Yves here. Yanis Varoufakis frames this piece by recounting how his father, who worked initially in supervisory positions in a steel factory, made Greek antiquities a focus of his private life. Yanis’ obituary for his father gives a much clearer picture of Georgios Varoufakis’ interests than the article below does:
From 1959 until almost his life’s end, in parallel with his demanding position at Halyvourgiki, he began systematically to study the erosion of the ancient bronze statues of Kouros and Artemis that are on display at the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus. Those metallurgical and experimental studies developed into a doctoral dissertation which he successfully defended at the University of Athens, which awarded him his doctorate in 1965.
From 1965, and with the collaboration of leading archaeologists, he continued to study ancient metal finds and to publish original works in Greece and abroad. Among them were:
- The Mycenaean Metal Finds of Perati – in collaboration with professor and member of the Athens Academy Spyros Iakovidis
- The Steel Spears of the Geometric Era – in collaboration with academician G. Mylonas
- The Study of Inscriptions Around the Quality Control of Metals and the Authenticity of the Silver Attic Coins of the 4th century BC – together with Ronald Stroud
- The Study of the Famous Derveni Crater – in the study of which he collaborated with renowned archaeologist Manolis Andronikos – and which he presented at the British Museum
- 45 Figurines of the Minoan Era of Crete
- Raw Materials for the Casting of Figurines in Kythira
In 1979, George Varoufakis submitted a dissertation entitled “Chemical and Metallurgical Research Around 19 Iron Tripods of the Geometric Era”, which resulted in the award of the title of Lecturer and, in 1982, Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Athens.
His research took another important turn when he focused on the steel rods holding the Parthenon and the Erechtheion together; rods that run through the large marble volumes of the cornice and the base of the temples. That study was published mainly in the Journal of the Historical Metallurgy Society and changed the way archaeologists appreciated the knowledge and skills of ancient technologists. He then researched the iron links of the temple of the Bank of Aegio and Epicurean Apollo in an attempt to assess the evolution of technology from the archaic to the classical era. It was at that time that scientific societies invited him to present his research works abroad, including in Cyprus, at the British Museum in in London, Prague, Zurich, Sicily, the USA, etc.
In his new article, Yanis only describes the intensity of his father’s interest in ancient Greek sculpture and architecture, not to tout his accomplishments but to demonstrate that working people, whether laborers or administrative staff, had clearly delineated job hours and the ability to define how to live on ones private time. What Yanis does not add is that in the old world of the heyday of manufacturing, most factories offered steady, stable work at a high enough wage rate to pay for the necessities o life. Lambert has recounted that one of his first jobs, in a yarn mill, paid enough for him to rent an apartment, pay for his transportation and meals, and have enough left for modest entertainment. That was once normal for entry-level, full time positions.
I lived in a series of paper mill towns growing up, people worked set hours and had time for hobbies and avocations, be it playing amateur sports, gardening, music, crafts, or participation in community groups. Yanis frames that loss in terms of the young needing to brand themselves to survive professionally, as in find and then present an identity. He argues that that’s eroded the private space that employees could formerly preserve under capitalism.
While Yanis does describe an important social pathology, I think the roots are much simpler. People in white and even many pink collar jobs are expected to be on call, making it difficult to organize private time and commit to group activities or pursue interests in a concerted manner. A classic union shift job might allow for more predictable private….but how many of those are left? In other words, I agree with Yanis that technology is at the root of this change, but that it’s the Internet enabling employers making unreasonable time demands, as opposed to social media’s impact on identity.
By Yanis Varoufakis. Originally published at his website
Only a comprehensive reconfiguration of property rights over the increasingly cloud-based instruments of production, distribution, collaboration, and communication can rescue the foundational liberal idea of liberty as self-ownership. Reviving the liberal individual thus requires precisely what liberals detest: a revolution.
ATHENS – My father was the epitome of the liberal individual, a splendid irony for a lifelong Marxist. To make a living, he had to lease his labor to the boss of a steel plant in Eleusis. But during every lunch break he wandered blissfully in the open-air backyard of the Archaeological Museum of Eleusis, where he luxuriated in the discovery of ancient steles full of clues that antiquity’s technologists were more advanced than previously thought.
