of the reaction to the game.  Some people in the comments section of the article are outraged, like “Silentboom,” who says, “Robbery is not capitalism. True capitalism is driven only by willing participants who are transacting for the good of each. Organized crime is in no way shape or form, capitalism. This is crime, extortion, kidnapping, theft, etc. The breaking of laws, and worse the threat of violence can never be described as capitalist.” Apparently, Silentboom missed the news about Enron, Arthur Andersen, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, and the latest monetization of human organs in New Jersey.  Those examples are the tip of the capitalist iceberg.

Frank Newbold (photo by Aaron Boyd)

But let’s give Silentboom the benefit of the doubt. Silentboom might be living in the Hamptons next door to Frank Newbold, Ivy League-educated acting chairman of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, a body that by its actions shows that capitalism is just as Silentboom imagines it, pure, non-violent, lawful, non-threatening.  Newbold and his ilk have delayed expansion of the East Hampton Library, because they feel threatened by the less affluent.

Library Director Dennis Fabiszak has said that the East Hampton Village Board of Zoning Appeals has expressed concern that an expanded children’s collection would lead to more library usage by those who live in the less affluent areas of Springs and Wainscott.

The rich do not want the poor using libraries for obvious reasons.  By using a zoning board, this kind of violence to the less affluent can be done lawfully.  The acting chairman of the zoning board knows how to use the law, because it looks as if Frank is a Senior Vice President with Sotheby’s International Realty in East Hampton. Can we call Frank and the other board members criminals for participating in a decision that kept books from less affluent children?  I do not expect Silentboom would, though it looks as if the members of the zoning board intended to act in a bloodless, cutthroat manner.

At Boing Boing, one of the people responding to the article about the library expansion writes about the board members, “How do they sleep? Seriously, how the fuck do they sleep?”  Likely on 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton purchased by a servant (personal assistant).   As Newbold said in a 1998 Fortune article entitled “Spoils of a Pig Market,” living in East Hampton is “strictly about rewarding yourself.”

Design Doldrums: The “Chronicle” Looks Like “The Daily Beast”

Chronicle of Higher Education's redesigned web site

The Chronicle of Higher Education has launched a new and retro 2.0-ish look on the internet, and the front page looks remarkably like The Daily Beast.  The scrolling image rectangle in the upper left is a feature that helped give The Daily Beast some energy when it launched last year.

Unlike The Daily Beast, The Chronicle incorporates the rounded edges of Teletubbies-sounding web sites such as Skoosh, Disaboom, Meebo, Plaxo, Bebo. Care to buy a vowel, or have the vowel sounded out by a Sesame Street character?

The Daily Beast

The rhetoric of design offers lessons in reading Chronicle 2.0.  The designers have labeled their product “the New Chronicle.”  Yet, the new look reinforces the Chronicle’s standard ideological messages, such as its allegiance to corporate America.  Today’s front page includes a graphic from The Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, an organization devoted to advocating Fordist principles  in higher education. The project’s executive director has had a career built on Total Quality Management.  The mission of the members of the project is, among other things, “to generate the greatest return on investment.”  Yet, the project’s members claim to represent an “independent” group.  Independent = conservative, in this case.

Like The Daily Beast, the Chronicle offers its readership traditional journalistic pieces (about higher education) while serving up numerous dollops of gossip and trend-tidbits, along with TMZ-ish attention to academic celebrity sightings.  Notice any similarities between TMZ’s web presence and the Chronicle’s?

Paris, Texas More Important than Henry Louis Gates Jr.?

The arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. makes the front page of The New York Times.  Meanwhile, in Paris, Texas, a protest over a black man’s dragging death barely receives coverage here in Texas, even though white supremacists bearing flags with swastikas also attended the protest.  On the local television news, the white supremacists were identified as “counter-protesters,” revealing problems at numerous levels.

Prolegomena to an Uncoupling

Douglas Rushkoff

Sometimes, one finds unexpected allies. While Douglas Rushkoff seems perhaps still too comfortable with the pervasive impact of business models on everyday life, he provides the beginnings of an analysis that might be helpful to uncouple large portions of life (e.g., education) from what we might call the Businessbody, and the ideology of overly refined capitalism that barks back to any opposing voices that it is the common-sensical, utilitarian view that ought to pervade all facets of life.
Life, Inc. raises the issues of incorporation, familiar to academics who work with Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies.  Do we want the hegemonic body of business absorbing all other bodies/entities? Do we want bodily mergers we did not request, incorporations that take place without our consent? Rushkoff raises important questions, even if his solutions sound saccharine and wholly inadequate considering the power of corporations in our political institutions.

Tina Brown Conducts Premortem Investigation of Publishers at BookExpo

Martin Heidegger wrote that “language speaks” (Die Sprache spricht), and that phrase ought to have meant that this blog should have been producing entries while I was attending to other things.  While my appropriation of Heidegger for a lesson about blogs was wrong, Vicki Hearne is right in one of her poems that “time spreads from / The momentary hesitations.” The hesitation in question turned into a few months.

Book Expo 2009 - New York City - personal photo

During those months I did attend BookExpo America 2009, and it proved to be prospectively funereal, as if the gathering was a performance of the reverse of Maurice Blanchot’s The Book to Come (Le livre à venir – 1959).

Tina Brown attempted to persuade some major publishers that they will be undone by technology.  Brown used the example of her move to The Daily Beast, a web venture that she indicated altered the way she thinks about journalism and about time, because electronic publishing runs at a different pace from print journalism, one of several pertinent phenomenological differences.  The publishers would not engage directly with Brown’s analogy that book publishing faces a similar set of dire circumstances that have impacted newspapers.  Several times she attempted to solicit commentary on the analogy, and each time panel members either ignored her or talked in nonchalant tones about tangential issues, such as how they had already positioned their companies to “monetize” new technological opportunities via agreements with Amazon over content for the Kindle.  Brown wanted the panelists to engage in commentary about a vision of a world without

Tina Brown (right) - Creative Commons photo from Flickr

books on paper, a vision of a world that might not include an event like BookExpo. Eventually, Brown could not speak at a level to be heard (she arrived with what seemed to be the beginning of laryngitis), and some in the audience must have interpreted her diminishing voice as metaphorical.  About half way through the session, Brown’s husband, Sir Harold Evans, took over the moderating duties for her.

BookExpo America itself, by numerous accounts, revealed the vulnerabilities of publishers. Some did not show up for the event; others, like Macmillan, retreated to cheaper, smaller spaces off the main exhibition floor, and almost all of the publishers had reduced their offerings of advanced copies of new and forthcoming books.  Attendance was down significantly.  The future of books will likely not include some of the companies that served as the engine for this year’s BookExpo, the conference that might be one of the last places for the public to witness CEOs in denial about their current capacities to avoid the same fate as newspapers, and in different ways, libraries.

What will happen when the CEOs of major publishing houses consider books as an accident of the proliferation of paper, when the energy of their thinking turns away from “monetization” and bottom lines, and turns toward books in a richer (non-lucre-centric) context, à laFriedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900?

Agribusiness Wants You in a Persistent Vegetative State

You might need to wait to see Food, Inc. on DVD.  One theater in all of northern Texas is showing the documentary that will make you rethink your answer to the question: What’s happy about a Happy Meal?

Remember that the Texas beef industry sued Oprah and a vegetarian (Howard Lyman) for “beef defamation,” and lost. Maybe Food, Inc. will lead more people to adopt Oprah’s attitude.  The documentary illustrates the numerous ways some large agribusinesses do not want the public seeing, learning about, or thinking about the food from which their profits come.