Re: rage against the machine
On 29 March 2019 at 09:07:31, Morlock Elloi (morlockel...@gmail.com) wrote: Seemingly totally unrelated: 1. flight recorders are brightly colored these days. The term "black box" originates in WW2, mostly because the first flight recorders, as all other "secret" electronics, was housed in metal boxes painted matte black. See https://web.archive.org/web/20171019110346/http://siiri.tampere.fi/displayObject.do?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.profium.com%2Farchive%2FArchivedObject-8077CE76-2B43-6FAA-D11C-77AAFD6C72E8 2. Schematic "black box", meaning circuitry/algorithm that is opaque and not supposed to be seen or understood, and only I/O is available also originates in WW2. It's hilarious that #1 and #2 overlap again these days, as most airlines have no capability of examining their own flight recorders, so we are back to black boxes: Ethiopian Airlines refused to hand over their black boxes to Americans, as they don't trust them. I Hello, I want to weigh into this thread finally, after following it closely these past weeks. I haven’t had the time to respond, as I’ve been busy with my PhD dissertation, which I submit in just a few days. There have been so many good posts on this thread, particularly one from Felix timestamped 2019-03-28 0900 UTC where he talks about the rise of complexity in systems. First, I want to qualify the position from which I speak: I am a technical expert who works for an airline. I’m not an aircraft engineer, but I design and build what are called ‘operational systems,’ which provide the inputs and outputs for the airline to safely fly it’s equipment. I’m not, therefore a strictly disinterested party in such discussions, but I do possess a certain amount of inside knowledge of airlines, and the often cryptic systems we use and the language we use to describe them. First, I want to talk about the ‘black’ box. Yes it's bright orange. No that’s not why it’s spoken as a ‘black’ box. In fact the cybernetic explanation is the correct one. The airline is not supposed to be able to read the contents of these boxes. That’s why they are ‘black’. The cockpit voice recordings and control data flow into them and are used for _safety_ investigations, by a _safety_ authority, like CASA, or the FAA. Why isn’t the airline supposed to read the content of the boxes? Because the voice recorder is recording the pilots use of procedures which may be designed by the airlines. Yes, every airline has slightly different procedures, as long as these procedures are within the parameters of the aircraft designers, and the responsible aviation regulator, all is _supposed_ to be OK. But just as _technical_ failures, say with the pitot tube icing on AF447, can cause technical systems to malfunction (disconnecting the autopilot … although that’s not a ‘malfunction’ as such), and ‘human factors’ (cockpit design of Airbuses) the company procedures and culture can also cause or compound accidents. In the case of AF447, there was a toxic culture among the pilots. They did not co-operate smoothly. The senior pilot barged into the cockpit and basically bombarded the two pilots at the controls with theories and questions. __nobody__ thought to ask the most junior pilot onboard, who was sitting in the right hand seat at the time, if he had made any control inputs. He had … in fact he performed the __worst__ possible input when faced with a stall warning: he pulled the nose up. Anyway, the investigation found a cultural and training issue, which AF had to fix. However, just because we can’t read the boxes, doesn’t mean we don’t monitor our aircraft. There are plenty of signals which the aircraft transmits during flight, and a ton more which are downloaded from it when it gets into the hands of the engineers. We have a entire department that analyses this information, offline. If they find issues, the pilots are asked to explain to the chief pilot (for the type) what happened: “why did you exceed the type’s maximum recommended descent rate for over 30 seconds last week flying VHxxx into YBBN on SMOKA 8 ALPHA to RWY 01LR between DAYBO and GORRI?”. Anyway I don’t have any great theoretical insights at the moment but a lot of this discussion is interesting, and if someone has airline related questions I’m happy to answer them. Scot # 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: rage against the machine
Not so fast, Felix, and not so clear. The origins of the phrase black box are "obscure," but the cybernetics crowd started using it from the mid-'50s. Their usage almost certainly drew on electronics research, where it had been used on a few occasions by a handful of people. However, that usage paled in comparison to the phrase's use among military aviators from early/mid in WW2 — *but not for flight recorders*. Instead, it described miscellaneous electro-mechanical devices (navigation, radar, etc) whose inner workings ranged from complicated to secret. Like many military-industrial objects of the time, they were often painted in wrinkle-finish black paint. Hence the name. Designing advanced aviation devices in ways that would require minimal maintenance and calibration in the field was a huge priority — because it