This is an intricate text with a lot of angles on the subject - not a
bad thing, since the subject in question is now 4,500 people! I want to
look behind just one sentence:
"From the beginning, <nettime> served as an environment for
experimentation with the new medium and, beyond that, as a collaborative
platform to prepare publications outside of it."
In terms of publication, Ted and Felix are firstly talking about the
"Zentralkomittee" readers that were published in the early days of
nettime. But there is a more informal and sometimes unacknowledged type
of collaborative writing that emerges from this kind of list, which is
also worth some attention. For example, "my" texts on cybernetics in the
mid-2000s were to a certain degree products of list-wide debates, as I
usually indicated somewhere in the footnotes to the published versions.
I also had the great experience of launching a collaborative project on
the subject of Technopolitics through mailing-list exchanges with Armin
Medosch and others (that project didn't actually start here, but nettime
has been the most important venue for written debate about those
issues). I would be curious to know if some others have had interesting
experiences with this type of informal collaboration?
As noted last April Fools', there will be good reasons for fresh
conceptual collaborations in the future. The neoliberal order with its
bewildering anarcho-libertarian ideology is on the way out. We are
headed toward a new state-form based on third-order cybernetics, or
general ecology, in which finely grained data on global populations will
be used to repress those populations, but also to facilitate and channel
behaviors more adaptive to the overall earth system. As resource use
continues to grow, survival issues will increasingly make earth-system
dynamics into an ultimate reference point, directly present and
determinant for all experience, yet not susceptible of direct control.
This leads to fundamental epistemological shifts, with many cascading
effects on human-machine combinations (we cyborgs, I mean). Of course,
the second-order paradigm of multiple autonomous agents modeling each
others' behavior will never entirely disappear, just as the first-order
logic of command, communication and control has never ceased to govern
individual machine systems. First-order cybernetics was exemplified by a
missile seeking its target; and the second order, by a bunch of
hedge-funds making wild bets according to their speculative models of
their rivals' wild bets. I think both of those cases will look very
different from whatever kind of system emerges to coordinate, say, the
movement of millions of driverless cars through a busy urban region.
While neither finance or war are likely to disappear, many new forms of
continental- and global-level coordination are likely to take hold,
affecting not just states and governments, but also individual agents
relating to each other through densely patterned networks.
Continental-scale smart grids for distributed electricity production are
one possible example of a new kind of large-scale system, and
potentially a crucial one. But I would look further to novel forms of
water recylcing, emissions control and even weather modulation, not to
mention a total embrace of identity control by the included classses,
panic-dampening efforts during political-economic crises, etc. Silicon
Valley remains the most obvious candidate to invent, commercialize and
roll out the early versions of these systems; but Silicon Valley itself
will become an ever-more global complex, increasingly shaped by a
globally inegrated state-form. I don't say all this is for the better,
nor necessarily for the worst. I say it's likely to happen. Wouldn't it
be interesting to analyze this gradual metamorphosis?
The Technopolitics project was designed as a kind of observatory or
distributed digital Wunderblock to keep tabs on the ways that the world
is reacting to the financial crisis and the subsequent period of
economic stagnation and military chaos, which is not yet over. Now,
however, it looks to me as though inter-state cooperation (or what used
to be called "inter-imperialist cooperation") will succeed in overcoming
the contradictions of capitalism once more, setting the stage for
massive new rounds of infrastructure building accompanied by the
emergence of previously unimaginable organizational forms and new
cultural-ideological horizons as well. The crucial intervention so far
has been the unprecedented injection of some 12 trillion USD into the
global monetary system by central banks, which know very well what each
other are doing. The next crucial intervention will be to actually *do*
something coherent with that money. In other words, look forward to
attempts at orchestrating global economic productivity, somewhat at the
US and the Allies did during WWII and in the decade thereafter. The
collapse of the American security system in the Middle East, the
desperate gambits of Russia and the military growing pains of China have
yet to be surmounted; but i think they will be. Global corporations will
obviously survive and thrive through this process, and they will
administrate most of the coming investment wave. However, I think that
key aspects of the coming round of global development will be
orchestrated by the new inter-state/inter-imperialist order, in order to
coordinate production/consumption and provide earth-system level
services for all included populations. Who will do this? A consortium of
countries including China. Whether the US or the EU will be part of it,
I don't know. In short, the 21st century is not likely to be your
grandpa's political economy!
I don't expect any recognizable pattern to become visible for a decade
or more; but it is likely that that the decisive breakthroughs of the
future are actually being invented right now, without us knowing it.
First-order cybernetics was analyzed, critiqued and subverted in the
Sixties and Seventies, and second-order forms were at the heart of our
concerns in the Nineties and the Noughties. Don't you think a Third Age
of net-critique is dawning? Who wants to have a go at that one?
curiously, Brian
***
Cybernetics essays ("Dark Crystals" section):
https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/book-materials
Two forks of Technopolitics:
http://www.thenextlayer.org/technopolitics_group
http://threecrises.org
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