Sublime

That all urban development has been locked into path dependency on an economic concern now millennia out-of-date is surely a cause of unimaginable waste and inefficiency.

“we have entered a different phase for the economy, a new era where production matters less and what matters more is access to that production: distribution, in other words—who gets what and how they get it”[282]. In this context, there

For most of history the economy stayed much the same size. Yes, global production increased, but this was due mostly to demographic expansion and the settlement of new lands. Per capita production remained static.

In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

Au cours du XXe siècle, les élites mondiales de New York, Londres, Berlin et Moscou ont élaboré trois grands récits qui prétendaient expliquer la totalité du passé et prédire l’avenir du monde : le récit fasciste, le récit communiste et le récit libéral.

At the same time, whatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematic participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability.

In their analysis of contemporary capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have pointed to the array of forces that esteem the individual who is constantly engaged, interfacing, interacting, communicating, responding, or processing within some telematic milieu.