The public-versus-private debate reduces citizens to investors and consumers
Evidence
It is already a symptom of the vanishing value and lexicon for public things that such questions today are generally converted to a different one, namely, the role of government versus the private sector for the provision of goods and services. In this conversion, government is not identified with the public, but only as an alternate market actor. Citizens, meanwhile, are rendered as investors or consumers, not as members of a democratic polity who share power and certain common goods, spaces, and experiences. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 358
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the discourse-theory tradition (Laclau, Mouffe, Habermas’s colonization of the lifeworld) about how language frames political possibility. — connects to: Democracy and markets both reduce choosers to interchangeable statistical objects — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 738; Surveillance capitalism is collapsing the distinction between private and public life — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1504; Market ideology fragments classes into individual consumers and hides production (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Democracy and markets both reduce choosers to interchangeable statistical objects
#expands(0.82) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 738 - Digital media blur the private-public boundary even though its structural basis persists
#complicates(0.80) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 22 - Surveillance capitalism is collapsing the distinction between private and public life
#complicates(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1504 - Market ideology fragments classes into individual consumers and hides production
#expands(0.75)