If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Information debt

I just bought some books on eBay and saw a disclaimed saying that this information will be stored at their facilities/servers in San Jose, CA. I drove by one of their "campuses" in San Jose a couple days ago. At the time it seemed like a sterile info-industrial park of little merit--maybe a place to turn around in if I got mixed up. Now it seems alive. It is close enough to be tangible in my mind. This sparks some momentary anxiety for me, some fear that the internet will become corporeal in more places, unexpectedly, and seize on all the information I have given to it to use against me. It's like Baudrillard's essay on global debt, but at one more level of abstraction: debt is only so much information, so many bits among other bits, and we need to keep the hell away from the lot of it. Question: is our accumulation of information also an accumulation of unfinished projects, of an informational debt that forms, like monetary debt, an insurmountable horizon of social reproduction? Can it contact us with crushing force? Is that what would transform economic crisis into revolution?

No comments:

Post a Comment