hello Max
I got a similar thought from Patrice: that a stressed society is perfect raw
material for manufacturing anxieties. Whether aesthetic or rational education
are enough to counter the effects of the last financial crisis and the one to
come, and to counter (here I agree with David Harvey) the increasingly
successful attempt to reverse the gains of the last 100 years since the Russian
revolution and restore a pre-1914 gap between rich and poor - well, that's a
question
Maybe those older solutions, stretching back in Europe through Habermas and the
Bauhaus to Rousseau and Schiller, have to be rewritten. This is the message of
Greta Thunberg's inspiration to the next generation - rethinking the world
/with/ the world.
Mindfulness is rather off my radar but many of the psycho-spiritual techniques
my generation experimented with tended to be therapies for a self whose
centrality to the myths of success and consumption are a symptom (if not a
cause) of the same forces driving us to crisis.
what if the core problem is over-production? The conversion from mass transit
to private cars solved the 1929 crisis by making oil king; the oil crisis that
began in 1973 has been ":solved" by the information economy, personal
computers, and the same built-in obsolescence.
Over-consumption (and uneven distribution) are symptoms of over-production:
reducing consumption wouldn't stop over-production, which is built in to
capital.
And maybe - just for a quasi-humorous thought experiment - the Swiss challenge
is that wholly admirable topics like reforming prison finance, slowing urban
sprawl, and revisions to gun control (2019's initiatives) do not address other
key issues like the notorious secrecy of the banking system, and the alleged
criminal use of the Geneva Freeport, or other massive problems. Perhaps because
a referendum can only address a /national/ issue?
As David's post about the EMA points out, there's a huge architecture of
governance at global levels (including the internet!). Maybe the next political
revolution would have to start at that level of expert-managed global
infrastructures - thew logistocs of supply chains that Trump's trade war is
throwing into sharp focus; their environmental costs; the management of global
financial flows, electro-technical standards - all things even governments have
little power over (and often little interest in)
So the climate emergency folks are right to demand something new - and the
technical-political question becomes whether it is possible a) to really 'think
globally' while restricting action to the local; and b) how to engage the Alps
/ Arctic / Amazon in their own governance
Currently migrants are governed without a voice in their own government.
Solving that would, for my money, force a profound change in the concept of the
nation-state; perhaps from that and from indigenous struggles for recognition
in settler colonies we might begin to find models for global political
engagement - necessarily requiring political-technical invention because time
is so short
bring back the poli-technics?
Sean
________________________________
From: Max Herman <maxnmher...@hotmail.com>
Sent: 23 August 2019 21:00
To: Sean Cubitt <s.cub...@gold.ac.uk>; nettime-l@mail.kein.org
<nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs
Interesting points Sean!
Manipulation of behavior is easier technologically when the goal is triggering
anxieties. That is a much more primitive brain-state. Also, since the target
populations are already highly stressed they are all the more susceptible to
fear/hate suggestion and the concomitant primate leader-worship mode. They are
also likely more compulsive about their media usage and more prone to clicking.
The contrary effort is to make people de-triggered, calm, wise, peaceful, and
articulate. This is a far more complex project, and one which requires
long-term effort by the target individual (like building a house as opposed to
setting one on fire). Short term, the wisdom-fostering is slower and weaker
and ever has been, which is why it is not referred to as "pushing someone's
buttons" but rather the opposite.
This opposite, call it calming, teaching, reassuring, enlightening, or, so to
speak, to "soothe the savage breast" might pertain less to technology than to
artistic beauty in the highest and most technology-transcendent sense. Open
cheap technological communication might have a role in allowing a new aesthetic
consciousness to form, but it might be more like teaching or pamphleteering
than cathedral-building because again, some human states are not susceptible to
button-pushing. The UK mindfulness project could be a helpful start; I'd be
curious to hear how that initiative is being received.
One could argue that low-tech pamphleteering and signing off, signing out, are
actually how most of the great transitions and phase-shifts of aesthetic
progress have occurred over history. A new idea is more likely to emerge where
the investment required and constraints imposed are low, than where they are
high. A large, high-budget, high-impact, technology-intensive entity is
sometimes paradoxically less creative (hence Da Vinci, Galileo, James Austin,
and such like).
Is there any way that technology could help bring to more folks the essential
experience of the following, and to associate it with mindfulness, and evoke a
spontaneous pedagogical phenomenon which is both fun (appealing) and rewarding
(restorative)?
