Sock Puppets on Neoliberal Society

Posted by Kieran Healy

Via Wicked Anomie. Imagine Sifl and Olly with less slacking and more social theory.

posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 2:48 am
comments

  1. Speaking of sock puppets, here’s a hilarious story about a corporate quarterly earnings conference call hoaxster, from the weekend WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120301945499169247.html?mod=home_we_banner_left

    I for one think “Joe Herrick” is Michael Berube, wasting time he could be using to learn French!

    Posted by DB · February 17th, 2008 at 3:39 am

  2. Amazing.

    Posted by yoyo · February 17th, 2008 at 4:59 am

  3. Two nice bits of product placement too . . .

    Posted by Nick · February 17th, 2008 at 10:17 am

  4. What they’re describing there – is it really the essence of neoliberalism, or is it more like propaganda, ideological indoctrination accompanying neoliberal policies?

    Posted by abb1 · February 17th, 2008 at 11:08 am

  5. the creators are from the Austrian group monochrom.
    an echo from the Austrian Marxists with google and ipod mixed in?

    Posted by wolfgang · February 17th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

  6. Boingboing also covered this. From the comments:

    Our puppet piece is not directly dealing with economic theory, it is dealing with the shift in power structures. It’s a brief summary of Foucault’s concept of the -> “disciplinary society” and Deleuze’s adaption of Foucault’s ideas (-> “society of control”).

    So it isn’t Marxist per se. Also from the comments Zuzu makes the observation:

    This is tagged funny because they perpetuate the myth of the Labor Theory of Value, right?

    The problem with Neo-Liberalism is the cognitive dissonance between the Classical Liberal theory espoused and the manner “privatization” is put into practice—which more accurately would be called Corporatism.

    Which seems to me to be a very accurate assessment.

    Posted by noen · February 17th, 2008 at 7:06 pm

  7. Anybody who rips off Avenue Q is doing something right. (See The Internet Is For Porn as performed by one Trekkie Monster.)

    Posted by Chris Ashley · February 17th, 2008 at 7:14 pm

  8. The imitations of Kermit and Cookie Monster were pretty good.

    Posted by Walt · February 18th, 2008 at 6:25 am

  9. Noen @6, there’s “dissonance” between classical liberalism and neoliberalism because the relationship between the two is very superficial. Allow me to try the patience of the administrators of this good blog to plug an old(ish) post of mine from last week on defining neoliberalism.

    Posted by a very public sociologist · February 18th, 2008 at 12:11 pm