nettime Interview with Kees van der Pijl: Global Rivalries Today
Our recent interview published in Turkish and English (by Transform) How have global rivalries shaped the world we live in, and how do they continue to affect the way some of the most crucial geopolitical decisions of our time are made? In this interview with renowned political scientist Kees van der Pijl, we look at some of the most pivotal events of recent years, from 9/11 to the Arab Spring and the current crisis in Ukraine, to reveal the surprising underlying forces at work. reproduced at: http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/interview-with-kees-van-der-pijl-global-rivalries-today/ Orsan # 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?
(who is top if you google search engine if not Google themselves?) You'd be surprised. Google not even on the first page... except the last hit is an ad for google search appliance. https://www.google.ca/#q=search+enginesafe=off and ignoring mioneymaking in strategy is the fastest growing financial behemoth ever, merely as an ironic side-effect. This strikes me as wishful thinking. Ignoring moneymaking in strategy?! http://tinyurl.com/mawmeox Like attention is some new commodity that replaces money? Why all the stained glass windows, then, and Sunday church service, not to mention the children saying their prayers before bed every night for the last two thousand years? Hell, you couldn't get your way in the ancient greek Agora without anyone's attention. But what is the purpose of attention-maximization if not the accumulation of more capital? Without money, the Church would have been in a bad position to enforce ideological norms and would have made a bad partner for the violent oligarchy. If all those Sunday worshippers didn't turn into conversions (as they say in web marketing) the Church would have been in trouble. For example, you can no longer ignore the fact that there is an enormous difference in power between somebody with 400,000 Twitter followers and those with merely 10. Unless Twitter deletes their accounts. There's definitely the illusion of power, but I would draw attention to Bruce Sterling's definition of Web 2.0 as favela chic. It's not your real estate, just a few of your belongings that you've smuggled in. You could wake up in the morning to find them on the sidewalk. Certain types of symbolic power can be taken away as quickly as they are handed out by the powers-that-be. http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/10/suspended-senator-patrick-braz eau-arrested-after-police-called-to-his-home-in-gatineau-at-4-a-m/ Someone with 400,000 twitter followers posting rude photos really doesn't have any particularly important power. I mean, Katy Perry? Justin Bieber? Are they more powerful than Barack Obama? He's number three to their one and two. You could say that Perry and Bieber embody normative values that are internalized by the public (their publics, anyway) through performance, consumption and repetition, but that doesn't give Perry or Bieber much more personal power than the lifeless sculptures of idealized humanity in ancient Greece. Privilege, yes, absolutely. But power? I don't think so. Perry can get hired, for instance, to recruit women for the US marines, thus attempting to drive male/female power relations in a new direction, but she is interchangeable in that role, and the power there comes from the money behind the campaign, which of course comes from the state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuwfgXD8qV8list=PLJECfJQljDiWQ3a6YWu9g7hWImJXD1c1T - Flick -- * WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison * FLICK's WEBSITE: http://www.flickharrison.com # 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?
