Alex Wright

Why you don't meet too many Marxist UE consultants

July 21, 2004

from The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception:

Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalise it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. All of which is a bit too lefty-Marxist-theoretical for me, but still a good read that gives one pause to ponder the politics of engineering experience - and whether the whole User Experience business, for all that warm-fuzzy humanist rhetoric, is irretrievably bound up with Capitalist coercion? File under: biting the hand.

File under: User Experience

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