One of the major collateral damage effects of information as both money and a commodity is that the science establishment here, and in other countries one suspects, suffers exactly what you'd expect when the process of finding useful, new, information becomes saturated with many of the contradictions that afflict society in general within electrified Capitalism.
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, within a context of wonder and curiosity, so that we can better understand, and appreciate, everything around us, is similar, I think, to the need of humans to interact socially in a host of more generally spontaneous, and organic ways; interactions that help us to not only better know our neighbors, but to also be able to find tolerant grounds for cooperation so that we have loving structure to live and grow within.
But then we throw money, and the absolute requirement for net gain, into all of the workings of our lives and suddenly you have a toxic kind of abstraction in not only what motivates to make choices every day, but also structures the forms of interaction that take away any pretext that there should be deeper kinds of needs that ought to be a part of what motivates us. Here all that matters is a ledger sheet of bottom line logic; a logic that dictates that the only question you should be asking yourself all of the time is whether what I do next will result in something that will profit the capitalizer, and myself, so that further profit can be obtained.
You need only read what the scientists who participated in the poll conducted for the article linked below had to say about what has happened to science to see the truth in this. It is disheartening for me especially as it only serves to remind one of the general metaphor of what is happening to life in general because of an economic operating system long past its use by date.
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