often made more sense to ship entire units than exotic spare parts, because the devices' tolerances were too fine to repair in field settings, because training and fielding specialized personnel was difficult, because the military didn't want to circulate print documentation, etc, etc. So those physically black boxes became, in some ways, "philosophical" or even practical black boxes. Several of the key early cyberneticians contributed to the development of those devices at institutions like Bell Labs and the Institute for Advanced Studies, and there's no doubt they would have heard the phrase. In that context, the emphasis would have been on *a system that behaves reliably even though ~users don't understand it*, more than on *an object that's painted black*. Wartime US–UK cooperation in aviation was intense (the US used something like 80 air bases in the UK under the Lend–Lease program), so there was no shortage of avenues for slang to spread back and forth across the ocean. It's on that basis, a decade later, that Ross Ashby called a chapter of his 1956 book _Cybernetics_ to "The Black Box." Given who he'd been working with, it's hard to imagine — impossible, I think — that he was unaware of this wider usage. (An exaggerated analogy: try calling someone looking at shop shelves a "browser.") Some early aviators had come up with ad-hoc ways to record a few flight variables, but the first flight recorders as we now understand them started to appear around the mid-'50s. There's lots of folksy speculation about how these things — which weren't black and weren't box-shaped — came to be called "black boxes." I think the simplest explanation is best, even if it's the messiest: a combination of aviation slang and the fact that they were the state of the art when it came to sealed units. In the same way that the word "dark" clearly exerts some wide appeal (dark fiber, dark pools, dark web, dark money, etc), I think the idea of a "black box" held mystique — of a kind that would tend to blur sharp distinctions like the one you drew. Anyway. Planes are interesting, but what led me down the path of studying these histories is what you point out — that the fusion of the pilot with the plane is an ur-moment in human–machine hybridization. Cheers, Ted On 28 Mar 2019, at 14:48, Felix Stalder wrote: Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each other. In the case of the black box in cybernetics, it stands for a (complicated) processes of which we only (need to) know the relationship between input and output, not its inner workings. In the case of the airplane, the it's just a very stable case protecting various recorders of human and machine signals generated in the cockpit. There is no output at all, at least not during the flight. There is, of course, a deep connection between aviation and cybernetics, after all, the fusion of the pilot with the plane was the earliest example of a system that could only be understood as consisting humans and machines reacting to each other in symbiotic way. So, the main thrust of the thread, and the rest of your post, are interesting, this little detail irks me. # 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: rage against the machine
Seemingly totally unrelated: 1. flight recorders are brightly colored these days. The term "black box" originates in WW2, mostly because the first flight recorders, as all other "secret" electronics, was housed in metal boxes painted matte black. See https://web.archive.org/web/20171019110346/http://siiri.tampere.fi/displayObject.do?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.profium.com%2Farchive%2FArchivedObject-8077CE76-2B43-6FAA-D11C-77AAFD6C72E8 2. Schematic "black box", meaning circuitry/algorithm that is opaque and not supposed to be seen or understood, and only I/O is available also originates in WW2. It's hilarious that #1 and #2 overlap again these days, as most airlines have no capability of examining their own flight recorders, so we are back to black boxes: Ethiopian Airlines refused to hand over their black boxes to Americans, as they don't trust them. Instead they gave them to the French (this really existing trust hierarchy is getting interesting.) For Ethiopian Airlines, the brightly colored flight recorders are true black boxes: the input was something their aircraft generated, and the output is something that French will generate. Ethiopian Airlines doesn't get to understand the rest. So term "black box" is fully justified and interchangeable with "flight recorder", in true schematic sense. On 3/28/19, 11:48, Felix Stalder wrote: Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each other. # 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: rage against the machine
