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David A. Westbrook's avatar

Wessie, thanks for the shout-out! As I've said, you're onto something really important. It's a little to easier to say "bureaucracy" or "capitalism." Cars may be built by accountants, one might say, but Ford and Daimler were businesses from the beginning. Let me suggest that early modernism relied upon a craft tradition (your piece on house building) that the 20th century did not really sustain, indeed struggled against in the name of democracy. So if social position is determined by job, and jobs are in principle open . . . symbol manipulation rises up the ladder. So you might not want to run a plumbing supply company in St Louis, but maybe you join a private equity firm that . . . runs a plumbing supply company. Thus what we might think of as the abstraction, and distance from the physical, and so the shoddiness of the material, stems from democratization itself. Maybe. Probably needs more thought. Again, keep up the great work.

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Laurence's avatar

Agreed. The small annoyances and indignities are bad enough, but the way that our money is funneled away from our towns/cities and into the pockets of distant strangers, "investors", is the aspect that we're most likely to seriously regret. Once upon a time my purchases primarily enriched my neighbors and countrymen. The road we're on now will lead to some regrettable form of global feudalism. We grow the wheat but all we get is barley.

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