program. ‘ Individuals ’ are merely evanescent projects from a neoliberal perspective. Neoliberalism has consequently become a scale-free Theory of Everything: something as small as a gene or as large as a nation-state is equally engaged in entrepreneurial strategic pursuit of advantage, since the ‘ individual ’ is no longer a privileged ontological platform. Second, there are no more ‘ classes ’ in the sense of an older political economy, since every individual is both employer and worker simultaneously; in the limit, every man should be his own business firm or corporation; this has proven a powerful tool for disarming whole swathes of older left discourse. It also appropriates an obscure historical development in American legal history — that the corporation is tantamount to personhood — and blows it up to an ontological principle. Third, since property is no longer rooted in labor, as in the Lockean tradition, consequently property rights can be readily reengineered and changed to achieve specific political objectives; one observes this in the area of ‘ intellectual property, ’ or in a development germane to the crisis, ownership of the algorithms that define and trade obscure complex derivatives, and better, to reduce the formal infrastructure of the marketplace itself to a commodity. Indeed, the recent transformation of stock exchanges into profit-seeking IPOs was a critical neoliberal innovation leading up to the crisis. Classical liberals treated ‘ property ’ as a sacrosanct bulwark against the state; neoliberals do not. Fourth, it destroys the whole tradition of theories of ‘ interests ’ as possessing empirical grounding in political thought. ” See his remarks, “ The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism ” at http://www .the-utopian.org/post/53360513384/the-thirteen-commandments-of-neoliberalism.
- The simple formula that the powerful should be transparent and the powerless opaque means something only if those terms are self-evident and if they sit still while the world turns. Neither is a reasonable assumption. Consider this example. Solly Benjamin and his colleagues looked at the impact of the digitization of land records in Bangalore. Their findings were that newly available access to landownership and title information in Bangalore was primarily being put to use by middle- and upper-income people and by corporations to gain ownership of land from the marginalized and the poor. The newly digitized and openly accessible data allowed the well-to-do to take the information provided and use that as the basis for instructions to land surveyors and lawyers and others to challenge titles, exploit gaps in title, take advantage of mistakes in documentation, and identify opportunities and targets for bribery, among others. They were able to directly translate their enhanced access to the information along with their already available access to capital and professional skills into unequal contests around land titles, court actions, offers of purchase, and so on for self-benefit and to further marginalize those already marginalized. Solomon Benjamin, R. Bhuvaneswari, P. Rajan, and Manjunatha, “ Bhoomi: ‘ E-Governance, ’ or, an Anti-Politics Machine Necessary to Globalize Bangalore? ” CASUM-m working paper, January 2007, http://casumm.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/bhoomi-e-governance.pdf.
- “ Virtual People to Get ID Checks, ” BBC News, July 29, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ technology-14277728.
- Charles A. Shanor, “ Making a Mountain out of a Digital Molehill, ” New York Times, June 7, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/making-a-mountain-out-of-a-digital -molehill.html.
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