On 28.03.19 16:38, tbyfield wrote: > Yes and no. In theory, plane crashes happen out in the open compared to > other algorithmic catastrophes. In practice, the subsequent > investigations have a very 'public secret' quality: vast expanses are > cordoned off to be combed for every fragment, however minuscule; the > wreckage is meticulously reconstructed in immense closed spaces; > forensic regimes — which tests are applied to what objects and why — are > very opaque. And, last but not least, is the holy grail of every plane > crash, the flight recorder. Its pop name is itself a testament to the > point I made earlier in this this thread about how deeply cybernetics > and aviation are intertwingled: the proverbial 'black box' of > cybernetics became the actual *black box* of aviation. But, if anything, > its logic was inverted: in cybernetics the phrase meant a system that > can be understood only through its externally observable behavior, but > in aviation it's the system that observes and records the plane's behavior. > > Black boxes are needed because, unlike car crashes, when planes crash > it's best to assume that the operators won't survive. That's where the > 'complexity' of your sweeping history comes in. Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each other. In the case of the black box in cybernetics, it stands for a (complicated) processes of which we only (need to) know the relationship between input and output, not its inner workings. In the case of the airplane, the it's just a very stable case protecting various recorders of human and machine signals generated in the cockpit. There is no output at all, at least not during the flight. There is, of course, a deep connection between aviation and cybernetics, after all, the fusion of the pilot with the plane was the earliest example of a system that could only be understood as consisting humans and machines reacting to each other in symbiotic way. So, the main thrust of the thread, and the rest of your post, are interesting, this little detail irks me. Felix -- http://felix.openflows.com |Open PGP http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature # 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: EU == USSR v2.0 ?
Property is just an opinion, programmed into certain number of human brains. It's soft, and can be modified or erased. There is no brain area dedicated for private property (witness human societies without it.) Using this ephemeral phenomenon to understand underlying dynamics is unproductive. Observers from Mars cannot detect property, as they cannot detect human gods. But they can detect lifecycles, illnesses, buildings, murders, poverty, luxury and such. The worse sleigh of hand done to communism was to divert focus to this single soft aspect (remotely similar to POTUS pussy grabbing idiocy.) The basic similarity between USSR and EU is the willingness of large number of people, *not* based on religion, leaders, or tribal/national identity, to pitch in for the better common* future. Both events are unique in the history in this regard. * note the word root How is the EU seizing control of the means of production? How is the EU delegitimising the ownership of private property by private citizens? When last I checked, it was still possible to establish for-profit businesses in the EU, and it was still possible for individual EU citizens to purchase goods from Ka De We. To say that the EU model incorporates elements of socialism is one thing, to say that it is 'communism' is a bridge too far. # 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: rage against the machine
The basic issue is complexity crossing the threshold that humans cannot. So far, at least in the last few thousand years or so, mental abilities were one of key factors for individual 'success' (the other, likely more important one, was class and heritage.) We appreciate smart people as much as the rich ones. In the last few decades there was acceleration of cognitive stratification, as the class of more-than-average smart technicians was needed to tend to more and more complex computing machines. Today it's obvious that the system of controlling capital/power, the Roman Guard of technicians, and computing machinery itself is practically ruling the world. Yet we can see smart people behind it so at least we can map the new order into familiar space, where smart people, evil, good, or just sociopathic, are at the helm. What happens when the machine complexity surpasses the human cognition? Skynet aside, the most dire effect is that the smart Roman Guard becomes redundant. Instead, it will be the inbred, semi-retarded ruling oligarchy, some 30-40,000 families on the planet, that will have this miracle machinery in its lap. Like a chimp that got hold of unlimited supply of AK-47s. It's not going to be sophisticated, it's going to be ugly. The final disintermediation. The heritage becomes the sole factor. Smartness is out. These things, societies optimizing themselves out of existence, happened before in different forms. Easter Island rulers liked those statues so much that they depleted all natural resources in building them, destroying the whole society in the process. The chimp logic is dead simple. It's a total waste of time theorizing and philosophizing about it. All that just buys them more time. On 3/28/19, 08:38, tbyfield wrote: That's why criticisms of the 'complexity' of increasingly automated and autonomized vehicles are a dead end, or at least limited to two dimensions. I liked it very much when you wrote that "the rise in complexity in itself is not a bad thing"; and, similarly, giving up autonomy is not in itself a *bad* thing. The question is where and how we draw the lines around autonomy. The fact that some cars will fly doesn't mean that every 'personal mobility device' — say, bicycles — needs to be micromanaged by a faceless computational state run amok. Yet that kind of massive, # 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: rage against the machine
