CAPITALISM IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT

I was overcome with a feeling of nausea when I read that the twitter IPO has created 1,600 new millionaires – the bulk of these most likely in San Francisco, twitter’s headquarters and the city where I live. My feelings about twitter’s IPO is only matched by revulsion at the site of the Google, yahoo, box, and other technology company buses ferrying their employees down to Silicon Valley.

Arround the turn of the millenium, the dot com bubble resulted in a major change in the demographics of San Francisco, with many lower income people (including many artists) evicted from their apartments to make way for higher rents and the tech workers who could afford them. The bubble burst but now we are seeing much larger changes in San Francisco, because it’s not a burstable bubble any more it is the new long term reality. Those of us who have erected barricades at the doors of our rent-controlled apartments are among the few lower income (by San Francisco standards) residents who can live here. And if we leave, we can never afford to return. But, really, who wants to live here any more with the evil speeding black buses, the hoards of technocrati maruading down Valencia Street on Saturday night, the breathless adulation of everything tech-related? The income and reality gap is huge. The other day I walked past the line for the Google bus on 24th Street and a homeless guy was lying face down in front of them, oblivous as they stared into their smartphones. I checked on the man to see if he was OK, and he grunted an affirmative reply. The scene is emblematic of what is going on in this city, if not globally.

But, where does all the money come from? How can twitter be a viable business where massive fortunes are being made? What is it selling? The chilling answer is that we are the commodity, we are the product. Twitter’s (and facebook’s, and google’s) massive database of users is what is worth the billions of dollars of its IPO. The social network connects more of us to the database, and the number of users increases exponentially. As Guy Debord writes in the Society of the Spectacle, “The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification.” The more we are connected, the more we can be manipulated.

It’s nothing as blatant or as simple as advertisements on twitter pages. Rather, twitter will be selling us to other media outlets which rely on advertising, like TV. I just read an article in Fast Company that presenting twitter’s strategy to do exactly that. And, you can read about it straight from twitter in a promotional piece that reads like a parody of Orwellian mind control.

And what is being advertised? Cars, hair color, detergent, target, Home Depot, etc, of course, but it’s the perpetual idyll that consumption is still the inevitable path to happiness that’s the important overall message – exploitation of labor and the environment be damned. Social networks are a mobius strip that appear to turn the world upside down but take us back to where we started. There are reports that twitter has been used for revolutionary purposes (for example in Iran, Egypt and Libya), but I would argue  that reports of the importance of such uses are exaggerated (see for example this report, and this one) and that rather, twitter represents a further stage of the capitalist revolution, in which we become even more fully integrated into the spectacle.

This time it’s the Silicon Valley version http://siliconvalleyraffle.com/Overview.aspx

Scroll down the raffle’s home page and you’ll see that one of the two sponsors of the raffle is Titan 360 – the outdoor advertising giant. Check out their stomach churning video about the San Francisco DMA (Designated Market Area) and how their advertising dominates San Francisco residents. http://www.titan360.com/usa-markets/san-francisco/overview.html YBCA’s mission statement talks about propelling short and long term social change — but what kind of social change is propelled by a collaboration with Titan?

It is sad that these days that YBCA (and most other major arts organizations) find it necessary to collaborate with corporations that are at the forefront of promoting an unsustainable economic system, fostering inequality, and blighting our public space with messages we do not want to see, and which nobody asked our permission to show us. The opposite of art is propaganda.

For more on the Dream House Raffle, see my previous post.

It seems obvious that superior service is provided to those with more buying power. However, some situations the class dynamics are more obvious.

Fluffy Robe, Crown Metropole, Perth

Firstly, what is meant by “service”? Physical comfort or sustenance (hygiene factors) are two things that can gained from spending more money, but in most cases, the additional service is only considered superior because the person has paid more for it. The curve of hygiene quality versus expenditure is not linear – at some point, the curve levels out and the additional expenditure buys only status. Is the sound quality in the seats in the orchestra zone really that much better than the seats in the upper tier? Does a $500 a night room provide more shelter or comfort than a $100 dollar room? Are fluffy robes and down pillows really worth $400?

The rich are of course buying status or, which amounts to the same thing, they are paying to exclude others. A space where this is particularly obvious is airplane cabin. Due to the linear geometry, those in first class are not just  just excluding the hoi poloi but watching as they file to the back of the plane, struggling with their carry-ons and writhing children. I often look at them as they sip their champagne and wonder how they feel: guilty or gloating, or just don’t give a fuck because we’re not even on their radars?

The gap between first class and economy has increased over time – paralleling the growing gap between rich and poor. The drastically reduced leg room territory in economy has been ceded to the first class fiefdom. Is there anyone who does not find grotesque the image of the fully reclining first class sleeper seat? In it lounges the quintessentially pampered passenger completely immobile while tended to by an army of in flight attendants. The whole grotesque scene looks like something out of the hospital of the future.

Korean Air "Kosmo Suite" (photo courtesy Korean Airlines)

But it is the exclusionary curtain that truly defines the difference between classes on airplanes. Until 2001, these curtains were heavy opaque barriers like the one shown below. Such curtains, deployed at the boundary between airplane seeting classes, virtually provided a real physical barrier when hooked into place.

Spectra Aircraft Fabric and Drapery Fabric (photo courtesy Spectra Interior Products)

Since 2001, however, the US Transportation Safety Administration has banned the use of such curtains for security reasons. Presumably, they impeded the crew’s (and inflight security personnel) ability to scan the plane for terrorists. Lantal, a “transportation fashion” company devised a solution:

After September 2001, Class Divider Curtains were removed by TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) on all flights in and out of the United States for security reasons. This left airline operators with an almost impossible task to maintain class separation during flight and adhere to the new security mandate. In August 2003, launch customer Continental Airlines came to Lantal for a solution to this problem.

Patrick Ashton, Continental Interiors Engineer quotes, ‘Lantal was instrumental in developing a new fabric that gives our First Class passengers the sense of privacy they expect while complying with the Transportation Safety Administration’s new rules’. Continental Airlines began installation on their fleet in March 2004 and completed all aircraft installation by April 30, 2004. For further information please contact our Sales team.

Lantal Enigma Mesh Curtain (TSA approved)

The idea that class separation had to be maintained at all costs is telling. The mesh curtain has virtually no worth as a sound or visual barrier – it operates purely as a sign of exclusion, a sign  of class division, separating the front of the plane from the back of the plane.