entrepreneurial individualism,

the entrepreneur is the neo-liberal subject par excellence

entrepreneurial individualism,

the entrepreneur is the neo-liberal subject par excellence

entrepreneurial individualism,

the entrepreneur is the neo-liberal subject par excellence

the erosion between whiteness andgainful employment that Davidson and Saul arguedled to a cultural backlash from white Americans andhas caused them to move from the left to the far-rightas a form of retaliation against the neoliberal cosmo-politan left.

In the neoliberal era, individuals are forced to assume sole responsibility for navigating “every hardship and every difficulty—from poverty to student debt to home eviction to drug addiction.” When the pandemic exacerbated these hardships, it was an uphill battle to build solidarity and convince people to support collective solutions. After a lifetime of being told they were on their own, “a subset of the population” doubled down on individualism. It does not, now, seem surprising to Klein that they essentially said, “Fuck you: we won’t mask or jab

Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, a survey of workers at large firms by International Survey Research Corporation indicated that 25 percent feared being laid off. In 1996, despite the sharply lower unemployment rate and the tighter labor market, the same survey organization found that 46 percent were fearful of a job layoff.

So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.

it's what i write about and that is why what  is it that has created this uh uh disparity   and why is it widened so much since 1980. well  the most obvious reason is uh interest rates   reached a peak of 20 in uh 1980 and they've gone  down ever since well in the late 1970s uh my old   00:16:50 boss's boss at chase manhattan paul volcker  said let's raise interest rates to very high   because the 99 are getting too much income their  wages are going up let's uh raise interest to slow   the economy and that will prevent wages from going  up and he did and that was a large uh reason why   carter lost the the election to ronald reagan  interest rates then went down from 20 to almost 0   00:17:20 today the result was the largest bond market boom  in history bonds went way up in price the economy   was flooded with bank credit and most of this  credit uh apart from going into the bond market   went into real estate and there is a uh symbiosis  between finance and real estate and also between   finance and raw materials and also like oil and  gas and minerals uh extraction natural resource   00:17:48 rent land rent and also monopoly rent and most of  the monopoly rent has come from the privatization   that you had from ronald reagan margaret thatcher  and the whole neoliberalism uh if you look at how   did this one percent get most of its wealth well  if you look at the forbes list of the billionaires   in almost every country they got wealth in  the old-fashioned way from taking it from   00:18:13 the public domain in other words privatization  you have the largest privatization and transfer   of wealth from the public sector to uh the private  sector and specifically to the financial sector uh   in in history uh sell-offs and all of a sudden  instead of uh infrastructure uh public health uh   other uh basic needs being provided at subsidized  rates to the population you have uh privatized   00:18:41 owners uh financed by the banks raising the rates  to whatever rate they can get without any market   firing power uh in the united states the  government is not even allowed to bargain with   the pharmaceutical companies for the drug prices  so there's been a huge monopolization a huge   privatization a huge flooding of the economy with  credit and one person's credit is somebody else's   00:19:11 uh debt so you you've described the one percent's  wealth in the form of uh savings but uh i focus   on the other side of the balance sheet this one  percent finds its counterpart in the debts of the   99 so the one percent has got wealthy by indebting  the 99 uh for housing that is soared in price 20   00:19:37 uh just in the last year in the united states uh  for medical care for uh utilities for education   uh the economy is being forced increasingly  into debt and how how can one uh solve this   taxation will not be enough the only way  that you can uh actually reverse this uh   concentration of wealth is to begin wiping out uh  the debt if you leave the debt in place of the 99   00:20:10 uh then uh you're going to leave the one percent  savings all in place uh and these savings are   largely tax exempt uh so basically i think you  you uh left out the government's role in this   wealth creation of the one percent so your  finance has indeed grown faster than economy   absorbed real estate into the finance insurance  and real estate sector the fire sector finances   00:20:39 absorb the oil industry the mining industry  and it's absorbed most of the government so the   financial wealth has spilled over to become  essentially the economy's central planner   it's not planned in washington or paris or london  it's planned in wall street the city of london   and the paris ports the economy is being managed  financially and the object of financial management   00:21:04 isn't really to make money it's capital gains  and again as your statistics point out capital   gains are really what explains the increase  in wealth you don't get rich by saving the   income rent is for paying interest income is for  paying interest you get rich off the government   basically subsidizing an enormous increase in the  value of stocks the value of bonds by the central   00:21:31 banks which have been privatized and uh the reason  that this is occurring is that uh the largest   public utility of all money creation and banking  is left in private hands and private banking   in the west is very different from what government  banking is in say china

