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dyauspitryesterday at 1:31 PM5 repliesview on HN

What’s the alternative. Keep the smart physically separated, can never collaborate to make anything paradigm shifting and we just prod along with small town paper mills and marginally better local government?


Replies

bm3719yesterday at 1:48 PM

Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus based on the territoriality of earlier work.

It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not irrelevant.

One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our economic and psychological needs. What we have is subordination to the machine, which will do what it's designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic production.

Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything, a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production within the current structure. The cost is born by the individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now endemic.

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WillAdamsyesterday at 1:38 PM

California had a great mechanism for this in their land grant colleges, which back before the protests of the Vietnam War were required to offer the valedictorian of nearby high schools (or the person with the highest GPA who accepted) full tuition and room and board --- then Governor Ronald Reagan shut down this program when the students had the temerity to protest the Vietnam War --- it was also grade inflation to keep students above the threshold necessary for a draft deferment which began the downward spiral of American education.

HPsquaredyesterday at 1:44 PM

A little less min-maxing, perhaps.

ppoooNNyesterday at 2:13 PM

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