Re: nettime Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom
The unasked question was: why is youtube/google keeping all the viewing logs? From: Nettime's avid reader [EMAIL PROTECTED] oh, the joys of centralization :) # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Some reflections on global mapping
These are some important (to me) questions you are asking here and you are asking them in the right way. Elsewhere on brianholmes.wordpress.com you mention that both dialogue with other interested actors and less than paranoid attempts to understand how governmentality is operating or understanding itself on its own terms is also a positive and even hopeful activity. I wholeheartedly agree and I highly recommend that people read Brian's blog. I don't know that I always comprehend Brian's articulate mappings or that I even give myself the time and energy to fully work through his thinking, but the little understanding I have managed to wrangle is something. I can say that Brian is honestly doing the work of attempting to understand and live, and doing it well. An important part of it is how an aesthetic framing allows for reading across discourses. At a meta-critical level, I don't really see enough effort in such figures as Naomi Klein for example. Doug Henwood's review of her latest attempts to understand geoeconomics are spot on see the leftbusinessoberver.com. She is just not doing the work. She quite simply falls into the trap of personality as well as the fact that she does not do even the most rudimentary economic homework. A disavowal of the personality level of politics, and even dare I say it of the state as personality seems to me to clear the ground for understanding geo political economy quite a bit. Remove the personality players (Obama, Mcain, Bush, Brown, Blair, etc.), (Brown is perfect here) remove the Anglophone only empire idea, and you begin to see why even though every local person should indeed vote for the most liberal of Liberals available, governmentality is effectively globalized. In short, the G8 is empire. The mainstream left is a I don't really want to know population, an example of which is France whose government quietly does the work of the war on terror, and whose populace can pretend that George Boosh is some kind of unilateral madman. Brian captures something of the ways that we want to be fooled, the ways we don't want to know what is done in the name of security. The ways that much of what purports to understand the our present condition only masks it further. What is masked by the sheer mass of idiot facts? Or how does the mass of idiot facts mask? Examples do come to mind: Sey Hersh in the New Yorker writes yet another piece about the war in and with Iran. It is another access journalism feed from the Agency and part of some kind internecine battle within the war on terror masked as some kind of threat of conventional war with Iran. Page after page says almost nothing. Quite simply what is masked here is politics again. Politics and the ongoing urban, political war with Iran masked as the threat of conventional war and covert operations. It is not really important that Hersh is playing the agency's game, that he is their tool. He surely knows it. Is he so literal as to never want to ask or mention the larger question of how Iran is also empire, also an enormous state apparatus run and mobilized in a so-similar cynical way. Perhaps the only difference is that Tehran is ironically enough less literal and more politically savvy than Washington or London. Politics is masked. What would fall under the rubric of politics is masked. Why and how? On Thu, Jul 03, 2008 at 11:35:54AM +0200, Brian Holmes wrote: dr. w wrote this to me: re: Sovereign Wealth Funds and the current global restructure, I’m struggling to keep up with it all, things move so quick now it seems, it is nearly impossible to develop a ‘map’ Indeed, is there any point to it? ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Some reflections on global mapping
Ed, I too continue to learn a lot from Brian. His effort to engage with and understand our world takes him on one of the great journeys. If I say that it is a romantic quest, this is meant to enhance its value. After all, when structures break down, it no longer works to seek to adapt to the system. All each of us can do is to improve what is between our ears in the hope of being able to respond to circumstances more effectively, perhaps even to participate in new patterns of association. Romantics tell stories because narrative better captures the movement of life than other forms of thinking. Why replace the fluidity of story-telling with a map? A map is a static object, one thing out there, a visualisation of an encompassing idea like neoliberalism or global capitalism. But of course Brian also tells wonderful stories. Edward Said once suggested that life gives us so many cultural fragments and our task is to make a story out of them. I would say that we internalize society wherever we have lived and writing (not only, but mainly) gives us a chance to make a partial object of that experience that we can reflect on and share with others. For me this is a religious activity in Durkheim's sense, an endless traffic between inside and outside, the known and the unknown, conscious and unconscious, in search of meaningful connection. Brian's travel programme gives him a great chance to excavate an expanded vision of society, if he ever gets time to reflect on it. That's my problem too. Politics is masked. The most important and difficult task for all of us is to understand how we belong to others in society (big Emile again). The aim of ideology is to make it even more difficult. There is no question that the ideology driving world economy over the last three decades has masked the political conditions of that domination. But surely the current financial meltdown undermines such an operation. I would say that, just as the pendulum swung quickly from state to market in the late 70s, the reverse movement is rapidly under way now. The trick is to figure out where the state is these days or rather could be: central banks acting alone and together; sovereign funds bailing out failed banks; the dollar assets held by Asian governments; regional trading blocs like the EU; the American empire with or without a new president; countries like France, Iran, Brazil and China; OPEC; the Bretton Woods institutions or their replacements; the FT 500 corporations. The multitude or countless social movements around the world need to come to grips with some or all of these. Clearly deregulation allowed looting on a massive scale and something will have to be done to regulate the looters. How or where? That is what I mean by 'the state'. We are in for turbulent times when I suspect that politics will become less opaque, often in quite unpleasant ways. Against fascism and war, a revival of redistributive politics at appropriate levels of world society would be one strategy. Promoting the voluntary reciprocity of decentralized groups another. But we need both. All the economic possibilities are already there to be built on. Embracing the idea of capitalism as a totality only makes it harder to see that. Our challenge is to make new institutional combinations with a new emphasis. That raises the question of the relationship between politics and intellectual life, but not for this post. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
