Re: Stormy weather?

[Sean Cubitt]

One more war nested in the Donbas/Ukraine war: Putin wants to believe this is a 
civil war.

Despite everything the West threw at revolutionary Russia, despite its own 
errors and catastrophes, despite the devastation of the Great Patriotic war, 
Russia emerged in 1945 with a greater landmass than when it kicked out the 
czars and created the 20th century. Take that sentence as broadly accurate 
historical generalisation or as the basis for an entire mythology. Either way, 
in the mind of Putin's faction, Russia is still the union of republics and 
anyone who leaves is a traitor.

Meanwhile:
A: the neo-liberal hegemony, fundamentally the USA's hegemony, is entering a 
phase that looks distinctly like decline (this can take a century - look at 
Britain). There's no secret the rising hegemon is China. Two questions remain: 
(1) neo-liberal economics still rules (eg to explain the collapse of successive 
COP conferences just look at the Fortune Global 500 top ten) but as a political 
creed it is falling apart. There are many possibilities leading towards a new 
economics of the commons but I can't see a credible political alternative, 
certainly not in the PRC.
(2) who comes next? By rights it should be India, but Modi may blow it., 
politically, militarily and  - this would be a great place to learn more from 
better placed nettimers - through 
https://digitalindia.gov.in/ which looks likely to 
exclude the poor entirely from all aspects of civic life. So if he blows it, 
and Iran has already blown its chances, Putin is smart to place Russia in the 
pecking order.  But ...

B: everything else, notably ecological catastrophes in every continent and 
ocean and the accelerating distance between rich and poor says there's nothing 
much to win if there's no future to enjoy it in. Add your favourite crisis. I'm 
fascinated by the suicidal culture war education policies being adopted in the 
Anglosphere, a recipe for stagnation. ChatGPT is a symptom, not a cause: it 
triggers panic because  AI is coming for white collar jobs [no-one cared much 
when it only replaced service industry employees]. It is intelligent in the way 
a job-ready graduate is intelligent: it can perform normative functions (grunt 
coding, civil service consultancies) that efficiently displace expensive and 
unreliable humans. What it can't do is create tasks that don't have names yet. 
Without them, any moment now the whole shithouse, in WS Burroughs memorable 
phrase, is about to go up. Or rather fall down.

This helps explain what otherwise seems so bizarre: that the (un)civil war is 
not for influence, population or resources. It only has a veneer of ideology 
(unlike say Modi's undeclared war on Islam). It is a war for territory. This 
makes it hard to place in relation to other wars, but gives it a comprehensible 
place in Russia's military history (and brings back the shadow of Theweleit 
raised earlier in this discussion). This time, however, the entire population 
of the planet, non-human and human alike, ends up inhabiting Scorched Earth.

Pit raises all the right questions. To add: neo-liberal dogma is the only game 
in town but it is failing economically as well. Accelerationism left or right 
runs into the same Anthropocene barriers of over-use of energy and 
over-production of waste (this may be because - as in culture wars against 
critical humanities – hard labour and job-ready graduates and validated over 
enjoyable and fulfilling work that leaves metals in the ground)  There is the 
possibility of sharing out the unemployment - but only as soon as we have 
embraced politically the economics of leisurely survival and creation - and 
that can only happen if the actuality of accumulation and inheritance stops 
motivating key political actors in past, present and emerging hegemonic 
regions. Which suggests - in the hard light of recent seismic events - that we 
should be manoeuvring away from territorially based hegemon and towards a 
stratigraphic model: is it cool yet to say we don't need wars between or within 
hegemons: we need class war?



Seán





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Re: Its a Language thing

[Sean Cubitt]

just a small correction to david's post: "The UK doesn't have a market of 
hundreds of
millions of people," he writes: "it did once but we voted to leave".

In fact the vote was over leaving the European Union. Mad King Boris decided 
that meant also quitting the common market, which wasn't on the ballot, largely 
because it would have swayed an already narrow majority towards defeat. The 
method in this madness was entirely internal to the Tory Party; and this may 
have lessons for all two-party systems where any chance of power has to be 
fought in faction wars within big parties, unlike European systems that 
encourage minor parties. (Anglophones describe these systems as 'unstable', 
despite the notorious instability of large parties like the demented 
Republicans or the splintered Conservatives)

Boris made the extremist call on total Brexit from sympathy with and succumbing 
to the power of the faction known as the Tory backwoodsmen. Nietzsche punned on 
the equivalent (Hinterwäldler) when he described metaphysicians as 
'backworldsmen', people who believed in an invisible world behind this one that 
was truly real and permanent. Tory backworldsmen believe in an essential, 
unchanging 'real' England (rarely the Celtic fringes) which it is their 
obsession to reveal. It was this cult – a minority which holds some crucial 
voting power – which demanded the referendum, fuelled the propaganda machine 
surrounding it, and demanded an extremist interpretation of the result - there 
was no "we"

[in a footnote, I still prefer the email forum for all the excellent reasons 
debated over the last few days - by all means document on an interactive 
platform and increase spread etc but do keep this more personal commons]

Seán Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA

I acknowledge the Boonwurrong and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nation on 
whose unceded lands I live and work

New publications:

 Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media special issue Visual Cultural Studies 
(Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale). 2022. https://vcsmimesis.org/





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Re: Proposition on Peak Data (John Preston)

[Sean Cubitt]

hi John and nettimers

just a small corrective: you describe data as 'intentionally gathered', which 
seems okay, and not inapprpriately extended to non-human intentions as in the 
case of the fuel gauge. My car-driving knowledge is limited (the equivalent is 
probably how much I crave a coffee after ten kms on the bike) but the gauges I 
remember were analog pointers. There are differences with numerical counters 
but we can overlook.

The problem is not with the indication of how much fuel is left in the tank 
when I glance at the gauge. The first problem lies with storage: gathering and 
keeping every reading the gauge has ever made. This is the initial problem of 
'peak data': how much of this captured and stored​ data is of value and to whom 
or, more broadly, to what. (My answer is - to the corporate cyborgs of the oil 
industry but that's another marginal issue for this discussion - it may be 
over-simplifying to say it is 'presented to the driver' if the indicator is not 
just pointing but gathering)

The second problem is that the stored data (let's call it information at this 
stage in its life) isn't in ert: it is actively processed in relation to other 
data. That might be a surveillance issue, again not something that worries me 
unduly in the peak data discussion. It's the new problem of information 
produced by processing stored data to produce more information for further 
processing 

two issues here: (a)  that the second, third, fourth etcetera order information 
is less and less close to the world the first data gathering touched and (b) 
there is more and more information produced from the first dataset, far more 
than the entire population could look at if it spent 8 hours a day in heavy 
rotation looking at it, and with no end in sight.