Following his return home, at just after 5 p.m. every day, and a late siesta, he would emerge ready to share in our family life and to write up his findings in academic articles and books. His life at the factory was, in short, neatly separated from his personal life.
It reflected a time when even leftists like us thought that, if nothing else, capitalism had granted us sovereignty over ourselves, albeit within limits. However hard one worked for the boss, one could at least fence off a portion of one’s life and, within that fence, remain autonomous, self-determining, free. We knew that only the rich were truly free to choose, that the poor were mostly free to lose, and that the worst slavery was that of anyone who had learned to love their chains. Still, we appreciated the limited self-ownership we had.
Young people today have been denied even this small mercy. From the moment they take their first steps, they are taught implicitly to see themselves as a brand, yet one that will be judged according to its perceived authenticity. (And that includes potential employers: “No one will offer me a job,” a graduate told me once “until I have discovered my true self.”) Marketing an identity in today’s online society is not optional. Curating their personal lives has become some of the most important work young people do.
Before posting any image, uploading any video, reviewing any movie, sharing any photograph or tweet, they must be mindful of whom their choice will please or alienate. They must somehow work out which of their potential “true selves” will be found most attractive, continually testing their opinions against their notion of what the average opinion among online opinion-makers might be. Because every experience can be captured and shared, they are continually consumed by the question of whether to do so. And even if no opportunity actually exists for sharing the experience, that opportunity can readily be imagined, and will be. Every choice, witnessed or otherwise, becomes an act in the careful construction of an identity.
One need not be a leftist to see that the right to a bit of time each day when one is not for sale has all but vanished. The irony is that the liberal individual was snuffed out neither by fascist brownshirts nor by Stalinist commissars. It was killed off when a new form of capital began to instruct youngsters to do that most liberal of things: be yourself. Of all the behavioral modifications that what I call cloud capital has engineered and monetized, this one is surely its overarching and crowning achievement.
Possessive individualism was always detrimental to mental health. The techno-feudal society that cloud capital is fashioning made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that provided the liberal individual with a refuge from the labor market. Cloud capital has shattered the individual into fragments of data, an identity comprising choices expressed by clicks, which its algorithms are able to manipulate in ways no human mind can grasp. It has produced individuals who are not so much possessive as possessed, or rather persons incapable of self-possession. It has diminished our capacity to focus by co-opting our attention.
We have not become weak-willed. No, our focus has been hijacked by a new ruling class. And because the algorithms embedded in cloud capital are known to reinforce patriarchy, invidious stereotypes, and pre-existing oppression, the most vulnerable – girls, the mentally ill, the marginalized, and the poor – suffer the most.
If fascism taught us anything, it is our susceptibility to demonizing stereotypes and the ugly attraction (and potency) of emotions like righteousness, fear, envy, and loathing that they arouse in us. In our contemporary social reality, the cloud brings us face to face with the feared and loathed “other.” And because online violence seems bloodless and anodyne, we are more likely to respond to this “other” with taunting, demeaning language and bile. Bigotry is techno-feudalism’s emotional compensation for the frustrations and anxieties we experience in relation to identity and focus.
Comment moderators and hate-speech regulation can’t stop this brutalization because it is intrinsic to cloud capital, whose algorithms optimize for the cloud rents that flow more copiously toward Big Tech’s owners from hatred and discontent. Regulators cannot regulate artificial-intelligence-driven algorithms that even their authors cannot understand. For liberty to have a chance, cloud capital needs to be socialized.
My father believed that finding something timelessly beautiful to focus on, as he did while wondering among the relics of Greek antiquity, is our only defense from the demons circling our soul. I have tried to practice this over the years in my own way. But in the face of techno-feudalism, acting alone, isolated, as liberal individuals will not get us very far. Cutting ourselves off from the internet, switching off our phones, and using cash instead of plastic is no solution. Unless we band together, we will never civilize or socialize cloud capital – and never reclaim our own minds from its grip.
And herein lies the greatest contradiction: Only a comprehensive reconfiguration of property rights over the increasingly cloud-based instruments of production, distribution, collaboration, and communication can rescue the foundational liberal idea of liberty as self-ownership will require. Reviving the liberal individual thus requires precisely what liberals detest: a new revolution.