Felix, this is really interesting. Normally, I'm allergic to sweeping models of history that involve anything like 'technology' or 'technology,' because they mostly serve as playgrounds for wannabe TED talkers. Yours is different — maybe, in part, because you don't assume that capitalism and computation play well together. You wrote: In the case of the plane crash, it's just out in the open, like in the case of a massive stock market crash. The difference is only that in the case of the plane crash, the investigation is also out in the open, while in virtually all other cases, the investigation remains closed to outsiders, to the degree that there is even one. Yes and no. In theory, plane crashes happen out in the open compared to other algorithmic catastrophes. In practice, the subsequent investigations have a very 'public secret' quality: vast expanses are cordoned off to be combed for every fragment, however minuscule; the wreckage is meticulously reconstructed in immense closed spaces; forensic regimes — which tests are applied to what objects and why — are very opaque. And, last but not least, is the holy grail of every plane crash, the flight recorder. Its pop name is itself a testament to the point I made earlier in this this thread about how deeply cybernetics and aviation are intertwingled: the proverbial 'black box' of cybernetics became the actual *black box* of aviation. But, if anything, its logic was inverted: in cybernetics the phrase meant a system that can be understood only through its externally observable behavior, but in aviation it's the system that observes and records the plane's behavior. Black boxes are needed because, unlike car crashes, when planes crash it's best to assume that the operators won't survive. That's where the 'complexity' of your sweeping history comes in. Goofy dreams of flying cars have been a staple of pop futurism since the 1950s at least, but until very recently those dreams were built on the basis of automobiles — and carried a lot of cultural freight associated with them, as if it were merely a matter of adding a third dimension to their mobility. But that dimension coincides with the axis of gravity: what goes up must come down. The idea that flying cars would be sold, owned, and maintained on an individual basis, like cars, implies that we'd soon start seeing the aerial equivalent of beat-up pickups flying around — another staple of sci-fi since the mid-'70s. It won't happen quite like that. When cars crash the risks are mainly limited to the operators; when planes crash the risks are much more widespread — tons of debris scattered randomly and *literally* out of the blue. That kind of danger to the public would justify banning them, but of course that won't happen. Instead, the risks will be managed in ways you describe well: "massive computation to cope, not just to handle 'hardware flaws', but to make the world inhabitable, or to keep it inhabitable, for civilization to continue." The various forms of 'autonomization' of driving we're seeing now are the beginnings of that transformation. It'll require fundamentally different relations between operators and vehicles in order to achieve what really matters: new relations between *vehicles*. So, for example, we're seeing semi-cooperative procedures and standards (like Zipcar), mass choreographic coordination (like Waymo), the precaritizing dissolution of 'ownership' (like Uber); GPS-based wayfinding and remora-sensors (everywhere) and the growing specter of remote control by police forces. None of these things is entirely new, but their computational integration is. And as these threads converge, we can begin to see a more likely future in which few if any own, maintain, or even 'drive' a car — we just summon one, tell it our destination, and 'the cloud' does the rest. Not because this realizes some naive dream of a 'frictionless' future, but because the risks of *real* friction anywhere above 50 meters off the ground are too serious. And, in exchange for giving up the autonomy associated with automobiles, we'll get to live. That's why criticisms of the 'complexity' of increasingly automated and autonomized vehicles are a dead end, or at least limited to two dimensions. I liked it very much when you wrote that "the rise in complexity in itself is not a bad thing"; and, similarly, giving up autonomy is not in itself a *bad* thing. The question is where and how we draw the lines around autonomy. The fact that some cars will fly doesn't mean that every 'personal mobility device' — say, bicycles — needs to be micromanaged by a faceless computational state run amok. Yet that kind of massive, hysterical, categorical drive to control has been a central feature of the rising computational state for decades. The system that has worked for the last 40 years is reaching the limits of the complexity it can handle. The externalities p
Re: EU == USSR v2.0 ?
