online: 1 october 2006 2005
modified: 1 october 2006


29 september 2006

the electric book, part 2

the weblog of the caretaker



episode 6


(Moreover, Weber argued, Marx's nearly exclusive concern with the productive sphere led him to overlook the possibility that the expropriation of the workers from the means of production was only a special case of a more general phenomenon in modern society where scientists are expropriated from the means of research, administrators from the means of administration, and warriors from the means of violence. He further contended that in all relevant spheres of modern society men could no longer engage in socially significant action unless they joined a large-scale organization in which they were allocated specific tasks and to which they were admitted only upon condition they sacrificed their personal desires and predilections to the impersonal goals and procedures that governed the whole. From Coser, re Max Weber, 1977:230-233 (linked to wikipedia entry re Max Weber)


this is the point at which j-921 begins to differ seriously from industrial living. with the help of and in the virtual presence of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and many many others - in fact 'everyone, as fully human'!:

Very good, says the caretaker, very good... that is something really worth taking care of... to take care of the fragile suggestion that we live the post-industrial life without bureaucracy, without appropriating everyone's education, tools, our means of doing what we do, with the help of technology... to be able, for the first time in modern history, to act with autonomy, each one of us, and without the obligation to give up our lives to the aims and limits of abstract organisations, inhumanities, alienations, all that is horrible in modern life as we know it!

You're not supposed to say such things as that, to make proposals, to form policy, that is a matter for organised politics, our protection against chaos...

who was that speaking? was it a human voice, or was it something less, something bad, the voice of dualism, perhaps, the last embodiment of evil as a separate being, within and around all of us?

no reply... only emptiness, silence, the faceless authority beginning its transformation into something else... and resisting, with the last remnants of organised force bringing our species to extinction before the new, as it can be, has even been imagined...

the caretaker realises that s/he is entirely alone, outside the limits of the organised system, and not yet entering the times and spaces of the new life, the new possibilities that could come into existence, but as yet are only dreams, not realities... (there may be no way forward from this emptiness, the destructive calamity of technology disconnected from its human source)... no way to reconnect, in the face of total abstraction and the negation of humanity... of you and me...





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