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10:38

(In »The free and open Internet versus the ecological apocalypse«)

The current rewriting of history enables the individualist epoch to be viewed with new, more critical eyes. For example, capitalism is exposed as the tyranny of numerical slavery par excellence. The deeper we delve into its exploitative nature, both ideologically and historically, the more clearly capitalism’s obsessive fixation with finally being able to mathematise all human thoughts and activities into a sum of dollars, a number of votes or a series of orgasms, emerges. No one illustrates this better than the American economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker, who in his work reduces all human activities to a kind of constantly ongoing rational calculation of utility. His work is about a consummate capitalist logic that takes Becker all the way into people’s bedrooms and places of worship – according to him, even an act of sexual intercourse is nothing other than a calculated, selfish utilitarian venture worked out in advance. What Becker thereby reveals about the seat of his own ideology is how rationalism, individualism, utilitarianism and – in all cases calculating and profit-maximising – capitalism really are one and the same ideology. Becker quite simply takes the Kantian paradigm and its isolated, compulsively colonising, patriarchal subject to the end of the road. And there he finds nothing other than an eternally empty calculator, grinding away.