against illiberal education
BUDAPEST-Hungary on Tuesday saw the largest public protest since 2014 as demonstrators rallied against what they see as the populist government's tightening grip on education. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in a rainy Hungarian capital against Prime Minister Viktor Orban's administration, the latest sign of public discontent with governing politicians. A group of teachers, parents and students-speakers at the rally in front of the country's landmark parliament building-called for a one-hour nationwide strike March 30 unless Mr. Orban ensures talks on teachers' demands continue in earnest. http://www.wsj.com/articles/protests-continue-in-hungary-against-governments-education-policies-1458075911 http://www.reuters.com/article/hungary-protest-idUSL5N16N459 for those w r g: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/ungarn-lehrer-protestieren-gegen-viktor-orbans-bildungspolitik-a-1082249.html http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/viktor-orban-diffamiert-migranten-und-kritisiert-europas-fluechtlingspolitik-a-1082441.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Fwd: Re: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance
On 15/Mar/16 09:07, Felix Stalder wrote: The fact that nobody knows how to put all of these things together into a coherent whole, a new techno-economic paradigm, means that these technologies and their associated potential are still open to interpretation and configurations based on particular social experiences . You know, Felix, as one anecdotal example, here on the ground, doing curriculum dev and renewal at The Ecosa Institute (http://ecosa.org) -- a Paolo Soleri-inspired spin-off founded by a British architect, Tony Brown -- I run into quite some naivete and lack of a sense of urgency. Even in the face of the absurd socio-political developments that are happening all around (all the more noticeable here in a bright RED state, Arizona, the source of Barry Goldwater). People supposedly trying to do interesting sustainable-oriented things seem to be slacking around all the time -- listless "trustafarian" students at the local 'alternative' college (http://prescott.edu) just wanting their identity to be cushioned from any shocks. I get little sense of urgency or intensity directed at the problems. There is the passle of grey-headed ecosophs who enjoy their back-country walks (I certainly fall partly under that rubric), but many are too romantically involved with this to, for example, even ponder what's going on in cities, that's why they live out here to begin with. Considering the most holistic systems view, it is impossible to not come to the conclusion that there are too many humans on the planet. I was recently at a packed talk (200 people or so) by the writer Terry Tempest-Williams, revered by many alternative folks (at least out here in the US West), but when she began relating a story of flying to Jackson Hole, and driving around Yellowstone (any drive can't be less than 300km!) in her rental Prius and ending up at a friends 'cabin' drinking French wine on the terrace talking about how great and precious life was ... she lost me ... And monkey-wrenching to deter development in the US West will get you taken out by a drone or F-16 anyway, these days. There are no quadrants in the so-called wilderness of North Amurika that cannot be rapidly gotten to by a well-trained and equipped desert military presence. Not only that, practically every single person I know of, working in the non-profit 'eco' sector lives something of an upper-middle-class life, driving those damn Prius' again, installing PV panels on the roof of a typically large house (with hot-tub), etc etc etc... It seems impossible to overcome -- although guidelines like: Odum, H.T. & Odum, E.C., 2001. A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies, Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. point a certain direction for understanding and living ... (I do have a pdf copy if anyone is interested, contact me off-list)... Perhaps it is a failure of general education system-wide, and that too few people have the intellectual tools to be able to suss out sustainable *wide-scale* solutions. Personally, I wonder if the angstlich search for identity in US college-age kids is a convenient ruse (often) to avoid simply do-ing something, engaging in practices that are life-changing in the surrounding 'real' world. Granted in a country the size of the US there are always multiple exceptions to such pessimistic observations, and in the end, change comes at the microscopic level of daily lived experience, but somehow, the (psychic, psycho-spiritual, and real!) energy to have this occur society-wide just doesn't seem available. Maybe it will take a round of massive violence -- perhaps precipitated by a contested Repub Convention when Trump calls out his 'brown shirts' who are already armed, and the US 'left' will respond in like manner, violence in the streets -- for a trajectory change, or not. But as you see, I'm not optimistic. JH -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Fwd: Re: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance
The question is, does it matter at all? The degree of mind-engagement is irrelevant if not properly coupled with feet-engagement. In other words, whatever you do with your fingers touching plastic surfaces and your eyes scanning electronic screens, your brain constructing fantastic models of could-be worlds, regurgitating those worlds with other plastic-touchers, may be a totally irrelevant honey-trap, if it does not result in your feet taking you somewhere and eventually confronting men with guns. And it does not appear to result in that at all. While it may be hard to accept, no one in position of control gives a flying fuck about these ideas - that's why you can do these idea exercises ad nauseam and publish all you want. The feet coupling is lost. The only way to regain such coupling may be a forced abstaining from plastic-touching. At the same time, there is a whole generation of people experimenting with new social values and forms of being together, centering arounf networked collaboration and complex systems thinking, all-based on digital technology but extending from experimentation # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Fwd: Re: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of
