So Argentina is in big trouble, it seems.
It all sounds like the economy fell victim to many things, each of which
was something that Wasn't Supposed To Happen. Reminds me of something
Ilya said:
"Imagine that you cannot start your car because it ran out of gas, the
battery is dead, the key broke, the garage door won't open and your
driver's license expired."
It sure didn't help that the wealthy investors were tipped off that everyone's bank accounts were going to be semi-frozen to prevent a run on the banks; and being tipped off, they ran on the banks, presumably depleting the reserves that all the normal people would use -- so essentially "the rich people took all the money away", so now the country still has lots of worth (material assets, skills, etc), but money stops working as a good medium for, er, tokenizing worth. (As a friend of mine said, "can't they just put more quarters in the machine?".) So a
clunky
barter economy returns -- which is great until you have to pay the light bill.
Interesting to note that weird economies are an important part of Bruce Sterling's work. Consider the AI-Tamagotchi-directed gift economy in "Maneki Neko" in A Good Old-fashioned Future.
Interesting turn of phrase I saw today: "This world of hundreds of millions of English speakers seems in its unstoppable immensity to [the French] to be consigning France to a sort of museum culture." I don't think it took the English-speaking world (i.e., Earth, depending on how you look at it) to make France a museum culture. Every society on its own does a fine job of trying to make itself into a museum culture.
Nice little article that was. I must say however that I would have to consider it bad style to name it after a Jean Baudrillard quote (and what's more, to refer to him in the text) as he's probably the most benighted self-labelled intellectual in France, possibly farther. Not that I disagree with him, -- he spends way too much time hiding total lack of ideas or content under pythic formulations for me to even have an opinion on what he says -- he really is quite simply stupid.
It is also wrong that no opinion that isn't anchored in the left bank (for those that don't know, that's the posh-arty south of Paris. The "left" part isn't political, otherwise I'd be living there) is disregarded. Left bank culture hasn't changed since Sartre. Nowadays, I'd go to parts of the right bank for interesting things (which is why I live in the 11th district).
As for the museum culture? Hmmmm, I think they'll just go away
Re:Fetishism of the cultural heritage
TorgoX on 2002-01-06T14:13:32
I was tempted to say that the current state of the French intelligentsiyyat is the result of France being a country with one and only one "real" city; but England (with really just London) doesn't seem to have this problem, whereas Italy (many cities barely on speaking terms with eachother) does seem to have a similar problem, I think. So nevermind that idea.But at least Italy has been mercifully less successful that France at exporting its pinheads and quote-machines, with the possible exception of Ummy Eco.
I think that if the US gubmint signs a landmine nonproliferation treaty, the French gubmint should sign a "semiotics" nonproliferation treaty.
Re:Fetishism of the cultural heritage
darobin on 2002-01-07T16:17:46
*LOL*. Possibly, yes. Rhetoric Science is, after all, a true martial art.
However this year in France is one big election year (parliament and presidential), so I wouldn't count on it before 2003... in fact, I'd count on very high semiotic tides circa March-June this year. Oh, the fun it's going to be...