On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 10:05:16 PM CET, Morlock Elloi wrote: EU is really another attempt at communism. Go home grandpa, you're drunk. # 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: EU == USSR v2.0 ?
On 27.03.19 22:05, Morlock Elloi wrote: > EU is really another attempt at communism. As I just wrote in another post, I think the US (and the UK and the EU) far facing a similar structural crisis as the USSR faced in the 1970s. Whether these countries turns out to be like the USSR, depends on their ability to reform and respond the the nature of the crisis. I'm not hopeful, but the analogy has nothing to do with communism. The EU is a neo-liberal project, at its core (which, to me, is still better than nationalism, but far from good). Felix -- http://felix.openflows.com |Open PGP http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature # 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: rage against the machine
On 24.03.19 14:28, Florian Cramer wrote: > Travis suggests that the 737 MAX fiasco resulted from a combination of > market economics/cost-optimization management and software > being used to correct hardware design flaws. Yes. I think there are several factors involved that are in fact indicative of a wider techno-political condition, it's just that in the case of a plane crash, the effects and the investigation are particularly public. I'm pretty sure, the set of problems involved here is very common, it includes: a) Lax oversight. A massive shift from government (aka public interest, at least in theory) regulation to industry self-regulation. This is an effect, as well as a cause of, the power shift between the two poles. b) Consequently, the narrow interest of corporate actors (cost-cutting, profitability, short-termness etc) dominate the equation of incentives. c) Massive rise in complexity that increases the importance of computation as a way of managing the resulting dynamics. These three elements are, basically, the ingredients of the system of neo-liberal globalization. And the most important aspect of this story was that it has worked, not the least by being able to marginalize all other systems over the last 40 years. It's important to remember where this system came from, and here I keep thinking of Castells brilliant analysis of the crises of "industrialism", aka Fordism, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, which occurred both in capitalist and socialist countries. The reason, so Castells, was that Fordism as a mode of organization had reached the internal limit of complexity it could handle. It was no longer able to cope with the increasingly diverse and more rapidly changing demands and pressures that characterized the socio-technical (and ecologic) environment which it was supposed to organize. The Soviets went into 20 years of stagnation (basically, the era of Brezhnev) while the capitalist countries went on a contentious processes of organizational change, that reached its pitting point when Thatcher and Reagan came to power. By returning basically to a Hayekian notion of the market as a superior information processors, by reducing the complexity of lived-experience to the price signal, it emerged a system that was able to cope with, and rapidly expand, the rising complexity of society. The Soviet Union fell apart when belatedly trying to embark on similar reforms (similar not in the sense of neoliberal, but in the sense of acknowledging the rising complexity of society, by, for example, recognizing the existence of civil society). So, fast forward to today. I think we are witnessing a similar moment of stasis, this time in the West. The term gridlock describes both the UKt as well as the US experience and the attempts to break through it are seriously damaging the system. In a way, it's like punishing workers in a dysfunctional system for not meeting their targets. It deepens the dysfunction. The EU is probably not far behind. The system that has worked for the last 40 years is reaching the limits of the complexity it can handle. The externalities produced by the radical reduction of the lived experience to price signals are coming back to haunt the system, which has no way of coping with it. The attempts to put a price on "bads", say in the case of cap'n'trade have failed. And similarly, the attempts to save the climate are failing. The rise in complexity in itself is not a bad thing. Historically, as far as I can tell, a reduction in complexity has always meant a breakdown of civilization. That may well be in the offing, but that's not a good thing. But that also means that we need massive computation to cope, not just to handle "hardware flaws", but to make the world inhabitable, or to keep it inhabitable, for civilization to continue. The problem, I think, is the combination of two massively reductionist systems, that of price signals and that of digital simulation, that cannot account for the complexity of the effects they produce and hence generate all kinds of "black swans". In the case of the plane crash, it's just out in the open, like in the case of a massive stock market crash. The difference is only that in the case of the plane crash, the investigation is also out in the open, while in virtually all other cases, the investigation remains closed to outsiders, to the degree that there is even one. Felix -- http://felix.openflows.com |Open PGP http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature # 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: Some background to Christchurch
Hey Douglas,
Nice to hear from you. Really interesting perspective and I appreciate
hearing about some of the 'on the ground' conditions in Wellington and
Christchurch.
