Jeremy Gilbert (see also Monday's post) writes on the relation of social media networks and individualism; below the fold some reflections on his essay for the philosophy profession.
On the one hand we have a social logic which tends towards the promotion of egalitarian collective creativity. On the other, we have an ideology which demands that we remain commited to the liberal individualist obsession with our private, interior lives and our separability from all other beings. It insists that the outputs of all such creativity - and even the condition of possibility for those outputs - manifest themselves only as forms of private property: from the ‘transferrable skill sets’ which we ‘sell’ in the labour market [*] to the carefully-defined pieces of intellectual property that are the substance of the ‘knowledge economy’.... [**]
[N]eoliberalism has been, since its inception, a reactive strategy aimed at capturing, commodifying, and individualising the very creative, and necessarily social, energies which emerged from the cultural and technological revolutions of the 1960s. These are the energies which capital must to some extent facilitate and intensify, precisely in order to be able to exploit them for its own benefit....
[Facebook and Google] try to delimit and guarantee the real-world individual identities of users, limiting any potential social media might have for the abandonment or proliferation of modes of belonging and interaction, trying to ensure that the liberal vision of a socius composed of isolated individuals connected by purely voluntary, weak, transparent and time-limited relationships becomes a digital reality. You log in to everything through your facebook account (and increasingly they want to ensure that you only have one and that they know it's definitely yours) so that they can be sure that you are always and only ever 'you' - a little bundle of accurate market data to be marketed on the basis of its veracity in the 'real' world of actual spending.
*All the New APPS discussion of preparation for the post-PhD TT aspect of the political economy of philosophy instruction is relevant here. For instance, why "job market" is a poor term; some of the consequences of professionalization pressures for early publication; and further reflections on the last theme.
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