Företagsbeskattningen ska vara konkurrenskraftig

While claiming to increase meaningful forms of direct participation, neoliberal governance works within structuring bureaucratic and ideological path dependencies and often hinges on computational forms of participation which are set already within circumscribed software environments and solution

ather than fostering subversive ideals of experimentation, city hacking or beta-version infrastructures, smart innovation appears more an exercise of replication via short-term and risk-averse finance

“smartpolitics”

Victor Papanek’s Design Problem, 1975.

The Beloit-based billionaire has publicly pushed for tax breaks and said she wants to stop the U.S. from becoming “a socialistic ideological nation.”

Keynesian planning and neoliberal privatization drives are superficially quite opposite tendencies. Yet deeper down they share the view that a thin formalism, based on aggregate statistics like inflation, GDP growth, output, interest rates, etc. as defined in the theory, are enough to process the wide range of social feedback necessary for sensible political and economic decision-making.

value of your program

El jardín de la extracción capitalista se constru-ye mediante tecnologías de exterminio que acaban con la bio-diversidad natural y, por lo tanto, con la potencialidad actuante de la materia.

While neoliberalism has varied in its manifestations in different countries and regu-latory arenas, the common core has been the promotion of market-based solutions to a broad range of issues.

This is why, in the seemingly interminable debates about the ‘validity’ of neoliberalism as an analytical term, both sides are right: yes, on the one hand, the term is vague and can seemingly be applied to any manifestation of power, but, on the other, it does cover everything, which means it cannot be avoided either.

Now an impoverished Marxist cultural critique suggests that such encounters between people, qua humans with richly diverse lives, are the very opposite of — or further, directly opposed by — the alienated encounters underwritten, if not compelled, by money. You see this kind of argument when people say “the ‘sharing economy’ is an oxymoron that has nothing to do with sharing because people are lending their underutilized resources for financial recompense.” However, what has always seemed to me most interesting about many ‘sharing economy’ platforms is not that they are spaces outside of commercialism, but rather ways of affording a re-embedding of economic exchanges in social relations within commercialism. When I ride-share or home-share, there might be money changing hands, but the actual experience of the ‘service’ is of two people (when there are face-to-face encounters) who cannot entirely withdraw into prescribed roles of employee and customer. This is why these ‘sharing economy’ experiences tend to be awkward, in ways that I have tried to argue are in fact deconstructive of the monolithically abstract idea of capitalism.These moments underline that there can be ‘sharing’ within economies, that relations between strangers do occur at levels or in ways beyond what is covered by their monetization. Service designing, it seems to me, is precisely the pursuit of these forms of sociality that exceed commercialism even within commercial interactions. This is the quality that a well-designed service encounter will manifest, a quality that will differentiate such a service from other less-designed ways of managing or engineering services.Service designers should therefore be expertly sensitive to these emergent and sometimes even resistant socialities. Designers should understand that at the very core of their practice is all that is concealed by excessively capitalistic perspectives: the hidden labor of informal economies; the emotional and aesthetic labor provision that service interactions compel from providers without adequate recompense; the satisfiers that make care work rewarding beyond their inequitable pay scales; the moments of delight involved in the comfort of strangers. All of these, it should be clear, are political, sensitivities that acknowledge oppression and exploitation via gender, race and class.All this is why service design is never just the design of this or that service, but part of the wider project of redesigning work and generating sustainable livelihoods. For instance, service design is not tangential to current debates about the roboticization of jobs. Service design is unavoidably involved in Transition Design, toward or away from meaningful work, or rather perhaps toward or away from quality ways of organizing the resourcing of new kinds of society.

Whereas the original liberals wanted law to be stable and general, pursuing only the most limited functions, the neoliberal vision is of a state that is an active part of the guarding, maintaining, and promoting liberty itself, as understood by a particular vision of what should be. It asserted that liberalism is so important that it must be the primary goal of the state to see it realized.

