{"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":41,"pdf_page":51,"physical_index":51,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"595208eaff850bec67bce7b4f68e59a0bfb540074c6bae08cbf6cc6d529d0f0f"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"The last operation of the technological fetish follows from and is enabled by the previous two: denial. The political purchase of the technological fetish is presumed in advance; it is immediate, understood. File-sharing is political. A website is political. Blogging is political. This assertion of immediacy, however, is an energetic form of denial. The presumption that a left politics necessarily attaches to a technological fix denies what the media activist or technology enthusiast already knows to be the case-that democracy in practice is the rule of the wealthy, the protection of a governmental elite who serves their interests, and the constant chatter and opining of everyone else in the circuits of communicative capitalism.\n\nIn his account of fetishism, Freud describes how the young boy's belief in the fetish enables him to retain and give up this belief at the same time.40 He can know his belief that his mother has a penis is false but continue to believe it nevertheless-this is what the fetish allows him to do. Crucial to Freud's account is the reason for the boy's underlying attachment to his false belief-fear of castration. If he accepts what he knows, the boy must acknowledge castration, and this is what he cannot .l?ear. He would rather retain the fiction of a mother with a penis than acknowledge a world of lack or accept the possibility of his own dependence or diminishment.\n\nThe power of the technological fetish operates in a similar fashion. A condition of possibility for asserting the immediately progressive political character of something-web-radio or open-source software, say-is a prior exclusion of knowledge of their antagonistic conditions of emergence, their embeddedness within the brutalities of global capitalism, their dependence for existence on systemic violence and nationalized and racialized divisions. Advocating the extension of information and communication technologies accepts and denies these conditions at the same time. Even as the proliferation of communication technologies serves neoliberal firtancialization, accelerating the speed of monetary transactions and consolidating networks of privilege, the left advocate of participation, deliberation, and fundamental rights to communication canand must-energeticaly deny this context. Why would leftists promise that the technologies could fix democracy, if democracy was not broken, if it was not failing as a political form? And if democracy's underlying brokenness is the problem, the actual condition for the advocate's emphasis on communication and technology, why isn't this fundamental lack or failure the central matter at hand? Communicative capitalism thrives on the fetishistic denial of democracy's failure, its inability to secure justice, equity, or solidarity even as it enables millions to access information and make their opinions known.\n\nTECHNOLOGY\n\n41","previous_page":40,"next_page":42}