I was discussing the previous post on indigenous artefacts piled in storage - 
in their case not generating information; perhaps generating ignorance; or 
perhaps - they warn me - being made available to people who should never see 
them. That post ended with the suggestion that those artefacts should be left 
in the ground. I'm told that many traditional owners have contacted collections 
to request that the artefacts they house should be destroyed.

that's a terrible thing for an archivist. But perhaps it is time to start 
destroying the insane Borgesian archives of adta and information

[I made some proposals about the capture, storage and processing of social 
media imaging in my book Anecdotal Evidence which I recommend everyone goes out 
and buys at least two copies of]




For example, we may consider the fuel gauge in a car. The tank contains fuel, 
and we install a system which can measure the volume of fuel in the tank, and 
connect this to a dial on the dashboard, and so the data on the current fuel 
availablity of the car is generated by the interaction of the fuel tank, fuel 
in the tank, and the measurement system, and it is presented to the driver via 
the dial.


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Re: Utopia is finally over

[Sean Cubitt]

thanks Brian - as ever an astute analysis
It's intriguing how every autocrat this year hankers for the period round 
1945-9: Modi wants to go back to Partition; Xi keeps claiming the revolution; 
Trumpistas want to return to the Eisenhower era (For what it's worth Boris 
seems to want to return to 1943: surviving a ghastly defeat, and before the 
labour Government of 1945 introduced the NHS and welfare state). Putin pretty 
vocally wants to restore Stalin's USSR. (There's more to be said another time 
about the 1947 UN Declaration of Human Rights and the later statement on 
refugees)

but there's another date to bear in mind, 30 years earlier. The history of our 
times can be read as an enormous effort to rescind the gains of the Russian 
revolution. A time when an autocratic leader surrounded by a sycophantic court 
attempted to embroil his people in an unending war.

No return to 1947! All hands for the restoration of 1917

seán


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Today's Topics:

   1. Utopia is finally over (Brian Holmes)


--

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2022 15:19:46 -0600
From: Brian Holmes 
To: nettime 
Subject:  Utopia is finally over
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

I vividly remember driving past the shuttered customs buildings on the
Franco-Belgian border in the mid-1990s. Paris-Amsterdam had become a
freeway trip. Seven years later, colorful pieces of paper appeared in
everyone's hands: the euro. Almost simultaneously, China entered the World
Trade Organization. Anyone with historical awareness and access to live
information from around the planet could have predicted what would happen
over the middle term: the rise of inequality, the formation of a
transnational oligarchy, extreme environmental degradation, the reemergence
of far-right forces, and ultimately, geopolitical clashes leading to war.
Yet even those who did predict such things experienced a utopian period of
free international cooperation, creativity, travel, the formation of new
kinds of communities and the chance to express a new spirit that had
emerged after the end of the Cold War in 1989-92. In fact the entire
neoliberal period, with market populism at its core, saw incredible
flowerings of culture across the earth, something worth remembering and
trying to interpret.

America's useless wars in Central Asia and the Middle East (supported by
Nato in the former case) cast an excruciating light over this period, as
did the inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere and the corresponding
failure to do anything about it. You'd have thought that the global
financial crisis of 2007-12 would have put an end to all this, but instead
it reinforced the oligarchies. Meanwhile, privileged people all over the
world kept the party going. I was in Mongolia, on an amazing cross-cultural
art junket in 2014, when a Polish artist agitatedly explained to me what I
was not getting: Vladimir Putin's ability to run circles around Western
governments and populations with the destabilizing techniques of what was
then called "non-linear warfare" - while at the same time engaging in the
real thing.

No one knows where the current conflict will end, if war will extend beyond
Ukraine's borders, how the crucial issue of Russian-Chinese cooperation
will play out over the coming months, whether the unified world economy
will split into rival blocs (Nato vs Shanghai Cooperation Organization), or
whether a new, even more corrupt status quo will emerge that allows the EU
to remain Russia's number 1 trading partner.  As I write, the former SPD
chancellor of Germany during the go-go years of globalization, Gerhard
Schroeder, has not yet stepped down from his position as chairman of the
board of Rosneft.

Whatever the outcomes, everyone knows a divide has been crossed, and that
the short and middle-term responses will be crucial. There's half a chance
to purge the global financial / real-estate system of highly corruptive
Russian money, and to quell the voices of those who see Putin's militarist
nationalism as the model for a virile white authoritarian resurgence across
the so-called West (I'll leave others to speculate about contrary
possibilities). Maybe a live demonstration of what risk reall

Re: The Meaning of Boris Johnson

[Sean Cubitt]

two short reflections on Brian's point on the corporate state:

the alt.right's libertarian situationism (which Brits recognise as Dominic 
Cummings' cash from chaos doctrine) is an extension  of Mount Pelerin's belief 
that the state should a) shrink and b) be subject to 'law' - but clearly not 
laws that governments write: the law is today referred to as the International 
Rules based Order and is fundamentally the law as promulgated by the WTO (and 
GATT before it). The loony fringe think the Law is some imagined Magna Carta 
(or possibly the 10 commandments rewritten to preclude gun control and trans 
rights). The Ottawa truckies probably don't believe the state should stop 
shovelling snow, filing potoles, clearing wrecks or sending ambulances to crash 
sites. If and when they set up mutual benefit associations to build roads, 
police and maintain them, and their own hospitals with funds to provide for the 
victims of their pollution, I'll believe they are into something good. That 
these services to the road haulage industry are provided free of charge and 
supported with fossil fuel subsidies suggests current neoliberal governments 
are good for ensuring the well being of capital and the destruction of the 
planet. Otherwise where would be the point of state capture of the kind 
envisaged by the GoP's segregationist voting policies?

It is striking that Modi evokes Partition, Zi the Revolution and Putin the 
moment when the USSR's territorial spread was at its greatest, while Boris is 
part of a movement that gained  traction with Reagan and Thatcher in the late 
1970s to rescind the gains made by the Welfare State at the same period. Brian 
can fill us in non the parallel histories of the US and Canada but it seems the 
1940s postwar generation that gave us the mathematical theory of communication 
and cybernetics also set the foundations for 2020s revanchism

so it is heartening to remember that the equivalent period after WW1 and the 
Spanish influenza a hundred years ago gave us the Duino Elegies and Ulysses. 
Audiovisual media have been maturing for about the same time as the novel had 
been in 1922: perhaps this pandemic year we'll see similar aesthetico-political 
breakthrough.

seán


Message: 2
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2022 16:06:14 -0600
From: Brian Holmes 
To: David Garcia 
Cc: "nettim...@kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  The Meaning of Boris Johnson
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Obviously I agree with David in this thread. Global metabolic disruptions
like the pandemic (and the coming climate-driven storms, famines, etc)
require a renewed focus on large-scale collective action - not just
intellectually, but also existentially. This was obvious with the
production and distributions of the mRNA vaccines (an incredible feat of
science and technology btw). For the first time in my life I was glad to
see the US Army in action, because they were putting a shot in my arm, for
free, in an entirely desegregated collective facility that made me feel
like the resident of a city rather than an individual sheltering in a
private home. To this day, practically everyone in Chicago wears a mask in
public places, which is a rare and tremendously positive recognition of the
vulnerability of others.

