Maybe you’ve been able to tell from my postings (and lack thereof) that my dissertation work has derailed in the past few weeks. Mostly it’s the flippin estate lawsuit that’s burning up my attention and my money and my time, and I’ve lately been short-tempered and irritable and just plain frustrated that this thing’s still dragging along.
Which isn’t to say that I’ve been entirely neglecting my work. I finished Mark C. Taylor’s The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture a while ago, and was halfway through William Greider’s excellent The Soul of Capitalism when someone recalled it to the library. I’ve also just started Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin’s The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, and the three books share many similar ideas about our economic future in an age of distributed interactions. All three books are hopeful, but in different ways: Taylor and Zuboff and Maxmin seem to be saying, “Here’s what’s going to happen,” while Greider is a little more cautionary, saying, “Here’s what needs to happen.”
As you might guess, my somewhat pessimistic perspective puts me on board with Greider more than with Taylor and with Zuboff & Maxmin, and I wonder how much their outlooks and my own are colored by institutional positions. I’m at a Big State U; Zuboff’s been at Harvard for a long, long time, and Taylor’s been at the relatively elite Williams College ($34K tuition, 1400+ average SAT) for a while. They’re fairly enthusiastic about the potential ways in which they see corporations, education, the economy, and information technologies interacting in the future. Greider graduated from Princeton, did a stint in the military, and has been a reporter for over forty years, and what he sees is far less rosy.
In the past, I’ve railed against the “authenticity” argument — the claim that coming from a certain background entitles one to speak with more authority on a certain topic — but I think that the authenticity argument is a little different (although there is some overlap, which makes me want to rethink my perspective on the authenticity thing) from saying that one’s cultural position can influence one’s perspective. I wonder how much the view from Harvard University and Williams College colors what their authors see, and I wonder what a writer from a community college in Connecticut or Ohio or California might have to say about the effects of the convergence of corporations, higher education, economics, and information technololgy in the next few years.
Still, taken together, the perspectives of Taylor, Zuboff & Maxmin, and Greider offer useful possibilities as possible ways forward from the important critiques offered by Gibson-Graham and Dyer-Witheford. I think I’m gonna find them pretty important for the final section of my dissertation.
Cross your fingers for me, and help me hope that this legal stuff gets resolved swiftly? I’m eager to move on and get back full-time to the work that I love. And I’m starting to get happy about teaching in the Fall.
Recent Comments