B&B: Laissez-faire & monetary technophilia // Psychoanalysis as a capitalist drug // Sociology and economics // Hobsbawm on May Day // Big Tech uses the Covid-19 crisis // Artists’ strikes

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

> “As ugly as the public provision of money can sometimes be, its digital privatization is all too likely to be vastly worse” — Frank Pasquale reviews three recent books examining the laissez-faire ideology of monetary technophilia: David Golumbia’s The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, Finn Brunton’s Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency, and Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

> “Deleuze and Guattari were frustrated with the ‘Mummy-Daddy’ focus of psychoanalysis. By understanding desire in terms of the family romance, psychoanalysis had become  (in Guattari’s words) a ‘capitalist drug’, individualising collective problems and neutralising the disruptive effects of desire.” — by Adam Shatz

> As a part of the INET’s series “How & How NOT to Do Economics”, a renowned Keynesian economist and economic historian Robert Skidelsky looks at economics’ relationship with sociology & discusses how can sociology help economics (video lecture)

> May Day as The Principle of Hope: Eric Hobsbawm’s enlightening historical account on the birth of May Day and its gradual transformation from being a strict political activity to a secular holiday

> “We face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very unlikely to do both.” Naomi Klein on how Big Tech is leveraging the Covid-19 crisis to get more power & profit

> Artists have always contributed to the strikes of others. But what about artists’ strikes? They remain rare, although their significance is well established. Stewart Martin provides an historical & contemporary inventory on this topic

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