I agree with Patrice too, except Patrice, I think you make a category
error. The relevant category is neither corporations nor government, but
instead the democratic capitalist state. From the get-go this is a
corporate state that develops social functions for the needs of enterprise.
But as a socially transformative force the state "comes back in" (as the
poly sci people say) whenever there is a collective issue such as war,
drought, systemic economic crisis that cannot be resolved through market
relations. It's the only way the state can retain legitimacy, and we will
not see that pattern ending anytime soon. The pandemic showed amply how
this collective actions works, as well as its contradictions and failures.
But so does much of 20th century history, as Joe Rabie pointed out.

I'm convinced that under the pressures of global inequality and climate
change, we are going experience many excruciating versions of this return
of collective agency. However, like Patrice and Joe too, I have serious
doubts whether the corporate state can fulfill its democratic promises. It
was amazing to see plans for transformative state investment come together
along with the vaccines during the early phases of the pandemic, then reach
the US legislative process in 2021. What next occurred was a breakdown of
that legislative process in the face of identitarian right-wing political
agitation, to the point where a US administration trying to fight
inequality and climate change through a comprehensive economic program
designed primarily by Bernie Sanders is now courting war with Russia as a
desperate attempt to hang onto power. And so, instead of gradually taking
apart and convertin

Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques

[Sean Cubitt]

good point david
there's another example reported in today's Guardian (the story has been 
running for a while' with a similar story about the oil industry
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/18/exxon-texas-courts-critics-climate-crimes

seán

From: David Garcia 
Sent: Saturday, 22 January 2022 10:45 pm
To: Sean Cubitt ; nettime-l@mail.kein.org 

Subject: [EXT] Re:  CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: 
left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques

External email: Please exercise caution



.. The commodification of ignorance ..



In his uncharacteristically angry book ‘Down to Earth: Politics in the New 
Climate Regime’,  Bruno Latour describes Ignorance on the part of the public as 
a “precious commodity” justifying immense investments. And in a useful footnote 
he points to the great manual on the active production of ignorance in the case 
of the tobacco industry being Robert Procter’s Golden Holocaust: Origins of the 
Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (Berkley, CA: University of 
California Press, 2011).



David Garcia





From:  on behalf of Sean Cubitt 

Date: Saturday, 22 January 2022 at 00:25
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: 
left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques



some notes from a manuscript on Truth I've been working on: the problem seems 
to be one of inadequate distrust



The problem with neo-populists is not that they distrust the media but that 
they trust them too much (and trust the wrong media). They do not seem to 
distrust advertising, software, fiction and the twitter feeds of billionaires. 
Their trust makes them angry, and the amplifications of their trusted media 
mobilise anger as hatred. ‘Freedom’ as war cry allows isolated, fearful and 
therefore combative people to feel they follow a common purpose, never noticing 
the paradox that following is unfree. On the other side, ‘trusting the science’ 
is as dubious as trusting the Lord: both have a sorry record of condoning and 
causing genocide and ecocide from the Inquisition to Hiroshima. This is why 
methodical distrust is essential, why we need the analytic aspect of 
consideration of – to consider where we are, what we can do and what effects 
our actions might take, informed by consideration for – caring, nurturing, 
loving (the alien): considering the consequences of truth statements, practices 
or performances of truth. Truth is a practice, but so is untruth, and they 
cannot be distinguished by whether they are successful or not, by whatever 
measure we apply. The natural, social and human sciences no longer pretend to 
possess absolute truth. It is in general a hallmark of neo-populist, not to say 
neo-fascist politicians and political movements to claim that they do. They 
proclaim their one true God, the alternate fact, that trumps all collective 
wisdom that says there is no single truth and no single place to interpret it 
from. Truth is not whole, stable, coherent, universal or eternal: truth is 
performed.



There is much more to say about the dispersed subjectivity of the network 
condition and the in-built tendency to managerialism (we should be translating 
'cybernetes' as 'manager') in the no-longer humancyborg corporations that 
manage networks; about the epidemic of anxiety and bewilderment and the anger 
they breed. Etcetera.

Seán Cubitt | He/Him

Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA



scub...@unimelb.edu.au



New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au>

Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W<https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W>







From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
Sent: Friday, 21 January 2022 7:53 pm
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 172, Issue 22



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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics:
  left-wing, feminist and anti-racist criti

Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques

[Sean Cubitt]

some notes from a manuscript on Truth I've been working on: the problem seems 
to be one of inadequate distrust


The problem with neo-populists is not that they distrust the media but that 
they trust them too much (and trust the wrong media). They do not seem to 
distrust advertising, software, fiction and the twitter feeds of billionaires. 
Their trust makes them angry, and the amplifications of their trusted media 
mobilise anger as hatred. ‘Freedom’ as war cry allows isolated, fearful and 
therefore combative people to feel they follow a common purpose, never noticing 
the paradox that following is unfree. On the other side, ‘trusting the science’ 
is as dubious as trusting the Lord: both have a sorry record of condoning and 
causing genocide and ecocide from the Inquisition to Hiroshima. This is why 
methodical distrust is essential, why we need the analytic aspect of 
consideration of – to consider where we are, what we can do and what effects 
our actions might take, informed by consideration for – caring, nurturing, 
loving (the alien): considering the consequences of truth statements, practices 
or performances of truth. Truth is a practice, but so is untruth, and they 
cannot be distinguished by whether they are successful or not, by whatever 
measure we apply. The natural, social and human sciences no longer pretend to 
possess absolute truth. It is in general a hallmark of neo-populist, not to say 
neo-fascist politicians and political movements to claim that they do. They 
proclaim their one true God, the alternate fact, that trumps all collective 
wisdom that says there is no single truth and no single place to interpret it 
from. Truth is not whole, stable, coherent, universal or eternal: truth is 
performed.

There is much more to say about the dispersed subjectivity of the network 
condition and the in-built tendency to managerialism (we should be translating 
'cybernetes' as 'manager') in the no-longer humancyborg corporations that 
manage networks; about the epidemic of anxiety and bewilderment and the anger 
they breed. Etcetera.


Seán Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#

Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W



From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
Sent: Friday, 21 January 2022 7:53 pm
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 172, Issue 22

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics:
  left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques (hans christian voigt)
   2. Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics:
  left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques (Ana Teixeira Pinto)
   3. Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics:
  left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques (Ana Teixeira Pinto)
   4. Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics:
  left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques (Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid))


--

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2022 19:10:26 +0200
From: hans christian voigt 
To: "nettim...@kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics:
left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques
Message-ID: <98ba5664-8a22-42a0-a57c-bada5bbcd...@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;   charset=utf-8

I?d say the verdict "an excellent example of [..] 'left? thinking that has 
completely fallen for the government and big-pharma propaganda" was the end of 
any critical discussion.

That and further indication that Florians doubts don?t seem far fetched.

chr.


>
>
> From: Florian Cramer 
> Sent: Thursday, 20 January 2022 13:00
> To: Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) 
> Cc: nettim...@kein.org
> Subject: Re:  CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: 
> left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques
>
>
> - Government propaganda and censorship around lockdown and vaccination
> [...]
> - The role of mass and social media in anti- or pro-lockdown or vaccine 
> propaganda, political polarization and forms of media virality (eg. via 
> covid-19 memes)
> [...]
> - Mandatory vaccine rollouts as assaults to the feminist appeal to bodily 

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Sean Cubitt]

sorry to hear about the wrist injury John: hope the gardening's good.
On population: 1. if you're right, abandoning the one-child family policy may 
be the most significant political decision of the first part of the century - 
both the policy and its termination might appear autocratic?  2. is the problem 
the whole population or the fact that a tiny percentage have accumulated all 
the wealth and use it to launch rockets and otherwise consume resources at 
scales far beyond most people? The food problem could be sorted simply: eat the 
rich.

