Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse? Quotes

“The dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information.”
― McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

“One thing that the left and right now seem to agree on is that the society in which we live is called capitalism.1 And strangely enough, both now seem to agree that it is eternal. Even the left seems to think that there is an eternal essence to Capital and that only its appearances change. The parade of changing appearances yields a series of modifiers: this could be necro capitalism, communicative capitalism, cognitive capitalism, platform capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or computational capitalism.”
― McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

“We act in and against a world that remains other to us. Reduced to nothing but users, and our actions forced into the commodity form, our collective work and play produces a world over and against us, one that massively persists in its own habits of functioning.53 Worse, collective human labor made a world for a ruling class that keeps making not only itself but us in its image.”
― McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

“Wright advocates for some salutary counterhegemonic strategies, based in geographic rootedness, local public goods, and worker’s cooperatives. But one has to wonder whether such things are all that viable (at least as traditionally conceived), given that the forces of production drive increasingly abstract relations of production, which appear then as transnational legal and treaty forms protecting information as private property. Trebor Scholz proposes a form of platform cooperativism as a more contemporary approach.47 The vectoralist stack needs to be countered with a counterstack on the infrastructural level.”
― McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?