/lit/ - Literature

>>18544864
>the only hierarchy we have, which is not formal at all and can be immediately dissolved
But it won't, because electricity must flow, and you won't give up your computer.

>can be immediately dissolved for any minor reason (share market collapse, eg),
And a feudal lord potentially can kill his peasants. And countries can potentially cause nuclear winter. All the power by its nature is *negative*: it's about how much shit can one wreck, how seriously one is to be taken.

>This system is entirely new, because it is ungradated and fluid
The fluidity of hierarchy power, doesn't negate the fact of it's existence.

>compared to the vast majority of world history and world societies, which had extremely stratified and formal,
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/09/04/stocks-are-up-wages-are-down-what-does-it-mean/
"Now here’s the uncomfortable truth. Capital is the same as mana — it’s a euphemism for power. Let’s run through the similarities. Hawaiian elites had power because they had mana. Capitalists have power because they have capital. Hawaiian elites proclaimed their power boldly. So do capitalists, who broadcast their power daily via stock tickers. Lastly, mana had mystical significance. So does capital. By controlling mana, Hawaiian elites became ‘vessels of spiritual energy’. By controlling capital, modern elites (we are told) become ‘vessels of productivity’.
The similarities between mana and capital are unsettling. But there is an important difference between the two ideologies. Hawaiian elites didn’t quantify their power. But modern elites do. Capitalists use the ritual of capitalization to give their power a number. This ritual, Nitzan and Bichler observe, does something unique. It makes capitalism the first social order that is quantitative.
For anthropologists of capitalism, this quantification is a boon. It means that we don’t have to work hard to study capitalist power. Why? Because elites do the measurement for us. They quantify their power using the ritual of capitalization. Then they broadcast this power to the world in the form of stock prices. To analyze capitalist power, we need only to remove our ideological shackles."