Gary: thanks - using socialism as shorthand for not-individualist was sloppy: 
de Sousa Santos is a good corrective: 'The hopeless fear of the powerless 
majorities stems from the fearless hope of the powerful minorities' he writes, 
and might be describing any tech trillionaire, whose optimism is warranted by 
their wealth. There's a maybe over-detailed argument to make whether this 
tech-optimism is hope or just planning - Bloch wrote the 'hope would not be 
hope if it could not be disappointed, the obverse of which is that hope is 
always for something utterly different but utterly unknowable -- which is part 
of de Sousa Santos' argument when he adds in his final lines the necessity 'for 
the future to become possible again'

Hope is the sense that a future other than this is possible: the politics of 
hope is making the conditions for its possibility - not, and I think this is 
the core of his critique of revolution and reform, a project, a projection, 
projecting present ideas and practices onto the future.

Mouffe and Rancière both argue that politics really occurs only when some part 
of the world that has been administered but never allowed to speak demands a 
voice. Today, migrants are not thinkable in the same terms as citizens: if we 
rebuild our systems to allow them to speak (vote, whatever) we have to rebuild 
fundamentally. If we begin to think that places, bioregions, reefs and oceans 
can no longer be administered without a voice, the challenge is even more 
profound (and takes us far beyond democracy/autocracy as the sole polarity in 
politics)

It's certainly true we also have to unveil the lie of discourses of freedom: we 
are ontologically ecological beings; and historically obliged to work in order 
to eat; as Galtung wrote 50 years ago, structural violence is measurable in the 
distance between potential and actuality: the structural racism of climate 
change, to return to John's point, not to mention the structural racism of 
pandemic vaccine politics, proxy wars, extraction industries, waste dumping and 
if Jon Beller's right of the entire computational network and its economy all 
demonstrate that freedom is at best the privilege of a tiny minority. That each 
of them, as Vincent indicates, is also prisoner of debt - the emblematic 
machinery for controlling the future under finance capital - shows how deeply 
the harness of consumer choice has worn in

making possible by conviviality, to make possible a commons (not to return to 
Eden): disappoinment would not be disappointment if it could not retain a germ 
of hope


Seán



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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism (John Hopkins)
   2. Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism (Vincent Gaulin)


--

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2021 11:31:47 -0600
From: John Hopkins 


I would suggest that the starting point (contrary to your 'first step') is an
examination of the problem of human population numbers. Life consumes energy to
maintain itself. This fact cannot avoided. That consumption can be optimized and
minimized, but humans, in the process of engineering optimization, have
optimized some localized populations' consumption of energy to maximize their
viability, which ends up maximizing energy consumption.


*
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2021 11:08:17 +0100
From: Gary Hall 

Can socialism accommodate such a
nondualist, nonseperablist ontological framing? Or does it require
transforming socialism almost out of all recognition by imagining it
very differently? Which I guess is part of what is being pointed towards
in this discussion of freedom and democracy in the c

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Sean Cubitt]

free to extract fossil fuels, and also free to die in a
flood or a forest fire. Yet the one who extracts (maybe a deep-sea drilling
company registered in the Caymans) and the one who dies (maybe an immigrant
in a basement apartment in New York) are not the same. If our theory of
democracy worked, the extracting and the dying would both be legitimate
because we "all" (or at least a majority of us) elected the lawmakers who
set the conditions under which the fuels would be extracted (and the rains,
rained, and the forests, scorched). So it would be our own damn fault. But
in North America and Britain and Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere
(not to say "the West"), for decades there has been no chance to subject
this legitimacy to a theoretical and practical critique, because even if
people with such intentions are elevated to power by elections, others
immediately show up yelling about their freedom.

In the backwoods of Oregon, which is having a brief respite from the fires
in order to become the worst site of the coronavirus epidemic, I literally
saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over
the sound of my freedom." That tee-shirt was the triumphant expression of
decades and billions of dollars worth of corporate manipulation, including
money direct from the Caymans. The same collective forces helped send a
bunch of wing nuts to the US Capitol to rant about their individual freedom
last January 6.

The theoretical critique of freedom and democracy has not been adequately
done, but the practical critique is moving ahead fast. When New York and
environs suffer more damage and death from a hurricane than Louisiana does,
you can expect an infrastructural response. But here's the rub: in the
absence of a theoretical/practical critique of capitalist democracy, the
response will be, not decarbonization, but enhanced protection for the most
well-off members of society.

The biological concept of symbiosis, and the integral evolutionary analysis
of earth system science that sprang from it, offer a viable theoretical
basis for practice (and a better one than the "accidental" theory of
mutation that Stiegler drew on). Rather than freedom, these ideas point to
interdependency as a necessary condition for continuing evolution. Stiegler
was well aware that in order for such a theoretical outlook to become
practical, a better idea of individuality had to be worked out, and space
had to be opened up for individual contributions to collective
transformation, in place of *absolutist* declarations of individual
freedom. There's the arena for cultural innovation today, imho.

Brian


On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 12:14 AM Andreas Broeckmann 
wrote:

> please (Daniel Ross), define "absolute failure (of the West)".
>
> -a
>
> ps: i suggest to leave room, in this definition, for failures of yet
> other proportions.
>
> pps: looks like adjectives are generally up for grabs these days and
> might become redundant rubble, if not signifiers of the opposites, like
> "precise(ly)" in many philosophical discourses.
>
>
> Am 02.09.21 um 23:44 schrieb Sean Cubitt:
> > thanks for circulating Patrice
> >
> > there's a great piece responding to similar issues byDaniel Ross (aka
> > Stiegler?s translator):
> >
> >
> https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened
> > <
> https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened
> >
> >
> >
> > a flavour:
> > "Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is
> > associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which
> > we are confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency
> > depends on recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a
> > necessity whose impure technological, but also social, economic and
> > political conditions are alone what make possible the exercise of
> > collective intelligence, belief, wisdom and decision. The temptation is
> > always to say that freedom and democracy are the fundamental
> > requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet the
> > /absolute/ failure of the West over the past two years means that these
> > ideas must /absolutely/ be subjected to critique, where the latter is
> > /never/ a denunciation, but an interrogation of their ?pharmacological?
> > limits"
> >
> > se?n
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> #  @nettime_bot t

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Sean Cubitt]

thanks for circulating Patrice

there's a great piece responding to similar issues by Daniel Ross (aka 
Stiegler’s translator):

https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened

a flavour:
"Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is 
associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which we are 
confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency depends on 
recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a necessity whose 
impure technological, but also social, economic and political conditions are 
alone what make possible the exercise of collective intelligence, belief, 
wisdom and decision. The temptation is always to say that freedom and democracy 
are the fundamental requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet 
the absolute failure of the West over the past two years means that these ideas 
must absolutely be subjected to critique, where the latter is never a 
denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’ limits"

seán


Seán Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#

Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W





The comprehensive crisis of neoliberalism may have unleashed creative 
intellectual energy even at the once-dead centre of politics. But an 
intellectual crisis does not a new era make. If it is energising to discover 
that we can afford anything we can actually do, it also puts us on the spot. 
What can and should we actually do? Who, in fact, is the we?

