Thursday, January 18, 2007

The machine of meta-capitalism

Baudrillard & Bangalore by Rich on Wed 17 Jan 2007 08:38 PM PST Permanent Link
Well maybe things are getting better in Baglaore. The economy is bursting at the seems and the .025 of 1% of the total Indian workforce , who are in IT, and who are driving the whole economy seem to be mostly headquartered here. Undoubtably many have benefited here because of the IT industry. Still last night when we were stuck in traffic for two hours coming into town through the area where most of the IT firms are located, - and understanding that many of the folks who work in the industry have to put up with this ungodly traffic on a daily basis - made me think that the Indian IT industry is the fulfillment of Heideggers idea of the standing reserve.
According to Heidegger - in the 1930s - human beings were already in danger of becoming simply a huge army of surplus labor, to be left standing to await their turn to be exploited by the machine of meta-capitalism. Well with often as many as a thousand people applying for just one IT job here and with the hordes of technicians in wait for the opportunity to serve the Virtual Class of global technicity, the leap to Heidegger's vision is not so large.
But the vision of the French post-modernist Jean Baudrillard is also easy to glimpse. In his work "Simulation and Simulacra" Baudrillard outlines the disappearance of reality since Plato, But especially as it manifest in the 20th century through the use of simulation (images). He says. that first images reflected reality, then they masked reality, and finally they hide the absence of reality all together.
Well in America its certainly easy enough to see the progression over the course of the last three major wars. For example in Vietnam the images on the TV reflected the aweful reality of the conflict and subsequently an outraged public demanded its end. However in the first Gulf War, the images on CNN of smart bombs being dropped in Iraqi cities and the sanitized killing which resulted , along with the newspeak of Collateral Damage to refer to civillian causualties "masked the realitty" which was happening.
Now fast foward to Colin Powell before the United Nations preceding the second Gulf wars, in which he cleverly used images to hide the fact that no such reality e.g. weapons of mass destruction, actually existed., or a month or so after the war began there was George Bush on the aircraft carrier announcing mission accomplished!
Well I opened the Bangalore edition of the Indian times today to find the headline was about a British Reality TV show. The images in the newspaper of half clad sexy starlets were very similar to ones you see on the billboards around town advertizing all manner of global brands of products "we simply must have". I should mention that last night we also took a detour through the slums of Bangalore, some of which house up to 100,000 people who share maybe ten working toilets. (see my review of Mike Davis book Planet of Slums). Its almost as if one could say about Bangalore, that it is where "High Tech meets the Flintstones".
The whole experience last night brought my thoughts back to the reality on the ground,: the Bangalore infra-structure juxtaposed against the images proliferated in the media and the billboards around town singing the joys of all the global name brands, and off course to Baudrillard. rich Previous: Stephen Hawking warns re "catastrophic dangers of climate change"

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