Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

by Yanis Varoufakis

‘What does it mean to be a proletarian, really?’ Costa continued, without waiting for a reply. ‘Let me tell you. From bitter experience. It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value into exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.’

The problem with humans, Costa surmised, is the same in real life as in digital games: we crave the company of other minds, whose validation is meaningful because they are beyond our control even while control of them is precisely what we seek. When they do things we do not want them to do, we get upset. But the moment we control them fully, their approval gives us no pleasure. It is ever so hard to learn to appreciate that the pleasure to be had from such control is illusory, especially since people are prepared to sacrifice almost everything in its pursuit.

‘The key to world economic and political harmony,’ Eve explained ‘is the curtailment of all global imbalances – not just imbalances in the flow of goods and services but also in the flow of money from one economic block to another, from one country to another.’