As Britain, the US and Brazil demonstrate, democratic politics is taking on 
strange and unfamiliar new forms. Social inequalities are more, not less 
extreme. At least in the rich countries, there is no collective countervailing 
force. Capitalist accumulation continues in channels that continuously multiply 
risks. The principal use to which our newfound financial freedom has been put 
are more and more grotesque efforts at financial stabilisation. The antagonism 
between the west and China divides huge chunks of the world, as not since the 
cold war. And now, in the form of Covid, the monster has arrived. The 
Anthropocene has shown its fangs ? on an as yet modest scale. Covid is far from 
being the worst of what we should expect ? 2020 was not the full alert. If we 
are dusting ourselves off and enjoying the recovery, we should reflect. Around 
the world the dead are unnumbered, but our best guess puts the figure at 10 
million. Thousands are dying every day. And 2020 was a wake-up call.

Adapted from Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World?s Economy by Adam Tooze, 
published by Allen Lane on 7 September

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Re: deep humanities initiative

[Sean Cubitt]

The thread - on the way to dissolution - has been fascinating and I've not much 
to add except that the list of topics avoids almost every major achievement of 
the humanities (and therefore the reasons why governments, pressure groups etc 
like to attack them).

Feminism arose in the 1970s not from STEM but from HASS (humanities arts and 
social science). STEM did not propel postcolonial and decolonial studies or 
critical race studies - if anything they lent their support to the lie of 
biological racism. I always presumed that STS science and tech studies changed 
its name from History and Philosophy of Science to broaden its field but also 
to escape its subservient role in med schools ectetera. But like critical 
digital studies it owes little to schools of computing (this comment might be 
out of order but it has in general been at the margins where computing meets 
HASS that the key work has been done). Critical disability studies didn't 
emerge from engineering schools tho it should have. HASS have changed the 
intellectual and ethical landscape of the 21st century at least as profoundly 
as STEM

On the positive side, the scientists have been far better at communicating the 
arcana of quantum theory and DNA than in general we have been in communicating 
what HASS does to the general public (tip of the hat to Nick Mirzoeff for his 
efforts). Feminists and critical race scholars - Ta Nahisi Coates  - have done 
huge things here; Rebecca Solnit out of environmental humanities - but no big 
statements for several decades of what we collectively are doing and why.

That is exactly what a major initiative should be doing. Broad is more 
important than deep

seán


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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: deep humanities initiative (Ted Byfield)
   2. Re: deep humanities initiative
  (d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk)


--

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2021 13:00:32 -0400
From: "Ted Byfield" 
To: Nettime-l 
Subject: Re:  deep humanities initiative
Message-ID: <5aba5930-4d5d-48c5-b323-c6fc37d98...@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"; format=flowed

I have a few thoughts: the first has to do with these one-off comments
about "deep," the second has to do with the gender aspect of this thread
in just five messages long. They're related, in a way.

(1) DEEP

Somewhere in my piles of scribbles I have some notes for an essay on the
poetics of "deep." tl;dr: no, *do* forget web, pockets, and Europe.
Those associations are fine, but there are better ways to approach this
kind of thing than a couple of guys dashing off whatever comes to mind.

One of my favorite mini-methods for just-add-water cultural analysis is
Google's autocomplete ? say, what it coughs up if you type in "deep
a", "deep b", "deep c", etc. 26 searches is boring, but its rote,
mechanical quality forces you to look at what other people are thinking.
In this case it's pretty funny (part of me wants to say *deeply
ironic*), because you're staring the problem right in its face: what do
millions, maybe billions of people mean when they think "deep"?

There are several ~layers of meaning, but I'll just get to a few:

One is older, and has a miscellaneous quality because "deep" is literal:
"deep pockets," "deep ocean," "deep end," etc. They're not so
interesting, though "deep sleep" is one of them, and it was probably a
basis for later, more metaphorical notions of deep."

Then there's another layer where the marketing kick in, and you start to
see more metaphorical phrases like "deep conditioner" or "deep tissue
massage." This second layer is less miscellaneous because the marketing
has a focus, the human body. In this sense, "deep" takes on a new,
latent meaning through an implied contrast ? not just with a
traditional antonym like "shallow", I think, but with something more
like "superficial." It's not so explicit in this context, but this turn
came with gendering ? I think because commercial representations of
bodies tended to focus on women first, and conveyed a sort of
double-bind message: your body is a chronic problem / this product will
fix or maintain it /  turn your body into a promise. Lather, rinse,
repeat, as they say.

I'll fast-forward past a bunch of othe

Re: Thoughts on coups

[Sean Cubitt]

Andreas asked (and Eric, Oliver and Brian offer plans for) how 'politics' (my 
word, not his) can work, practically. Offline I admitted that our ill-timed 
move to Australia means I'm as bad a person to reply as anyone could be but...

On the question of who can speak: when a hundred whales strand themselves. - 
commit group suicide - there are two or three possible causes: deep ocean sonar 
activity, typically military but sometimes natural deep ocean earthquakes (but 
none recently near the Chathams) or chasing food, typically travelling on 
currents of, in this case, cold water, set up by new seasonal conditions due to 
glacial melt. If a hundred migrants threw themselves onto a beach to die we 
should respond, whether we speak their language or not. Whale beachings speak. 
to us - it's just that we aren't listening. (Wittgenstein was wrong to say 'If 
a lion could speak, we would not understand him: lions do speak - we choose to 
ignore them)

On technology: step1: Grundrisse, the 'Fragment on machines': machinery is the 
congealed form of skills extracted from workers and turned into factories, ie 
'dead labour', now owned by the factory boss and turned into an instrument of 
discipline over the workers.  Step 2: any attempt to get round that discipline 
and reduce the burden of labour  becomes the property of the bosses too, is 
added to the machinery and its organisation; step 3: as Andreas has also 
pointed out, include here natural languages, maths etcetera - all culture is 
the congealed form of the knowledge and skills, as is institutional 
organisation; step 4: when I talked about this 15 years  ago with the Maori 
filmmaker Barry Barclay he replied, that's the problem with you pakeha: you 
don't know the names of your ancestors.