Swarms of little fish being eaten by larger, then those by larger, is happening in many industries as well as among countries. It is hard indeed to find anyone from the swarm who know how contest the largers so they take buyouts, managerial positions, deanships, public intellectualism and tough-love criticism, in order to prepare the swarm, to terrify it into a fishball, for inescapable consumption. Student loans, home loans, country loans, fish farms the swarm, places nets around the fishfood manufacturies, dispenses perfectly design fish food to turn exactly the fish designed for delicious precarity on a gourmet's groaning board of transcontinental luxury. Beware the little fish spies soliciting for the engorging leviathan, often coutured by toothless "surveillance" and further cloaked by rewarding disdain of "capitalism." At 12:07 PM 3/15/2016, you wrote: On 2016-03-15 07:42, Brian Holmes wrote: > In the US, the classic sequence of a long downswing is unfolding: > inventions pile up while the economy stagnates, so the inventions > are not brought to market. They pile up: electric cars, vastly more > efficient batteries, driverless cars, digital manufacturing, smart > grids, solar power, Internet of things, to list just a few. Some > of this research is crucially sponsored by the federal governments > (batteries and digital manufacturing are the US ones I happen to > know about). At the same time, there is a whole generation of people experimenting with new social values and forms of being together, centering arounf networked collaboration and complex systems thinking, all-based on digital technology but extending from experimentation with currencies, to self-made cars to urban food production, community-based financing, neighbourhood power stations etc etc. I think this offers a real chance to break with consumerist/precarized notions of individuality and open the doors towards some different configuration of subjectivity. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Fwd: Re: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance
On 2016-03-15 07:42, Brian Holmes wrote: > In the US, the classic sequence of a long downswing is unfolding: > inventions pile up while the economy stagnates, so the inventions > are not brought to market. They pile up: electric cars, vastly more > efficient batteries, driverless cars, digital manufacturing, smart > grids, solar power, Internet of things, to list just a few. Some > of this research is crucially sponsored by the federal governments > (batteries and digital manufacturing are the US ones I happen to > know about). At the same time, there is a whole generation of people experimenting with new social values and forms of being together, centering arounf networked collaboration and complex systems thinking, all-based on digital technology but extending from experimentation with currencies, to self-made cars to urban food production, community-based financing, neighbourhood power stations etc etc. I think this offers a real chance to break with consumerist/precarized notions of individuality and open the doors towards some different configuration of subjectivity. The fact that nobody knows how to put all of these things together into a coherent whole, a new techno-economic paradigm, means that these technologies and their associated potential are still open to interpretation and configurations based on particular social experiences . The cynical impulse here is to say: Ah, all of this will simply drive the next wave of innovation in capitalism! But I'm not so sure this is a done deal. For two reasons, first, the classic strategy of how capitalism has historically dealt with its own crises -- expand and displace -- is not going to work so easily in a fully integrated, globalized world, not the least because if the very tangible ecological limits. And, second. a growing range of goods and services shedding the commodity forms. It's not just software and data, but, on sunny and windy days, energy prices are turning negative, and you cannot have a commodity without an exchange value! > and I think the most widespread consensus in all three blocs points > (like it or not, I don't) to a kind of eco-securitarian use of Big > Data to manage complex populations at the limits of territorial > sustainability. Quite possibly that's a strategy to manage the transition, but I cannot image this to lead to any stable situation. It's hard to conceive of eco-islands in a world of catastrophic climate change and millions of displaced people are not easily stopped by a wall, as Europe is finding out now. Of course, the fact that a strategy is unworkable does not mean it's not going to be pursued. Felix # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
President Trump... its gonna happen
