{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","uuid":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/search"},"page":{"printed_page":31,"pdf_page":41,"physical_index":41,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fe55815fbeba3bcb4b0dec44a8c5d414718ed971b062f67b351fbcf151cbf349"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"The Fantasy of Participation: Technology Fetishism\n\nIn their online communications, people are apt to express intense emotions, intimate feelings, some of the more secret or significant aspects of their sense of who they are. Years ago, while surfing through Yahoo's homepages, I found the page of a guy who featured pictures of his dog, his parents, and himself fuly erect in an s I M -style harness. At the bottom of his site was the typical, \"Thanks for stopping by! Don't forget to write and tell me what you think!\" This quaint image suggests how easy many find it to reveal themselves on the Internet. More contemporary examples are blogs, image-sharing sites like Flickr, video-sharing sites like YouTube, and social-networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Not only are people accustomed to putting their thoughts online but also, in so doing, they believe their thoughts and ideas are registering-write and tell me what you think! They imagine themselves brave participants in a combative arena or prostrate confessors acknowledging their shortcomings. One believes tha,t one's contribution matters, that it means something to and within a context broader than oneself. Contributing to the information stream thus has a subjective registration efect detached from any actual impact or eficacy.\n\nBecause of this registration efect, people treat their contribution to circulating content as communicative action. They believe that they are active, making a diference by clicking on a button, adding their name to a petition, or commenting on a blog. Slavoj Zizek describes this kind of activity with the term interpassivity. \"When we are interpassive, something else, a fetish object, is active in our stead. Zizek explains: \"You think you \\_are active, while your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive:' <sup>18</sup> The frantic activity of the fetish works to prevent actual action, t<sub>?</sub> prevent something from really happening. Activity on the Internet, contributing to the circulation of afect and opinion, thus involves a profound passivity, one that is interconnected, linked, but passive nonetheless. Put back in terms of the circulation of contributions that fail to coalesce into actual debates, that fail as messages in need of response, we might think of this odd interpassivity as content that is linked to other content but never fully connected. Linking or citing stands in for reading, which stands in for engaging. At each juncture, there is a gap.\n\nNetworked communication and information technologies are exquisite media for capturing and reformatting political energies. They turn eforts at political engagement into contributions to the circulation of content, reinforcing the hold of neoliberalism's technological infrastructure. Political intensities become shorn of their capacity to raise claims to the universal, persisting simply as intensities, as indications of subjective feeling (a phenomenon taken up in greater detail in chapter 4) . The more strident the voices, the more intense the feelings, the stronger is the pull of communications media in their myriad, constant, and ever-ready forms. Media circulate and extend information about an issue or event, amplifying its afect and seemingly its significance. This amplifcation draws in more media, more commentary and opinion, more parody and comic relief, more attachment to communicative capitalism's information and entertainment networks such that the lmot of feedback and enjoyment itself operates as (and in place of) the political issue or event. Attention focuses on reflecting and commenting on the tangle of intensities-for the moment. More energies are invested in it. And the problem or issue is neglected, left to continue along its course, undeflected and unchanging despite the massive amount of interest and energy it has generated.\n\nTECHNOLOGY\n\n31","previous_page":30,"next_page":32}