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Tag Archives: neoliberalism
February 6, 2011
The democratization of digital technology has intensified the cultural specificity of media piracy in the Philippines. Media piracy is a racialized and class-consigned activity: it is bound to ethnic and religious identifications, since its main agents are mostly Muslim Filipinos, coming from the southern island of Mindanao (their autonomous region being one of the most poverty stricken in the country) and it is also class-consigned since this type of entrepreneurship connotes low-end origins that serve the more affluent economic groups in the country.
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Irmak Ertuna-Howison – Pirates, authors, and the fear of collective intelligence
February 6, 2011
As the chain of neo-liberal ideology tightens around our necks, it becomes harder to pull on the leash and attempt to break away from its influence in our thinking. Even cultural historians, critics, and authors- those who have traditionally taken the role of vanguard of progressive thinking – submit to conservative ideas. One such author is Jaron Lanier, whose book You’re Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, published in 2010, received enthusiastic reception from conservative critics such as the famous The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. Her review “A Rebel in Cyberspace, Fighting Collectivism“, as the title suggests, cuts right to the chase of the issue and pinpoints Lanier’s caution against the “wisdom of crowds” and threat to intellectual property posed by free Internet content as the real virtue of his book. Collectivism of cyber content, in distribution and production, is seen as an insidious threat to originality and imagination by conservative authors.
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Olivia Swift – Pirates at home, hostages abroad: Piracy in Somalia, the Philippines and the academe
February 6, 2011
While maritime piracy is an ancient and ever-present phenomenon, the recent upsurge in Somali piracy is notable for its scale and use of sophisticated weaponry and technology. Somali pirates are holding some 400 seafarers hostage and almost one million people signed a petition urging the United Nation’s International Maritime Organization to lead governments in taking stronger action against piracy in the Gulf of Aden and surrounding Indian Ocean.
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Brett Neilson – Crisis as an allegory of production
October 8, 2009
The current credit crisis has brought calls for a return to the ‘real economy’ as opposed to the financial (fictive) economy. Brett Neilson shows us that this tendency is nothing new: through his analysis of the recent changes in the very practice of capitalist accumulation, he also dispels any fantasy of resolving the current crisis through a return to industry.
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Ann Kingsolver – `As we forgive our debtors’: Mexico’s El Barzón movement, bankruptcy policy in the U.S., and ethnography of neoliberal logic and practice
October 8, 2009
Kingsolver considers the question of whether, in the face of rising indebtedness, there might be a social movement in the United States similar to El Barzón, a debtors’ movement in Mexico particularly visible during and after the neoliberal financial crisis of 1994. The importance of U.S. consumer debt to the global economy (with powerful potential for debtors to organize, if that significance is recognized) is mediated in the U.S. by increasing domestic surveillance and the links between neoliberal policy and neoconservative Christian logic in state administration. Since this article was first published, the U.S. has experienced – with many other nations — the debt crisis anticipated in this article.
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Steven Shaviro – A modest proposal: Some thought on the crisis
October 8, 2009
Steven Shaviro argues that part of our difficulty in making coherent sense of the crisis, reflects the way we experience as individuals, the market economy as something alien to us, over which we have no power. The boom and bust cycles that are intrinsic to capitalism are instrumental in instilling this sense of fatalism in people. One possible challenge to this fatalism is repoliticising one of the most ubiquitous aspects of the economy: money. Nearly all capitalist theory assumes ‘the neutrality of money’, yet rather see it as a vanishing mediator we need to understand, as this credit crisis has shown, that money isn’t a faithful ‘representation’ of wealth that exists, rather it is something that has it own intrinsic density and weight.
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José Fernandez Santillán – Reconsidering the third way
March 16, 2009
There are today many challenges on the international level: the global financial crisis, the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential implosion of Pakistan, a possible scuffle with Iran, climate change, the challenge that emerging powers, like China and India, represent, and the dilemma of a conflict in the Middle East. There are internal issues pending as well: the immigration problem,the health system, decisions concerning financial politics and the challenges of education.
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Philip Sarre – Environmental justice requires economic reform
September 22, 2008
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Environmental change and global poverty are caused by the way the world economy works, which depends on the way it is governed. The limited success of international policy initiatives in pursuit of environmental protection and/or social justice results from the prioritisation of economic objectives, increasingly seen within a ‘free market’ framework.