Virtual Realities and Social Facts
Always play to win when it comes to skin and bone
When one does not problematize social power, all exercises of it appear equally just. One becomes incapable of determining friend from foe, or securing one’s interests and acting accordingly. Power is what happens to such a person and the source of it matters little. Those who have power deserve it by the same measures that they have it and exercise it. A feedback loop of a sort most convenient for those who hold power, such as the President’s fellow con artist.
The President makes a blanket, baseless assertion of “corruption,” putting herself in the pose of a morally-just, but otherwise disinterested, champion of purity. She sends in her largest sponsor with a crack team of computer programmers who could serve as the cast of Barely-Legal Boys to “root out” the source. Never mind that under any other circumstances the President herself would never qualify for a national security clearance, now she decides who gets to see all the secrets. Lo and behold, it is Elon Musk (pictured above with his human shield, not named “Adrian Ditmann”).
Let's examine the wisdom of having any faith that the guy who has grabbed more money for himself than any other living person is looking out for OUR interests, over his own.
There has been an infiltration of federal computer systems that V. Putin could have only dreamt about, and do we hear a peep about impeachment? It’s not possible, you say, with the Republicans controlling the Legislative Branch?
And Trump is ignoring the Judicial?
The coup is complete. It has not been formalized in so much as we still have the remnants of the 1789 constitution hanging on walls, but “political scientists” figured out how to break the game back in the 1960’s, and it’s finally happened. While the Supreme Court undermined its and the Legislature’s ability to hold the Executive in check via criminal law, the real kicker is that even with an uncooperative Judicial and Legislative, the branch charged with enforcing the law could opt not to. The preemptive Presidential pardon may have dubious legal merit, but there is no law saying the Executive branch must enforce the law. Presumably, the Legislature would hold the Executive accountable, but the Founders never considered what to do if partisanship trumped that check.
Institutions make themselves real by creating and enforcing rules, and keeping records. Maps are records of physical spaces, which is why all the big tech companies started mapping the world early on. This was the purpose behind Microsoft—a company built on an operating system—developing Flight Simulator, which is a video game. Google did it directly with Maps. Like the Catholic church and every dynasty, realm, and empire of old, the map makes a claim on territory—not just that one has envisaged it, but how one understands it to be valued.
We are all familiar with street maps, but we now can produce value through a map of otherwise-invisible, “enhanced reality” Pokemon characters, possible via cell phone.
Popular cellular labor apps such as Uber or DoorDash utilize street maps, but also overlay where restaurants and customers are located, as well as which food items go from and to which locations.
These virtual maps have the same social facticity as geographic maps or street maps, but describe particular social relationships. As social facts, the re-presentations they make have material outcomes—profit, the driving feature in this particular case
The capacity to redefine geography—to locate profitable social relationships—has led the current Bourgeoisie to believe they have reinvented economy, when all they have done is alter relations of production in the most predictable way. Without labor-power there is no capital accumulation possible. They can automate all they wish, but unless—and only to the degree that—there are humans suffering a sucker’s deal at the point of production, they are not going to become any wealthier.
If there is no one able to exchange money for commodity (or service), there can be no realization of profit. It seems they are seeking Utopia, in the most literal sense, as in “no place.” Their virtual maps causing them to believe the spaceless and asynchronic elements of automated memory could conjure material wealth.
Our struggle, then, is to now situate everything in the quotidian world. Force those in power to meet us in the streets, where the maps reflect material reality. This is another reason why they attack science.