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The child is father of the man
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Of course, if the world's most powerful military-economic powers are dead-set
against any type of new aesthetic phase for humanity it can almost certainly be
successfully extirpated. Tolstoy thought something new could happen however,
even though he was largely at a loss to articulate how, and felt great
frustration and ambivalence toward his own corpus in his later years. Perhaps
something like
Shakespeare could be a model for collaboration or at least loyal opposition
between the temporal and artistic powers?
________________________________
From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org> on
behalf of Sean Cubitt <s.cub...@gold.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, August 23, 2019 2:20 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs
Hi Michael
Patrice also contacted me off-list with the same point about Switzerland - and
mentioning the Irish referendum. Solid point.
My problem is the use of media technology, specifically but not exclusively
social media, and opinion polling.
I've no idea why the system works in Switzerland.
But it's clear how it failed in the UK: through the active intervention of
click farms targeting specific anxieties, often with little relevance to the
question at hand. Though UKIP/Brexit Party are rare among EU populists in not
having clear links to Putin, the technology of targeted messaging based on
profiling suggests that the technology does not produce democracy - I'd be
interested to hear whether there is anything different about the Swiss case.
Perhaps extracting the UK from the EU is a more significant goal, seriously
weakening competition for US/Russian hegemony, and so attracts serious money
and - to return to another key term - expertise.
And to repeat: a technology that opened on non-human participation in
collective decisions would be a convincing argument for technological
solutions. Is there anything to look out for?
sean
Sean Cubitt
Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
________________________________
From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org> on
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org>
Sent: 23 August 2019 10:56
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 143, Issue 10
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Message: 2
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 12:56:07 +0100
From: Michael Guggenheim <mi...@bluewin.ch>
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs
Message-ID: <454c8e44-df33-64e5-04fb-b209a3f82...@bluewin.ch>
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I beg to disagree, and I would love to invite you to a trip to
Switzerland, where indeed referenda are held 4 times a year on all kinds
of things, from deciding whether to build a new school or (infamously)
whether to ban minarets. Sometimes you and I may agree or disagree with
an outcome, but the last time I checked, overall policy decisions in
Switzerland were no better or worse (according to my parochial judgment)
than those of any other European country without regular referenda.
When I last checked (a week ago), Switzerland was not "frighteningly
fascistic". In fact, it is the opposite. A simple reason is that if
people are asked in referenda /repeatedly/, they /learn/ how to act in
referenda (including the fact that the state develops complex techniques
for administering them, that overcome the beginner mistakes of the
Brexit referendum (was it advisory or not? What were the options
exactly? etc.). Most importantly, they /do/ get engaged in the relevant
questions and are much better informed about issues. They also have the
possibility to decide case by case whether they agree with a certain
policy, rather than being forced to vote for a party with which they may
agree in some issues bit disagree in others.
(Also ask yourself: Are MPs better informed and do they make better
arguments than random people on the street? Answer: They do not, for the
simple reason that they are not trained to be policy makers).
best
Michael
On 23/08/2019 11:28, Sean Cubitt wrote:
>
> John writes:
>
>
> Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:48:41 -0700
> From: John Preston <wcerf...@riseup.net>
> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
> Subject: Re: <nettime> From Meat Loaf to Penalty Shoot Outs
> Message-ID: <cc9c510bb7d1e7848da3f3df41d85...@riseup.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
>
> Technological development puts pressure on social institutions. We need
> a system of governance which encourages rapid iteration and mass
> participation, two features lacking in our current democracies.
>
> the problem is that referendums are not a viable alternative - partly
> for the reasons David gives: abandonment of evidence, argument or -
> I'd add - a commitment to the good life for all.
>
> Judiciously timed, a referendum on restoring the death penalty would
> succeed in any European country. So would bans on abortion, gay
> marriage, modest dress for Muslim women, immigration, and very
> probably heavy metal
>
> There is surely an arrogance in expertise, and a we-know-best among
> professional politicos. But to exchange that for constant (and
> compulsory?) opinion polling wouldn't change the new problem which is
> exactly that: ubiquitous real-time comment IS government by opinion
> poll, and it is frighteningly fascistic. The new national-populisms
> rely on just such technological by-passes because they know they do
> not construct the public but a plurality of publics, each of which can
> be triggered by the right (usually negative) stimulus - this is the
> whole strategy of social media marketing in the US, UK and across Europe.
>
> Sadly - since it requires far more work - the political solutions are
> the only response?to political problems. Yes, any politics in the 21st
> century must be mediated, and media techniques and technologies impact
> politics just as politics impact on technologies and techniques.
>
> The challenge is to build political media that are in service of the
> good of all - including non-humans --?a medium that allows the Amazon
> a voice, that could be interesting . . . .
>
> Sean
>
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--
----------------------------------
Michael Guggenheim
17 Popham Street
N1 8QW London
UK
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