(1)
On 18 Mar 2019, at 22:24, Brian Holmes wrote:
Ted, I like how you look at disputes from all sides, both for the
intrinsic
interest of the meta-discussion, and because you put a finger on the
very
existence of the dispute. For me it boils down to the old question
about
critique, what it is, how it works, why anyone would engage in such a
thing.
<...>
thanks for the meta, Brian
Brian, to put it more bluntly, when it comes to critical discussions of
aviation forensics, you are — by your own standards — out of your
depth and in the same boat as the legions of just-add-water experts who
opine on every subject that's trending on social media. I'm hardly an
expert, but I have spent years reading widely about how aviation has
reconstructed humanity at every level, from the cognition of
instrumentation design, to the history of crash-test dummies, to
divergent philosophies for building failsafe systems, to debates about
how aviation is transforming geopolitics and even history. Hence the
mini annotated bibliography at the end of my mail. So it's funny to read
that you 'look for something analogous in discursive spaces like this'
and 'stand for a critique of the relations between capitalism and
complex systems' — then thank *me* for being 'meta'?! Morlock's
comparison of Boeing's marketing of critical safety features with luxury
finishes on cars nailed it. More than that, it's the kind of insight
that can and should become a rallying cry in efforts to rein in
megacorps that treat human lives with leather gearshifts as fungible. I
guess we could say that comparison happens in a 'discursive space,' but
posh abstractions like that suggest this problem is somehow new and in
need of vanguardist theorizing. It isn't and doesn't. On the supply
side, this 737 fiasco is just one more chapter in longstanding labor
struggles for safe workplaces. Much as the flight attendants' AFA union
played a pivotal role in ending Trump's government shutdown, I suspect
that combined statements from the AFA and APFA (the American Airlines FA
union) that their member won't be forced to fly in 737s sparked the
Trump admin's sudden turnaround on the 737. On the demand side, the
tradeoff between safety and 'extra' features was clear enough in 1954 to
be the punchline of the Daffy Duck cartoon "Design for Leaving": after
Porky Pig pushes the 'big wed button' marked IN CASE OF TIDAL WAVE in
his newly <cough>automated</cough> home, elevating it hundreds of feet
on a retractable pylon, Daffy Duck appears outside his door in a
helicopter and says, "For a small price I can install this little blue
button to get you down."
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x34az2i
More generally, entire swaths of current 'technology' debates — about
automation and IoT, 'adversarial' this and that, how advertising is
subverting democracy, etc, etc – are naive historical reenactments of
front-page debates from the mid-1950s. Lots of factors enable that
naivete, and voguish talk about 'complexity' is one of them. It's not an
accident that complexity became a pop phenomenon starting in the '80s:
corporations love it because it emphasizes the power of inexorable and
inevitable systems rather than our 'simple' power to change them. Sure,
the rise of computation made the math needed to explore complexity is
more widely accessible; but the idea that what matters is the secret
mathematical kinship between the patterns of capillaries in our retinas
and the structure of whatever we're looking at — tree roots or urban
spaces or networks — is mostly mystification, barely a step above
staring at a fractal screensaver. So, when you say you 'stand for a
critique of the relations between capitalism and complex systems,' I
agree — just not in the way you intended. Effective critique stands
*against* that mystification.
(2)
On 23 Mar 2019, at 6:54, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
friends, call me over-sensitive, but i think that nobody should be
burned at the stake for anything in any country; i say this also
because this flippant kind of rhetoric poisons the reasonable debate
that is so urgently needed on the matters at issue here. (to the
contrary, i am glad that some civilised countries find forms of
punishment other than that for actual wrongdoing.) - unfortunately, in
a world where people get imprisoned and killed for all sorts of
things, there is little room for such dark humour... when all the
stakes have been taken down everywhere, we'll be able to laugh about
this joke again, perhaps.
Andreas, you're over-sensitive. Much as Brian's flight into abstraction
misdirected discussion away from concrete facts and struggles, your
focus on the brutality of Morlock's remark — which I'm pretty sure was
a figure of speech, not a specific advocacy for burning at the stake
over drawing and quartering or crucifixion — misdirects it away from
what matters most: penetrating the corporate veils that limit liability.
If multinational corporate sovereignty is to be a key part of the new
global regime, we need concrete strategies for isolating and punishing
corporate criminality. Boeing's reputation has suffered: another
airline, Garuda, canceled a $6B order for ~50 737s, and more are likely
to follow. But minimizing shareholder value isn't enough. We need
regulatory systems with teeth as sharp as those used in war-crimes
tribunals. Polite anti-corporate rhetoric won't change anything, but
identifying specific culprits within corporations and making them pay
dearly for their crimes will change everything. Best of all, it can be
applied to other imponderables like massive-scale fraud, environmental
degradation, arms manufacture, abuses of privacy, and all the rest. For
that reason, it *will* have broad-base popular support, sooner or later.
The first question is what will finally trigger it, and the second
question is whether we've laid solid groundwork for effective
progressive responses.
And that begs an important question that leftoids aren't prepared to
answer because, in a nutshell, they're allergic to power: what *would*
be appropriate punishments for people who, under color of corporate
activity, engage in indiscriminate abuses of public trust.
Cheers,
Ted
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