In this consumerist-led version of proletarianization, which is very per-tinent to what is happening with the commodification of higher educa-tion, the argument is that ‘consumers are “discharged” of the burden as well as the responsibility of shaping their own lives and are reduced to units of buying power controlled by marketing techniques’ (p. 34). For example, in rating and ranking scales and league tables, marketing agencies have essentially appropriated the decision-making process from students and their parents. Today’s ‘cognitive capitalism’, Lemmens says, is producing the ‘systematic destruction of knowledge and the knowing subject’ (p. 34), in what Stiegler calls the ‘systematic industri-alization of human memory and cognition’ (p. 34). As Stiegler (2010b) cryptically puts it, what is at stake is ‘the battle for intelligence’ (p. 35) which had its most recent genesis in the ‘psychopathologies and addic-tive ‘behavior patterns’ (Lemmens 2011, p. 34) brought about by the ‘logic of the market’ ushered in by Thatcher and supported by Reagan. This unleashed ‘a cultural and spiritual regression of unprecedented magnitude, transforming the whole of society into a machine for profit maximization and creating a state of “system carelessness” and “systemic stupidity” on a global scale’ (p. 34). It is literally ‘a global struggle for the mind’ in a context where there is an erasure of ‘consciousness and sociality’ (p. 35)

Far from ‘competition’ supposedly driving ‘innovation’, Connell (2013) argues that it does the reverse. In the first instance, what a neo-liberal conception of the university produces, is the ‘reproduction of global dependency’ (p. 2)—through a ‘neocolonial dependence...built into performativity through international rankings of journals, depart-ment and universities’, whereby local intellectual cultures are under-mined and obliterated through an unhealthy reliance on ‘impact factors and ‘citations’ (p. 2). Secondly, the ‘entrenchment of social hierarchies in knowledge production and circulation’ (p. 2), act to further sediment privilege in the already advantaged—institutionally, in Australia in the older so-called ‘sandstone’ universities, and individually in the scions of the privileged who attend them.

rgues that the very fibre of democracy which we understand to be ‘individual and collective self-rule’ and which we take to be ‘a perma-nent achievement of the West’ and that cannot be ‘lost’, is in the process of being completely ‘overwhelmed and ... displaced by the economium to enhance capital value, competitive positioning, and credit ratings’ (p. 10)

Transformed in this process is the very nature of knowledge:Neoliberalization replaces education aimed at deepening and broadening intelligence and sensibilities, developing historical consciousness and her-meneutic adroitness, acquiring diverse knowledge and literacies, becom-ing theoretically capacious and politically and socially perspicacious, with [forms of] education aimed at honing technically-skilled entrepreneurial actors adept at gaming any system. (p. 123)

By way of explaining why there is so much internal unrest and dissention in universities, Boyer (2011) says that the ‘dominant critical narrative’ emerges from the ‘dissipat[ion of] organizational and collegial auton-omy in order to better saturate universities with market-oriented prin-ciples (knowledge as commodity, faculty as wage labour, administration as management, student body as consumer public, university as market-place)’ (pp. 179–180).The loudest opposition to this intensified neoliberal regime has come from ‘faculty’ who, ‘among the three estates of the university (students, faculty, administrators)...has experienced the deepest erosion of auton-omy under the current reforms’ (Boyer 2011, p. 180). Coupled with this is the view that students stand to ‘enhance their social power with their new image as sovereign consumers, and the re-imagination of the uni-versity as a kind of for-profit corporation run by profit-minded managers has helped to cement the political hegemony of administrators’ (Boyer 2011, p. 180).

In other words, neoliberalism works through the way in which it ‘dissemi-nates market values and metrics to every sphere of life and construes the human itself exclusively as homo oeconomicus’ (Brown 2015, p. 176). Brown (2015)

Cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff has said, “I’ve given up on fixing the economy.  The economy is not broken.  It’s simply unjust.”

people’s behavior and emotions are affected by the people that they know, the people that those people know, and so on – in other words, by the social network which an individual is integrated in

as instrumentalities

Public

neoliberalism precisely goes to work by psychologizing political difference, individualizing structural exclusions and mystifying political change

the queer custom of re-appropriating terms of abuse and turning them into affectionate terms of endearment. When we obliterate terms like “tranny” in the quest for respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place!