I do agree that if the Springbok Tour of 1981 was one inflection point,
then Christchurch in 2019 is another. How do we rebound off this attack and
end somewhere else? That's a massive question that I guess gets decided
collectively.
My own small contribution would just be that I see a lot of media articles
focusing either on the evils of social media or on the everyday bigotry you
mentioned, concentrating either on technical solutions or more inclusive
relations. Already, for example, we're seeing ISPs implementing their
vision of the future by censoring content.
So there's a kind of bifurcation into camps and causes - it seems we're not
very good at linking protocols and politics, hate memes and hate groups, or
'informational' surveillance and armed crowd control, as you pointed out.
But the shooter's statements and manifesto pointed to the continuity of
these aspects - the deep psychological conditioning that online
environments can effect gradually over time, to the point where other
humans become inhuman.
Without reducing everything to an overly determined 'question of media', in
the context of a network cultures mailing list like this one, it should
foreground that these interests have significant stakes.
best, Luke
On Thu, 28 Mar 2019 at 01:28, Douglas Bagnall wrote:
> On 26/03/19 9:44 AM, Luke Munn wrote:
>
> > Sure, the Springbok protests were hugely formative, but I would say
> boiling
> > anything down to one event is placing too much emphasis on it.
> >
> > With respect, dating the 'beginning' of inequalities and civil unrest
> back
> > to 1981 is also a pretty Western/white perspective. Aotearoa has a long
> > history of civil unrest, not least in the New Zealand wars / Land Wars
> > beginning around 1845.
>
> Well yes, sort of. We have that *now*. Protest heritage seems to be a
> curriculum subject at my children's school, jumping from the
> Kororareka flagpole to Parihaka, suffragettes, 40 hour week, Waihi,
> 1951, Vietnam, "damn the dam", 1975 land march, Bastion Point, 1981,
> nuclear free, homosexual law reform, foreshore and seabed. But the
> historical facts are not really what David/Simon are on about -- the
> question is how [most] people understand their response to the
> Christchurch attack, and how 1981 affects that.
>
> In 1981 we didn't have protest studies in primary schools (I was
> there). There were protests -- half the canon was the produced in the
> 70s -- but that was a fad, not linked to tradition. And there had been
> anti-springbok protests for 20 years or so and they had sometimes been
> successful. Tours were cancelled. That meant in early 1981 the
> protesters had a well established organisational infrastructure but
> faced widespread complacency. The tour would be stopped before it
> started, so why join the protest? When everyone suddenly realised the
> WWII-era farts in charge were going to have the tour at any cost and
> the protests grew massively. The result was, on the face of it, a
> failure -- the tour went ahead. But after that, even as the new right
> fucked up the economy, the public service and the Labour Party
> consisted largely of Springbok protest veterans, at least mildly
> disposed toward rethinking the colonial past. In 1985 historic
> Waitangi claims were unleashed, which -- combined with relative
> contentment with diverse immigration -- led to the society you
> describe. It doesn't matter whether the vision of these protest
> veterans ("independent, racially tolerant society, a moral exemplar"
> in Simon's words) was hypocritical bollocks or not -- the argument is
> it drove us here from a very weird place. At that time New Zealand was
> famous for being the country that *uniquely in the world* would play
> sport with racist South Africa. There were Olympic boycotts against
> us. Nobody had heard of Te Whiti. The treaty was a historical
> curiosity. Our race relations were the best in the world, we said, our
> past had finished, there was no depression in New Zealand.
