Round about

Watching the World Cup, a friend wondered aloud just how much these kind of events cost industry. After a moment, I realised what was wrong with this, the standard view.

People do not exist to provide human resources to industry. Leisure, culture and family are not, in the wide view, costs to business. Society is not something that should be hammered and bent until it accords to the shape of the economic machine. Business, industry and economic arrangements are machines, social machines for sure, but inventions of human ingenuity nonetheless. I am a Luddite. To allow machines to shape us, rather than us them, indeed, to build an ideology – an understanding of the workings of the world – that inverts the only justifiable hierarchy of human and machine, is arse over tête.