Industry's Last Movement

I just finished reading a highly provocative interview with Bernard Stiegler in the Fall issue of the Queen's Quarterly. I found it to be a very potent analysis of capital in a contemporary setting.

It got me thinking. According to Stiegler, the quantifying and disindividuating effects of capitalism reduced the craftsmen to proletarians and eventually managed to replace them more or less altogether with mechanical technology. The same thing has happened on the other side of the supply-demand relationship as well. Citizens were reduced to "consumers", cogs in the industrial process. Consumers have been denuded of identity and meaning by the arithmetic logic of capitalism. Socialists would tend to think that the way out of this is to turn away from capitalism. Many would suggest that we need to turn to other things such as religion or nature to re-establish a sense of meaning.

But maybe there's another answer. Rather than fighting it, perhaps we should let this disembodied spirit of Capitalism have its way and let it complete the process of industrialization. We have industrialized harvesting, processing, manufacturing, distribution, even the commercial side of consumption. But the actual act of consumption has been largely left alone, human in its inefficiency! It seems like the best way to finally free humans from the reductionist effects of capitalism is to complete the industrialization of the economy: that is right, I am talking about Consumption Machines! Nothing else would break us so decisively free, allowing us to go romping in the meadow at sunrise. We would be free at last from our obligations to the economy!

The picture above is from the Cloaca project, where they have been well ahead of me in designing these sorts of machines. The link: http://www.cloaca.be/
I'm very impressed by their work, which manages replicate a digestion process, but what I'd like to see is a machine that will also look at advertising, watch tv, surf the net, read books, listen to music, experience a museum, etc. . . now that would be a true consumption machine.