>
> OK, so that's the argument for 1981's significance. But I don't see
> the Christchurch response in those terms. Rather it is desperate and
> existential -- we have no choice. We just want peace. Sectarian
> violence is unimaginably foreign to us. It would be like death to end
> up in a cycle of copycat and reprisal attacks, even if the statistical
> chance of actual death was negligible. We will do almost *anything* to
> keep the peace, though of course with spontaneous collective
> responses, "anything" precludes nuance. If we plan we will bicker and
> dither. So we smother the aggrieved with love and sympathy in the hope
> they will not blame the rest of us, and we spurn the attacker so that
> nobody wants to follow his path. Which is not to say the emotion is
> contrived. We are *really* hurt. P
Re: EU == USSR v2.0 ?
How is the EU seizing control of the means of production? How is the EU delegitimising the ownership of private property by private citizens? When last I checked, it was still possible to establish for-profit businesses in the EU, and it was still possible for individual EU citizens to purchase goods from Ka De We. To say that the EU model incorporates elements of socialism is one thing, to say that it is 'communism' is a bridge too far. Historical analogies are useful, and there may be nothing new under the sun. However, we also need to understand what is different this time. For example, it may be that the automation and centralised control made possible by modern technology, whose effects include but are not limited to altering the balance between fixed and variable costs, have substantively changed the nature of manufacturing and services. And now we see that regulators in many countries in Europe and America seem powerless to stop private interests from setting the rules and collecting their own kind of unaccountable taxes. It may be useful to consider the various emerging models for regulation pursued by the EU as a response to such effects rather than a repudiation of capitalism. In particular, much of information and communication technology has become a form of infrastructure, and governments have so far failed to fully determine and implement appropriate forms of regulation for this infrastructure [1]. Many people have offered reasons for this, and I shall not recount those arguments here. For various reasons the EU regulators are well-positioned to give it a go, and they deserve our support. Best wishes -- Geoff [1] Bob Frankston. "Demystifying Networking." http://rmf.vc/demystify On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 02:05:16PM -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote: > The arguments and narratives on EU don't really make much sense. Not that > deeply entrenched sides do not have self-coherent dogmas, they do. But it > all just doesn't make sense. There is a total disconnect between them and > between them and reality, it seems. Immigration, sovereignty, neoliberalism, > nationalism, etc. etc. ad nauseam, barren and fruitless drivel goes on and > on. Especially in GB (why anyone cares so much what happens to the > irrelevant inbred island is a separate topic) - intelligent people have to > admit that they don't have a clue what Brexit-no-Brexit discourse is about. > Not that it will prevent anyone to contributing. > > Maybe, then, the real issue is completely different, and present discourses > and narratives are simply psychotic avoidance of confronting it. > > EU is really another attempt at communism. > > Communism appears to be genetically attractive to large swaths of > population, so it does come up and will continue to be coming up, one way or > another. It's like when you are constipated - it *will* come out sooner or > later, and you know it. The question is how much are you going to pretend > and suffer in the meantime. > > The first attempt, USSR, failed for known reasons. It did work in the > beginning though. The same happened to EU. The really existing communism > appears to be perishable matter. > > The neurotic need to brand it as something else in the case of EU didn't > change much, if anything. The pattern is unmistakeable: wide initial support > from working class masses and honest intelligentsia, belief in transnational > unity and rosy future, followed by corruption of officials and apparatchik > system of government. In the post-mortem phase, flourishing of 'analysis' > and bickering about the exact way the decay should proceed. > > So don't be sorry about EU. Hopefully we learned something, and the next > time it will be better. It *will* come out, again. > > > > > > # 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: # 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:
