The Killer Jargon of #SXSWi, Part 1: WTH Are You Talking About?

South by Southwest, or SXSW, as it is more commonly known these days (or #SXSW, as it more commonly appears in online references these days) is now underway, with the Interactive portion of the festival, or #SXSWi, having begun this past Thursday. I attended this part of the event as a full-fledged badge holder in 2012 and 2013, and I may do so again some day, but there is also some value in observing the festivities from afar.

One aspect of SXSWi that particularly jumps out at me is the near-total inscrutability of much of its news and gossip, especially with regard to the quest to be this year’s “it” app. Take this headline, posted to Facebook by my friend Jen: “Twitter cuts Meerkat off from its social graph just as SXSW gets started.”

Literally nothing in that headline, or the comments to Jen’s post, makes any sense at all without heaping amounts of context. I initially just assumed that Meerkat and Periscope are companies, or apps, or websites, or programming languages, or something else tech-y. It’s just funny how the tech world has normalized jargon so much. Continue reading

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The Fallacy of the “Free Market”

The Gloomy Historian explains how it is a mistake to view the “free market” as some sort of independent, even natural entity, rather than a system of rules backed and enforced by government and others. Here’s a snippet:

When abstractions are spoken of as real things, we call it reification. Reification is a semantic fallacy, but its use is sometimes necessary when one wants to communicate complex realities with considerably less words. However, a semantic fallacy, if not challenged, can go on to support faulty conceptualizations of reality, especially once it seeps into discourse. The special problem in this case is that the reification complements an ideology, one that rejects the natural and necessary role of the government in the maintenance of the economy. If expressed as a thing, “free market” can be thought of as being interfered with or kept from its natural activities. If expressed as an entity, it can be given agency, rationality, and rights. We often talk about government intrusions in the personal lives of people. For some, a worse offense is when the government intrudes in the free market.

But this conveys a faulty conception of reality. As Robert Reich states: “Government doesn’t ‘intrude’ on the free market. It defines and organizes (and often reorganizes) it.” In reality, an economy is the product of an infrastructure of law that is created, maintained, and enforced by the government. It is an extension of the state for the purpose of ordering the complex human interactions that occur with economic activity. And with the constant growth and complexity of technology, which puts economic relations in flux and opens loop holes for economic actors to exploit, these interactions need to be monitored regularly and the laws adjusted accordingly. The “free market” is not a thing with a right to existence and freedom from molestation; it is a name for something that does not exist without the state and whose quality is wholly dependent upon the laws that form it.

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