Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
Hello all, In trying to keep track of the contours of this conversation; I seem to find it somehow removed from current political realities; as if the questions posed in this discussion, while clearly relevant to the world we live in, can be resolved in what seems to be a political vacuum. What I mean is this: where or in what way does the AS movement intersect with all the various/diverse forms of political insurgencies currently erupting in different countries? How does this relate to Brexit for example? Does the "Anthropocene Socialist” Movement intersect with DieM25 another example… Or Volt? Beyond a host of good ideas, what exactly is the political framework for the AS movement? Sorry to raise these rather practical questions but people here in Budapest are in the streets challenging the programme of an oppressive extreme right-wing government and I’ve been trying to figure out how this discussion relates to this ongoing struggle. best allan # 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: social media critique: next steps?
Hello, I’m coming at this discussion from another direction, sorry about that… The problem with Facebook (for me anyway) is not its social media functions in so far as IT ONLY works as a virtual bulletin board, town crier or even as vehicle for sending messages. These aspects were part of the original game plan (more or less). And, from its earliest days, even in its most militaristic iterations, www fostered various social media qualities; especially if you consider (or accept) that humans are inherently social animals; and, if one can imagine that any quasi-public social space (and Facebook is a social space) facilitates or breeds various forms of social interactions. The problem lies squarely within the Facebook business model which is not simply monopolistic but ravenously so… variations of this rabid form of monopoly capitalism are quite the norm these days and likely to be more so (if that’s possible). Successful businesses, on the hegemonic scale of Facebook, don’t simply compete; they devour the competition. Its the same for any commercial entity that manages to achieve the operational scale of such enterprises as Facebook, or Google or Amazon, etc… Facebook is free it exploits the illusion that is benign; because Facebook seems to be free, people cannot imagine it as a monopoly; they cannot conceive of its insidious nature. Its most cannabalistic insidious qualities are opaque. Small scale alternatives to Facebook are well-intentioned but are basically not sustainable without constantly replenishing the financial lifelines (via public or private sources). The only solution to the Facebook problem is breaking it up the way any monopoly has been broken into smaller components. Curated (not censored) social media fulfils an important and necessary social function. It’s not going to disappear; it’s integral to the digital world we live in. Additionaly, beside breaking up the Facebook monopoly, what is also imperative is the introduction of a digital literacy curriculum in secondary schools. Because one can navigate YouTube or Facebook or a word processing programme does not mean one is digitally literate. It only suggests that one has managed basic skills but usually and very sadly minus the critical skills to evaluate the information that flows endlessly over the internet. And in the land of Trump and beyond politicians rely on a vast digitally illiterate population and the likes of Fox News… But all is not lost... best allan # 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:
Brexit democracy
Greetings, It is encouraging to see Wendy Brown’s name appearing in this discussion and so I will add a bit more of her insightfulness: "the institutions as well as the political culture comprising liberal democracy are passing into history, the left is faced both with the project of mourning what it never wholly loved and with the task of dramatically resetting its critique and vision in terms of the historical supersession of liberal democracy, and not only of failed socialist experiments.” She stated this over 10 years ago; pre-fiscal crisis, pre-Trump and Brexit. So, resetting ‘critique and vision’ are definitely called for. Unfortunately, it is misleading (or inadequate) to view the current malaise simply through the lens of national politics; the crisis we are in the midst of is truly global with dimensions that are difficult to imagine or even adequately articulate. In this context, the mud slinging in regards to Russia’s meddling in US and UK politics is but a sideshow to the recurrent - East/West - political interventions that erupted during the Cold War and continued unabated with the demise of the Soviet bloc. We hardly returned to an age of innocence and political cleanliness with the fall of the Berlin Wall. (See the late Tony Judt’s historical analysis for the machinations taking place during the post-WW II period). To reset ‘critique and vision’ it would help enormously to view issues both on an international scale and locally. To think of politics, and indeed citizenship, as multidimensiona, multicultural and transcending borders which are fluid when it comes to capital but rigid when it comes to people. Fernand Braudel’s description of the ruthlessness that characterised late-stage capitalism is close to the mark when considering the world we now live in wherein the mask of a fraudulent sense of ‘morality’ promoted by political elites is each day shredded into smaller and smaller pieces. To paraphrase Braudel, we are living in barbaric times in which there are no rules; oligarchs, plutocrats and deep-state manipulators are continuously shuffling the deck to gain advantage, to liquidate adversaries. In this sense Trump and Brexit represent a form of desperation in which the elite of the 1% have jettisoned the norms of liberal democracy in order to encase themselves in a nostalgia for a bygone era - riddled with corruption, injustice and enumerable inequities - that we have struggled to overcome and eradicate. cheers allan # 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:
Google’s neoliberal dystopis
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/24/google-alphabet-sidewalk-labs-toronto google wants to run cities without being elected. don't let it With this district [in Toronto], Alphabet will have its own “urban living laboratory” where it can experiment with new smart systems and planning techniques. It can study how these systems and techniques work in the real world and how people are affected… Jathan Sadowski # 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:
Collective responses to digital neofeudalism
Hello, Collective responses to digital neofeudalism http://www.eurozine.com/collective-responses-to-digital-neofeudalism/ How has the digital dream of the 1990s – equality, freedom of expression and accessibility for everyone – turned into the constantly surveilled dystopia that many observers comment on today? New media expert Evgeny Morozov and sociologist Colin Crouch discussed this digital dilemma at the recent Lector in Fabula festival, in conversation with journalist Marina Lalovic. cheers allan # 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:
nettime principles of mobilisation (maybe?)
No more mediation by political parties, established or not, seems to be one of the new principles behind recent mobilisations. Is this the right way to approach political and social struggles today? How can we understand this? Excerpted from Illan Rua Wall: ??? People come out and refuse the current state of the situation. Their anger brings them to the streets, and there they learn radical politics, they learn ???overthrow???. We see this in Greece (I rely here on a description in the latest edition of the Journal of Critical Globalisation by Sotirakopoulos). By the 15th of June Syntagma Square appeared to have divided in two, with the political ???frustrated??? in the lower part of the square gathering around the Free Assembly and the upper half of the square around the parliament seemed full of the ???apolitical??? frustrated. The radical left feared that the majority of the indignants were merely there for pleasure rather than some sort of serious political programme. However, when the police rounded on the occupiers on the 15th of June, the apparently ???fluffy??? apolitical non-violent side of the square fought back with vigour. They had been subjectivised in their being-together against the state of the situation. They were not organised, they were not trained, not indoctrinated. There was no party revealing the reality behind the ideology. There certainly was critique, argument and solidarity. However, these were not mediated in the traditional sense by a party structure. This subjectivisation is fascinating. In Tunisia and in Egypt, we find a crucial example of how this works. In both countries, there was a huge effort to disrupt the ordinary running of the state. Variously, the police were restrained and the civil service were blocked from undertaking the ordinary workings of the state bureaucracy. But of course, in Tahrir Square, life continued without the police and without the civil service. The pre-constituted order was suspended and instead spaces of alegality, or of life without state (in Agamben???s words) were generated. Ranci??re calls this ???real??? democracy ???where liberty and equality would no longer be represented in the institutions of law and state, but embodied in the very forms of concrete life and sensible experience??? (Hatred of Democracy p3). Thus, in Tunisia we find the refusal of representation coupled with the opening of an interval between state and life. The ???order??? of the state, in many instances, is suspended, and in that gap there is just life without law. This sense of the suspension of the state however, does not lead to rape, murder and civil war ??? as the Hobbesean myth of the state of nature suggests. In fact, it is precisely the attempt to once more create the obedience to the social contract that has lead to the most violent confrontations. In Greece, it strikes me that a similar event takes place. Over and again the people come to the squares and refuse. They refuse labour, they refuse representation, they refuse! In the space of this refusal an interstices opens, and in that space a different politics emerges. The final point I want to make concerns that refusal. In Tunisia it begins with anger. The story of Mohammed Bouazizi has been told over and again. This is the man who set himself alight after an altercation with the police and a failure of response from the local government. Bouazizi???s situation resonated with the people. However, they were not just angry with bureaucracy or the police. Rather. On the streets they cried D??gage ??? clear out, get out. They manifested a simple refusal of the situation. It is not just Ben Ali but the entire situation. There is no attempt to reform, to work within the system, etc. Rather the people refuse representation. Like the characters in Jose Saramago???s novel Seeing, each provisional government since January 14th has been silenced by the simple refusal of representation. This refusal at once asserts the unacceptability of the secret police and Ben Ali???s neo-liberal reforms, but it is more than this as well. It is a rejection of the current positioning of the Tunisian populace in relation to the globalized world order. This is the same relation that pacifies Ireland. # 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