Technologies of every kind are the black boxes where we keep our ancestors 
locked up

Learning  from indigenous (and ancient folklore across Eurasia about djinns, 
fairies, dragons, dryads...)): what we call 'nature'  - mountains, rivers, 
trees as Brian just reminded us - are packed with life, and tho I prefer the 
word 'mediating' they communicate  - and as natural creatures who eat, breath 
and shit like anything else, we're part of that mediating/communicating ecology 
-- what we call nature is the domain of gods

to add another layer to Brian's delirium: a politics of gods and ancestors

Corporate capital (and its antecedent montheisms) has diminished, repressed and 
locked up our gods and ancestors for too long, "I love my fellow man" wrote 
Tolstoy " i would do anything to help him, anything at all -- except get off 
his back"

First step of a new politics: stop riding on the backs of gods and ancestors. 
History demonstrates that the longer we treat them as dumb animals that deserve 
to be ridden, the worse this gets


Sean

PS [ a small issue but -- monarch comes from mono-archos: rule by one.; 
an-archos is no rule (like the difference between aesthetic and anaesthetic) - 
no-rule tends to privilege the wealth/powerful: there's probably a Greek word 
for that too, but tyranny of the rich is a reasonable one - that's why they 
mock 1968 on one side of their faces and repeat it - this time as tragedy - 
with the other]


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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Thoughts on coups (John Young)
   2. Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups (Brian Holmes)


--

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 09:32:59 -0500
From: John Young 
To: 
Subject: Re:  Thoughts on coups
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"

An-archism vs. mon-archism, many vs. few,
--

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:13:28 -0600
From: Brian Holmes 
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:20 PM Sean Cubitt 
wrote:

The unthinkable has to be thought.
>

That's exactly it. I like this discussion. It's fascinating how the ideas
spring up like mushrooms. I especiall

Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[Sean Cubitt]

War: is already the de facto result of climate change in what used to be the 
Fertile Crescent. Trump damn near made it an issue of war on the Mexican 
border. If Australia wasn't a federation, its states would be at war over the 
selling off of the Murray Darling river system's water. And the pyrocene is 
entrenched in Australia.

There used to be a sour joke: There are Irish nationalists, Welsh Nationalists, 
Scottish nationalists and... English Greens. Like anarcho-fascists (Dominic 
Cummings, late of Downing Street, was just such a right-wing situationist), 
green-nationalists are equally revanchist.

Crutzen and Stoermer closed their 2000 proposal for the term 'Anthropocene' 
thus:
'An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global 
research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, 
sustainable, environmental management'

Geoengineering by a class of scientists (shades of HG Wells' Shape of Things to 
Come') may be as risky as scientists running nuclear programs. Tho maybe Wells 
also had something smart behind his aeronautical Übermenschen - world 
government. There's a good history of the UN that uses the Victorian poet 
Tenison's lofty vision of The Parliament of Man for its title - the gender is 
clearly out; but so is the speciesism. Rancière argues that politics occurs 
when the excluded demand a part in their governance - a demand that changes 
government permanently (as women and ex-slaves have done already). It is 
unthinkable that oceans and mountains should have a seat in government, just as 
it was unthinkable for women - and still is unthinkable for migrants - to have 
a say in how they are governed. The unthinkable has to be thought.

Eco-socialism yes - but only if the 'social' is rethought - and re-practiced - 
no longer exclusively as human: The Commons is a better phrase, common land, 
general intellect (including those forms it takes when congealed into machines 
and infrastructures). We could start with that absurd contradiction 
'intellectual property' - commons as peer-to-peer ecology/economy may start 
from undoing at least property as core concept of western Enlightenment. That 
this implies undoing the 'proper' as the principle of individualism is one way 
to recognise where anarchism belongs to capital and when it doesn't

Think local, act global

s


Sean Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#

________
From: Brian Holmes 
Sent: Wednesday, 25 November 2020 10:29 AM
To: Sean Cubitt 
Cc: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: [EXT] Re:  Thoughts on coups

UoM notice: External email. Be cautious of links, attachments, or impersonation 
attempts


On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 3:53 PM Sean Cubitt 
mailto:sean.cub...@unimelb.edu.au>> wrote:

Nationalism builds on the other great crisis of our times, migration. 
Post-nationalism means opening borders. Only that way will the wealthy learn 
that removing the causes of migration - war, pandemic, climate change, 
colonialism - is the only way to survive (unless of course you're one of the 
billionaire class)

This is for certain, because the only alternative to opening borders - and at 
the same time, engaging in co-development strategies that allow some people, at 
least, to remain where they are - is war plain and simple. Climate change is 
going to translate into burnt crops, forced migration and war long before 
rising seas drive people out of lower Manhattan. And state collapse induced by 
neoliberalism will do the same. The current political economy is a vicious 
circle getting worse, 2020 has sure made that clear!

Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an alliance of the excluded - 
human, ecological and - I would add, though it needs a longer argument - 
technological

The question I have, is how to build an effective alliance of the excluded, one 
that does not become a wrecking ball in its own right?

A lot of anarchism is now doing the work of neoliberalism, it's heavily 
nihilistic. Autonomism itself was an uneasy fusion, anarcho-communism, but the 
communist part was gradually reduced to a kind of fantasy for intellectuals 
whose real politics were anarchist by default - not their own default, but 
because every attempt to construct a state-for-the-multitudes was foreclosed. 
In the absence of a constructive principle you get alienated people looking to 
accelerate the breakdown, on both right and left btw. The US is rampant with 
that kind of accelerationist now - in fact, on the extreme right they describe 
themselves with that exact word.

I think we

Re: Thoughts on coups

[Sean Cubitt]

Brian hits the nail on the head when he writes "paying out fiat money to smooth 
the
jagged edges of the business cycle and thereby making proletarian
consumption into the very engine of capitalist growth."

As Felix adds, capital absolutely requires externalised nature - a cost-free 
resource which can be mined and dumped into at no cost.

The model also applies now to the proletarian consumer: once merely formally 
subsumed under capital, the new form of consumption has been 'really' subsumed: 
the form of consumption is fully integrated - all consumption is also 
productive, generating data for further exploitation. The mass production of 
debt is a crucial part of the process: as is the mental health epidemic that it 
generates - this is one way capital dumps its unwanted product, just as it 
dumps unwanted heat into the atmosphere.

Waste is not marginal: it is integral to capital - and that includes wasting 
excess humans, ie those that are not in the inner circle of obscene wealth. The 
destruction of the state by capital under Brexit / Trumpism is one strategy for 
ensuring a) the proletarianization of the real subsumption of consumption under 
capital and b) the externalisation/environmentalisation of the bio-mass and - 
in a way that must terrify all post-autonomists - the general intellect.

Ex-communist polities (populist cronyism in its Putin/Xi variants) still seem 
to prefer state capture; neo-con/neo-libs go for state destruction: but the 
distinction is blurry (Georges Monbiot has a suggestion why:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/24/brexit-capitalism

More depressing is the failure of the Left - while half believed the EU was a 
flawed but viable system for controlling the worst excesses of capital (which 
is why Murdoch and other gang members wanted it wrecked), the other half, 
including Corbyn, saw it as a capitalist conspiracy. Given that nationalism is 
such a hallmark of the rhetoric of neo-populists, one obvious experiment to 
make is a post-nationalist left - which instantly implies not rebuilding 
globalisation as it existed prior to the GFC but one that builds on what now 
constitutes the material infrastructure: populations, networks and ecologies.