Dear Alexander, I have enjoyed hearing you speak on this topic numerous times and there is one thing I have long wanted to ask regarding the idea that: those who use The Internet to their own advantage and who strengthen their power by successfully creating social networks within which they pursue their social intelligence and trained social skills What I wonder is how does this become quantifiable and meaningful? By your logic, Justin Bieber (51 million followers on Twitter) and Lady Gaga (41.3 million) are the most powerful people on the planet. Is this what you believe? I question this logic. I believe power is not held, it is either resisted or complied with: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ?general politics? of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true? (Foucault, in Rabinow 1991). In this sense the so-called 'netocrats' are not the agents of power, but are its instruments, its police. Celebrities online are authored by millions of people contributing to their personae via a propagated interest realized materially, in this case in a fan-based production composed of images, text and audio. The acceptance of these figures as meaningful and important does not bestow power to anyone. It locks people, (including the celebrities themselves) into webs of trivia and brand-based marketing. Alongside the misrecognition of frequency for agency, Power has always operated in networks. The Medici could not have been the most powerful family in Tuscany without a network of communication, media and bureaucracy that was based on 'Truth' to support and exercise that power. With a massive media system now in place globally we are not seeing a revolution in the network. In fact I would argue that your logic follows a similar path to Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks: Benkler tends to overstate the novelty of social production. Firms, for example, have long employed internal markets; delegated decision rights throughout the organization; formed themselves into networks, clusters, and alliances; and otherwise taken advantage of openness and collaboration. Many different organizational forms proliferate within the matrix of private-property rights. Peer production is not new; rather, the relevant question concerns the magnitude of the changes. - http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=721 I would go on to argue it is the small, the unknown, the rare, secret and the enclosed where power is more likely to be realized in terms of autonomy that can lead to more definite social change and new ideas. Finally in a slightly more paranoid observation, I do not believe the most powerful organizations and people on earth are on Twitter and Facebook. Those that use social media and have roles in powerful organizations, for example the World Economic Forum, (which actually has no policy and decision making powers but does include major stakeholders) are not the superstars of social media. I support this idea with the attached graphic from the last WEF in Davos that shows the tweeting was pitiful - 12 278 in total and most of them coming from the USA (from http://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2014 /social). The smokescreen of truth in the form of mass attention to something that says very little and does not share Power with anyone. Critique remains all we have. /James James Barrett PhD Candidate/Adjunct Department of Language Studies/HUMlab Ume? University Sweden http://about.me/James.G.Barrett # 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?
Dear Flick and James No, money is not the end of all things. Unless you still wear the most popular t-shirt from the 19th century: Whoever has the most money when he dies wins. The end of all things is of course power and not money (cue in a Zizekian manner of course taken from House of Cards). So money will only be at the center of things when and if money can buy you power (which it of course still can and likely always will) but if anything else beats money to power, we would be enormously naive if not taking this into account. Especially if we are sincere about our Marxism as a pathos rather than a strict logos. As for James' question of whether Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are the most powerful people on the planet: Of course not. It is not quantity but quality that counts even in a Google algorithm. It is who you know and not how many you know which maximizes attention. Credbility must always be multiplied with awareness as the basic equation of any information-curating algoritm. And this is of course why we now move into the golden age of the sociogram. Why else would there be free gmail, free facebook and twotter accounts etc in the first place. Come on? This is of course all properly calculated. Nothing is ever for free unless you get a bubble gum from a stranger at Burning Man. And please please please, I'm not saying money is not important. Not in any way whatsoever. And I'm not saying an old power structure is over and done with. We see traces even of the feudal system everyday in our lives today (Islam and Catholicism to name but two of its long-lasting bi-products), but here we are talking of of changes and eventual revolutions in a Bergsonian long duree, but still correct, manner. And attention is creeping in everywhere as a source of power. And how do we study it? Well, just look at what the Silicon Valley behemoths are going after and you will find where the power of attention is heading next. Money is a means to power. And will be, especially as attention can NOT be accumulated to then be traded. It's just that attention is an incredibly complex beast possibly producing a worse class division than anything we have previously seen. It must therefore not be ignored just because models that are not complex enoigh to understand the world today. For example: Was The French Revolution really a revolution, or merely the symptom of the real one (which of course happened in Germany in 1450)? I'm not the slightest bit optimistic about the future. But I believe our best shot as saving the planet, fighting class divisions and alienation etc is a proper netocratic metaphysical system to be developed. My shot is syntheism (what Simon Critchley calls mystical anarchism and Alain Badiou heralds as truth as an act). That's where I'm heading next in my research and literary work. Once that is done, I agree with Zizek and Badiou that we can create another proper symptom of a revolution, And in this activist work, keeping the Internet free and open as much as possible is the truly revolutionary activity of our time. I'm glad Slavoj Zizek finally sees the Pirates as the forebearers of this major movement. All the very best Alexander # 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