President Trump… Its gonna happen A bit of a meme has sprung up recently having some ineffectual fun with the uncanny resemblance of Trump to Biff Tannen the bully from the 80’s hit movie, Back to the Future, its more than the physical resemblance, in the second movie of the series Biff is depicted as a Trump like success who has built a dystopian empire around a building that looks amazingly like Trump Towers.. So in keeping with the occasional predictive bad fortune of the Sci-fi genre (and a nod to JG Ballard’s fiction based on the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the presidency a decade before he event) its probably time for us to pre-mediate the likelihood of a Trump presidency. Continuing the inversion of all the normal rules that his candidacy represents; the more absurd a Trump presidency appears, the more likely it is to happen. Trump requires no coherent arguments as he conforms precisely to Quentin Crisp’s definition of charisma as having -the ability to influence without logic- He is a little like England’s own miniature version (Boris Johnson) in that he deploys an invincible shameless confidence and blather to great effect. This places him not only beyond even the pretence of deliberative liberal discourse but also beyond parody, beyond satire; and perhaps even direct action and protest plays into his hands. To call him a symptom is to frivolous Trump is more like a morbid convulsion.. According to Andre Breton’s credo “beauty will be convulsive or not at all” but imagine a truly visionary convulsion so violent as to repudiate the very concept of beauty itself, substituting all the paraphernalia of aesthetics and connoisseurship… with an object so inexplicable that it appears ( F. Jameson) as a shudder emanating from an incomprehensible future. In art this would make it an avant-garde masterpiece …Unfortunately in this case, the resulting artefact that is the Donald… --- d a v i d g a r c i a d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk http://new-tactical-research.co.uk http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance
On 03/13/2016 12:39 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote: "here's to that future" indeed, Brian, but I wonder how deeper we must sink before things get better. To answer your questions, Patrice, for sure, both North America and the EU are sunk in governmental gridlock, and that is the essence of the crisis: an inability to collectively respond. In the US, the classic sequence of a long downswing is unfolding: inventions pile up while the economy stagnates, so the inventions are not brought to market. They pile up: electric cars, vastly more efficient batteries, driverless cars, digital manufacturing, smart grids, solar power, Internet of things, to list just a few. Some of this research is crucially sponsored by the federal governments (batteries and digital manufacturing are the US ones I happen to know about). So all the entrepreneurs know full well that if the governmental blockage could be overcome, then investors would provide capital for all these new inventions, and they would go into production. This leads to a very palpable mood that you feel in the US: the entrepreneurs are chafing at the bit. They want to get on with changing the world. But there is no coherent institutional framework in which to do so, so everyone is afraid and no one makes risky investments. Can government do it? Can entrepreneurs do it without government? It would be crucial to have a better understanding of what is going on in China, but in North America and Europe the answer to both questions at present is no. There is still no grand strategy to deal with the triple crisis of unemployment/precarity, breakdown of the global monetary and military order, and climate chaos. And disorganized private capital cannot by definition come up with any such grand strategy. The situation is much worse in the EU than in North America, and it's probably worse in China as well, given that they are facing mortal ecological threats as well as a huge transition away from the previous paradigm of export-led growth. Nonetheless, in all three major blocs there are forces that are ready to go ahead with new projects, and I think the most widespread consensus in all three blocs points (like it or not, I don't) to a kind of eco-securitarian use of Big Data to manage complex populations at the limits of territorial sustainability. From her text, I am not sure Shoshana Zuboff "gets it" about the depth of the crisis. For sure, Google thinks it can develop and sell the organizational technologies to overcome the crisis and make superprofits in the 21st century. No doubt (although she doesn't say this) Google thinks it can partner with the Federal government and redouble its own softcore consumer surveillance with the real hardcore military surveillance of the NSA and friends (this is suggested by Eric Schmidt's recent "defection" to the Pentagon). "Consume & secure" is the neoliberal paradigm of optimization and control that I outlined ten years ago in my text "Future Map." However, just wishing for the realization of this goal does not necessarily make it happen! Neoliberalism is notably lacking in any positive concept of the State, and sorry guys, there is no resolution of the triple crisis without the national state, and even more importantly, without serious collaboration between continental scale state-formations. Only some kind of coherent transnational government can restore enough predictability, security and general interoperability to allow capitalism (that damn plague of humanity) to go on forward in a smooth and normalized way. So the "dirty little secret of surveillance" (apparently also a secret to Mme Zuboff) is that such collaboration is presently absent, the state is missing in action. Without it, imho, the famous "surveillance capitalism" is pretty much dead in the water. How much worse it's gonna get? Well, y'all in Europe are apparently not going to solve the problem. There is no clear bottom to the European plunge. Over here, if the USians elect Hillary, I believe we will have some new ugly wars (that's her thing) and maybe some kind of negative, business-as-usual form of resolution to the crisis via a new assertion of full-spectrum American arrogance. If Bernie is elected (funny how we now have to call them by their first names) then we either get more gridlock, or oh, miracle of miracles, maybe the huge number of people in this country who want a different development path would actually be called upon to create one (obviously I am voting Bernie, April 15, in Chicago). If "the Donald" is elected, frankly, I can't imagine it, but then we would trade places with the EU to become the most abject continental-scale power Were that to happen, well, maybe I would finally take some interest in Alexander Bard's ideas after all! best, Brian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text