Nationalism builds on the other great crisis of our times, migration. 
Post-nationalism means opening borders. Only that way will the wealthy learn 
that removing the causes of migration - war, pandemic, climate change, 
colonialism - is the only way to survive (unless of course you're one of the 
billionaire class)

Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an alliance of the excluded - 
human, ecological and - I would add, though it needs a longer argument - 
technological


 sean


Sean Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#




Message: 1
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 10:58:52 +0100
From: Felix Stalder 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  Thoughts on coups
Message-ID: <2a74602d-d71a-2175-62ad-29b62760e...@openflows.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"



On 24.11.20 04:14, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Here's my two cents: Keynes aimed to save capitalism from itself. Double
> down on Keynes, unleash vast new creative energies on the basis of fiat
> money, and maybe, instead of sapping capital's foundations, we can push it
> over the top into ecosocialism.

There are probably two distinct political strategies here. And it would
be interesting to work out their relation.

The first is move capitalism towards a different regime of accumulation,
one based less on extractivism and consumerism but rather more on
renewable energy and "eco-system services" for repairing some of the
damage already done (I know, this term is conventionally used in a
different sense). A little bit of this we are already seeing, with the
EU's project to become a first climate neutral continent by 2050, China
commitment by 2060 and new Biden admin making similar gestures. So far,
actual effects, in terms of reducing the output of CO2 and and
ending/slowing down the loss of biological diversity, have not been
achieved. The big question is: is that too little too late, unable to
overcome very real system barriers to substantial change? Or can this be
made into the beginning of a self-accelerating shift in the energy
regime of global civilization?

In the longer run, it's hard to imagine how capitalism can still be
capitalism without treating "nature" as an externality. So the question
then becomes, what are the condition under which a 'greener capitalism'
can be pushed into something else. In a way that is like an update of
th

Fw: A question in earnest (Max Herman)

[Sean Cubitt]

Hi Brian

my mail seems to have got lost so - in response to your question about what 
other places are thinking, here's my note from Australia


From: Sean Cubitt 
Sent: Monday, 5 October 2020 8:47 AM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: Re: A question in earnest (Max Herman)

Hi max

"Why is there nothing appearing here about the US election?"

In my case, mostly sheer depression, manifesting as lassitude.

>From outside, Trump's kleptocrats have not only looted the state they captured 
>and set the terms for civil war, but done possibly irreparable damage to the 
>planet. The selection of the opponent least likely to offend leads inevitably 
>to one without vision. The hegemony is passing westward across the Pacific. 
>Trump's illusion of restoring 'greatness' (imperial power, white privilege) is 
>only marginally less out of step with history than Boris Johnson's farcical 
>promise to restore the Empire as it was c. 1946, before the founding of the UN 
>and the new international regime - that is now mutating once again. The only 
>interest has been to see what new insanity Trump can come up with or be 
>revealed to be hiding, and the joke is wearing thin. Everyone hopes Trump 
>loses, heavily, but few people are inspired by the Democrat alternative. 
>No-one outside the States wants American cuisine, cars, sports or gun culture. 
>A new polity based on what the US is good at - music, movies, education and 
>gizmos - combined with a return to isolationism that would leave the rest of 
>us in peace is the best we can hope for. It may not be so long till the 
>Mexican government does complete the wall - to keep the yanquis out (the 
>problem was never people coming in; it was always money gushing out). Watching 
>the election, from outside, is like watching a script conference for the 
>ninety-ninth sequel to Dumb and Dumber, where all the writers are on codeine. 
>What's really shocking is that a substantial number of US citizens appear 
>ready to vote for this brazenly corrupt sock puppet

 I understand trumpistas want to vote for sexism, racism and a return to 
colonialism; I understand that the American idea of 'freedom' bears no relation 
to anyone else's idea of collective responsibilities. American exceptionalism, 
from its weird spelling to its archaic units of measurement, was always funny. 
Now it is absurd in the Beckett and Ionesco sense: an assertion of identity 
where there is only conformism, and of nation at the moment of its 
disintegration. The election is a horrible farce at the brink of the abyss, or 
somewhere more banal, like the vortex of dirty water draining out of a bathtub. 
Washington is eating itself alive, and its voters are pouring on the barbecue 
sauce. The tea-party anarcho-capitalists said they would drain the swamp but 
omitted to mention they would drain it into the pockets of their billionaire 
donors at home and - increasingly - abroad.

The 2016 election was a tragedy. This one is a farce. Probably Ishtar: a madly 
expensive production that no-one can bear to watch

best of luck finding a way out!

sean



Sean Cubitt
Melbourne/Australia

scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#


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Sent: Sunday, 4 October 2020 9:00 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 157, Issue 3

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   1. A question in earnest (Max Herman)


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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2020 16:47:57 +
From: Max Herman 
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject:  A question in earnest
Message-ID:



Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"


Why is there nothing appearing here about the US election?

I sound like a jerk to myself typing this but the silence is unexpected.

Are we all too afraid to say anything, or all just busy with other platforms?


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Re: A question in earnest (Max Herman)

[Sean Cubitt]

Hi max

"Why is there nothing appearing here about the US election?"

In my case, mostly sheer depression, manifesting as lassitude.

>From outside, Trump's kleptocrats have not only looted the state they captured 
>and set the terms for civil war, but done possibly irreparable damage to the 
>planet. The selection of the opponent least likely to offend leads inevitably 
>to one without vision. The hegemony is passing westward across the Pacific. 
>Trump's illusion of restoring 'greatness' (imperial power, white privilege) is 
>only marginally less out of step with history than Boris Johnson's farcical 
>promise to restore the Empire as it was c. 1946, before the founding of the UN 
>and the new international regime - that is now mutating once again. The only 
>interest has been to see what new insanity Trump can come up with or be 
>revealed to be hiding, and the joke is wearing thin. Everyone hopes Trump 
>loses, heavily, but few people are inspired by the Democrat alternative. 
>No-one outside the States wants American cuisine, cars, sports or gun culture. 
>A new polity based on what the US is good at - music, movies, education and 
>gizmos - combined with a return to isolationism that would leave the rest of 
>us in peace is the best we can hope for. It may not be so long till the 
>Mexican government does complete the wall - to keep the yanquis out (the 
>problem was never people coming in; it was always money gushing out). Watching 
>the election, from outside, is like watching a script conference for the 
>ninety-ninth sequel to Dumb and Dumber, where all the writers are on codeine. 
>What's really shocking is that a substantial number of US citizens appear 
>ready to vote for this brazenly corrupt sock puppet

 I understand trumpistas want to vote for sexism, racism and a return to 
colonialism; I understand that the American idea of 'freedom' bears no relation 
to anyone else's idea of collective responsibilities. American exceptionalism, 
from its weird spelling to its archaic units of measurement, was always funny. 
Now it is absurd in the Beckett and Ionesco sense: an assertion of identity 
where there is only conformism, and of nation at the moment of its 
disintegration. The election is a horrible farce at the brink of the abyss, or 
somewhere more banal, like the vortex of dirty water draining out of a bathtub. 
Washington is eating itself alive, and its voters are pouring on the barbecue 
sauce. The tea-party anarcho-capitalists said they would drain the swamp but 
omitted to mention they would drain it into the pockets of their billionaire 
donors at home and - increasingly - abroad.

