"There's two conflicting narratives that you'll often find in the public domain: the banal mainstream narrative, [which] is that everything is driven from consumers wanting convenience. And then there's sort of a top-down narrative—which is often where the conspiracy theorists lie—where they say stuff like, okay, it's being pushed by global elites who want to control you. So they imagine all the power is projected downwards upon people. And all [of] the [tech] industry says, oh, no, it's everybody [from] the bottom up, who wants these changes to happen. [But] the reality is, actually, there's a complex feedback loop between all these things that are occurring."
This session builds from the opening week to explore the abstract worlds of finance and monetary systems. We continue to explore the accumulation of power and wealth through these systems, and see how the major players are related, or even the same. We look at “hegemonic cultural processes”, or the ways in which corporate influence extends into building cultural narratives around what is “in your best interest” and what is “for the good of mankind”. We ask questions about how much of our beliefs are constructed, for whose benefit, so that we may free ourselves from believing that the answers to the world’s crises can be found in something money can buy.
In this session, we begin to see how technology and digitisation are tools to further entrench the powers that be.
Brett Scott
hosted by Brett Scott
