Alexander Bard Quotes
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The decisive factor governing where in the hierarchy an individual ends up is his or her attentionality: their access to and capacity to absorb, sort, overview, generate the necessary attention for, and share valuable information. Attention is the only hard currency in the virtual world. The strategy and logic of the netocracy are therefore attentionalist rather than capitalist.
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To acknowledge the need of a new world-view would undermine the whole of their activity, and not many thinkers were willing to pay that price. Particularly not in a society where social exclusion meant rapid transportation to the proudest invention of the humanist sciences: the mental hospital.
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We are born as psychotics, we die as neurotics, we merely try to stay alive in between - as perverts. Welcome to the world of Lacanian phenomenology.
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So, instead, we are supplied with a constant stream of propaganda telling us about the righteous contempt that the people feel for the corrupt political class, which only serves to weaken the position of politicians still further, which in turn leads to a new round of gauntlet-running in the media. This process continues in a vicious circle, the inevitable culmination of which is the death of representative democracy, the complete impotence of politicians, and a hyper-real media dictatorship. This process is strengthened by feedback. Through the use of opinion polls, whose questions are obviously phrased by the media to serve their own purposes, the population is told what it thinks, and what it is “natural” to think. Then the media go on to show how adaptable politicians are adapting to this norm, or are allowing themselves to be adapted, and so the process goes on and on, ad infinitum. The investigations of the mass-media are, on their most profound level, investigations into the mass-media themselves. Statistics which purport to represent public opinion are actually the tools used by the media to manufacture opinion.
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The search for love is ultimately the shock reaction of the cutting of the umbilical cord.
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Anyone trying to resist developments and persist with political agitation in the old way would not survive in the society ruled by the netocracy. He or she would look like a despicable information-tyrant. The new conditions of the informational media landscape mean that the plurarchic public is turning its back on the old political stage.
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A parallel to this system of punishment is the trauma caused by enforced unemployment in capitalist society. Add to this an inability for the unemployed to find any imaginable alternative occupation, and the extent of the effects of network exclusion becomes clear.