Dr. Rowson,

Thank you for that.

I think it useful to interject some thoughts into our justification system on the matter of "Capitalism."

Useful light was shed by Professor Carrol Quigley on this matter, in his works.  He divided this overly broad term into three distinct phases in the history of Western Civilization.

1.  Commerce Capitalism; defined as the system of economic justification within a price structure.

2.  Finance Capitalism; defined as being the creation of "ownership at a distance" by the creation of publicly traded stocks in large corporations, characterized by a system of reducing costs to increase profits.

and 3. Monopoly Capitalism; defined as being the elimination of competition between the Ownership Class; characterized by a system of raising prices to increase profits.

Each subsequent justification system focuses the power further into the hands of the Ownership Class.

This comes from Dr. Quigley's book The Evolution of Civilizations, which I recommend.  Carroll Quigley. TheEvolution Of Civilizations. pdf

Carroll Quigley. TheEvolution Of Civilizations. pdf Carroll Quigley. TheEvolution Of Civilizations. pdf

I would like to suggest to the esteemed audience that rewinding our situation back into the Commerce Capitalism may be the desired goal to properly realign the interests of the public with the logos.

Thank you.

Bradley

Bradley H. Werrell, D.O. - This email is private and copyrighted by the author.

On Sunday, September 27, 2020, 08:59:27 AM MST, Jonathan Rowson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Thanks for sharing that James - it's very exciting for the makers and contributors of The Social Dilemma.

The article also acts as a useful reflexive prediction - a story about popularity that drives popularity - I hope it works because I think it is hard to overstate the importance of the docudrama.

What matters now though is not so much that The Social Dilemma is watched but that people grasp what follows from the argument it makes. On most complex problems, 'raising awareness' is necessary and not sufficient, and often risks giving the wrong impression that something transformative is actually happening. The makers have explicitly said they are modelling their approach on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, but in light of the absence of commensurate climate action following from it, it is worth asking if that documentary was, in fact, a success, or more like a kind of distraction of displacement activity (It feels churlish to suggest the documentary didn't help, but I do wonder...). 

Similarly, the central problematic this docudrama higlights is 'the business model' of all forms of social media (including Netflix!) and that business model is given much greater texture and detail in Shoshana Zuboff's model of Surveillance capitalism (she's interviewed in the The Social Dilemma, but not, alas, for very long). As Zuboff makes clear in her book, 'the business model' in question is historiographical in nature; a new mutuation of capitalism at scale; it's not something that individuals can easily resist or that can be changed in a board room, and it begs an uncomfortable question at the level of political economy rather than merely behaviour, culture or metapsychology. (Although I think there are metapsychological perspectives that contextualise important metaethical issues at stake. The underlying problem may be the incompatibility between 'the algorithim' and 'the good'; what is most precious to us is something uncodeable beyond utilitarian or deontological logic, and that kind of value and valuing is what struggles to find a place in this discussion.)

'The business model' that is the apparent villain in The Social Dilemma has its own kind of investment and return model based on data-driven behavioural prediction that is then targetted to personal and cultural detriment, but what is happening is still fundamentally the attempt to maxmimise profit for shareholders within the rule of law, also known as Capitalism. It's true that it is a difficult problematic to understand, that lobbying plays a large part in keeping the law as it is, and that 'the product' is a frontier of extraction (our attention) that may be ethically beyond the pale; even in the context of the world literally being on fire, it is probably worse that fossil fuel extraction, though certainly not as bad as the enforced extraction of human capital through slavery. The problem within the problem of The Social Dilemma is that the extraction in question is a data-driven psychographic hyper-intensification of what economic and political advertising has being doing to culture for decades, in which apparently legitimate game-winning and profit-seeking aims are served by addiction, alienation, polarisation and ecocide.

I am not so much saying that The Social Dilemma is saying 'Capitalism as such' is the preeminent problem (maximising profits for private gain, within the rule of law). Indeed, I am not instinctivley ant-capitalist by nature - I increasingly fear I might even be a little bit bourgeoise. But I am struck by the fact that for me, this is where the documentary took us, and yet it couldn't say so explicitly. It was a kind of epic ideological flirtation that was not consumated, leaving this viewer at least wondering if they had properly understood the signals.

In my own small way I tried to drive people towards the documentary with my own stream-of-consciousness review of The Social Dilemma 

earlier this month - https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=atQkyda1REQ - but that's just me thinking out loud on a screen; anyone reading this who hasn't seen The Social Dilemma yet, you should certainly watch that first!

Grey skies in London, but plenty of nimble leaves getting a gentle workout.

Dr Jonathan Rowson

Founding Director, Perspectiva

Research Fellow, CUSP

Open Society Fellow

@Jonathan_Rowson

The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life is published by Bloomsbury. 

On Sun, 27 Sep 2020 at 15:43, James Tyler Carpenter <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Of possible interest from a social influence expert-colleague in the forensic think tank I’m a member of. Of relevance for many reasons.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t ravisbean/2020/09/24/the-socia l-dilemma-is-about-to-become- the-first-documentary-on- netflix-to-achieve-this-incred ible-milestone/

James Tyler Carpenter, PhD, FAACP

www.metispsych.com

http://www.experts.com/Expert- Witnesses/search?keyword=Clini cal%20psychology&keywordsearch type=All%20Words&category= Clinical%20forensic%20& categorysearchtype=Any%20Word& name=James%20tyler%20carpenter &namesearchtype=All%20Words& company=Metis&companysearchtyp e=All%20Words&address=%20& addresssearchtype=All%20Words& state=MA&statesearchtype=Any% 20Word&country=ALL%20(or% 20Choose%20a%20Country)&countr ysearchtype=All%20Words&page= 1&freshsearch=1

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