Rushkoff on Disinfo Podcast

Disinfo yet lives. They just launched a podcast interview with me about Life Inc, as well as other matters counter-cultural.

Comments

[usr]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090716_blame_the_midas_touch/

William Pfaff

"In the June 19 issue of the (London) Times Literary Supplement, the Exeter University classicist Richard Seaford elaborates on an argument he first made in 2004 in a book called “Money and the Early Greek Mind.” This proposed that “the pivotal position of the Greeks” in the world culture of the period they dominated came largely from their invention of money.

Until money, an individual’s possible possessions had to be tangible, useful and necessarily limited enough to enjoy and control. One can directly possess only so much property, herds and ships, or enjoy only so much food, sex, honors, reputation and so on, before being satisfied (or sated). But you cannot possess too much money, because money is fungible, transferable, portable and theoretically unlimited in quantity.

Money thus isolates the individual because it removes him from the real world of relationships, property and useful things, to the world of potentially unlimited possession of something whose essential characteristic is that in itself it is useless. It destroys limits in society and in human relations because it places the individual, or a society, in a position, as Seaford says, of “predatory isolation.”"

[h. rococo]

That was an excellent interview. I really like Raymond and Joe's interviewing style because they just let guests talk and ask informed follow-up questions.

I am in sympathy with pretty much everything you said. I especially liked your computer Microsoft platform metaphor used as an example of the false sense of fixity we attribute to our current capitalist / corporatist structure. It is often difficult to explain the idea but that metaphor works nicely.

Also, always nice to hear people defend the Medieval Period. It always gets such a bad rap. My friend Jackie Jung teaches Medieval Art History at Yale and the things she could tell you about the social aspects of that era are amazing.

I'll take whatever currency you're having. Best of luck, joni