The 2016 election was a tragedy. This one is a farce. Probably Ishtar: a hugely 
expensive production that no-one wants to watch

best of luck finding a way out!

sean



Sean Cubitt
Melbourne/Australia

scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#


From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
Sent: Sunday, 4 October 2020 9:00 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 157, Issue 3

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Today's Topics:

   1. A question in earnest (Max Herman)


--

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2020 16:47:57 +
From: Max Herman 
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject:  A question in earnest
Message-ID:



Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"


Why is there nothing appearing here about the US election?

I sound like a jerk to myself typing this but the silence is unexpected.

Are we all too afraid to say anything, or all just busy with other platforms?


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Re: "Consume revolutionary media"

[Sean Cubitt]

thanks for the kickstart Brian, and thanks for the reminder to keep hoping, 
Prem:
I find regular inspiration from this canine cartoonist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/14/lockdown-2-some-handy-dos-and-donts-to-help-get-through-the-extremely-dreary-sequel

The First Dog strip refers to the cluster of cases in social housing towers in 
Melbourne. The source here seems to be a) these shoddy buildings house poor 
populations in short-term employment notably in health, cleaning and security - 
the employees of the private security companies who guarded quarantine hotels 
without training or equipment. The lesson here as everywhere that a central 
cause of the second wave is poverty. Or to be more precise, wealth extracted 
from the poor.

The source of the first wave is even more obviously fruit of the profit motive. 
Expansion of "wealth-creating" extraction and construction into habitats a) 
stresses the critters, rams them into denser communities, and proliferates 
viral mutation. and b) brings more humans in contact with this damaged 
environment

It's clear that the ecological catastrophes adding to the pandemic misery, not 
to mention the vicious proxy wars often enough started by drought in Western 
Asia/North Africa and floods elsewhere, are directly caused and maintainedby 
the rise of the billionaire elite.

As a rule I'm not in favour of euthanasia. But perhaps a cull of the wealthiest 
30 people on the planet and 100% death duties would make a good start

best
sean


Sean Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#


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Re: covid: neoliberalism superspreader, nationalpopulism

[Sean Cubitt]

 in order 
to smash the existing (moral, political) sytem and create their own; while 
Trump is of the permanent apocalypse persuasion

now back to managing the crisis . . .

best to y'all
sean


Sean Cubitt
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#



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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Sean Cubitt]

hi all

sorry for my poor joke about a cull of the ultra-rich: perhaps it's wrong to 
invite the 8 men who Oxfam declared three years back owned as much as the the 
poorer half of the world's population to join hospital porters in the world's 
most understaffed hospitals - for the good of their souls?

But I hold to the point that capital is incapable of securing its own survival. 
This is how we know it is not human (and indeed not a life-form, since every 
life form will strive to ensure that it can continue living). Take the 
Athabasca tar sands: using intense energies to extract il gets very expensive 
ill which, however, does guarantee a supply should other regions take their cue 
from Saddam Hussein and cut out the middleman by setting fire to their own 
assets. But the other upshot is that the price of bitumen, which used to come 
from the same resource, skyrockets, making it too expensive to build new roads 
to run the cars on that are going to burn the oil for you.

The failure to rein in the derivatives market in the wake of the GFC is a prime 
example; as is the whole Anthopocene gamble that Xi, Trump, Modi et al are 
wagering.

More distressing is the opposite side of surveillant information economics. 
There is little value to be got from gathering data on predictable behaviours; 
interactions are of interest when they are unpredictable.But at the point when 
enough information has been gathered to make the vast majority (the logic of 
info-capital says 'all') of human behaviour predictable, then the function of 
human behaviours in information generation ends, and humans become redundant.

The risk under the virus situation is that unpredictable behaviours could be 
fatal, and not just to the perpetrators. I keep thinking of Thomas Ray who used 
to say that the largest under-inhabited bio-mass on Earth is the human 
population, and that as long as it is underpopulated, there will always be 
critters evolving to make their homes in it.

Enough apocalypse! Enough of the exceptional humans who think their system will 
prevail over the deaths of others. Enough of the human exception that thinks we 
should be able to do 'whatever it takes' to ensure our survival over the rest 
of the planet.

As Andreas says, the situation may not be revolutionary, but it has all the 
hallmarks of being evolutionary. So to Brian's initiating query: individualism 
or general intellect, the answer is of course the general intellect; but in a 
form that no longer severs humans from either the technical or natural 
environment. Resource and information extraction are both terminal 
trajectories; finding alliances with the repressed and oppressed world is 
intrinsic: dead labour is even more intrinsic to living than it was when Marx 
was writing Capital; the labours of Gaia ditto. An eco-technic commons is the 
means and the goal: the only question is how move it from some kind of ontology 
into practice


Sean


From: Andreas Broeckmann 
Sent: Friday, 20 March 2020 8:32 PM
To: Sean Cubitt ; nettime-l@mail.kein.org 

Subject: Re:  Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

Dear Sean, folks,

thanks for the useful historical references. I've already gone on record
here as being against speculations on who should die in what way.


<>





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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Sean Cubitt]

sorry for my poor joke about a cull of the ultra-rich: perhaps it's wrong to 
invite the 8 men who Oxfam declared three years back owned as much as the the 
poorer half of the world's population to join hospital porters in the world's 
most understaffed hospitals - for the good of their souls?

But I hold to the point that capital is incapable of securing its own survival. 
This is how we know it is not human (and indeed not a life-form, since every 
life form will strive to ensure that it can continue living). Take the 
Athabasca tar sands: using intense energies to extract il gets very expensive 
ill which, however, does guarantee a supply should other regions take their cue 
from Saddam Hussein and cut out the middleman by setting fire to their own 
assets. But the other upshot is that the price of bitumen, which used to come 
from the same resource, skyrockets, making it too expensive to build new roads 
to run the cars on that are going to burn the oil for you.

The failure to rein in the derivatives market in the wake of the GFC is a prime 
example; as is the whole Anthopocene gamble that Xi, Trump, Modi et al are 
wagering.

More distressing is the opposite side of surveillant information economics. 
There is little value to be got from gathering data on predictable behaviours; 
interactions are of interest when they are unpredictable.But at the point when 
enough information has been gathered to make the vast majority (the logic of 
info-capital says 'all') of human behaviour predictable, then the function of 
human behaviours in information generation ends, and humans become redundant.

The risk under the virus situation is that unpredictable behaviours could be 
fatal, and not just to the perpetrators. I keep thinking of Thomas Ray who used 
to say that the largest under-inhabited bio-mass on Earth is the human 
population, and that as long as it is underpopulated, there will always be 
critters evolving to make their homes in it.

Enough apocalypse! Enough of the exceptional humans who think their system will 
prevail over the deaths of others. Enough of the human exception that thinks we 
should be able to do 'whatever it takes' to ensure our survival over the rest 
of the planet.

As Andreas says, the situation may not be revolutionary, but it has all the 
hallmarks of being evolutionary. So to Brian's initiating query: individualism 
or general intellect, the answer is of course the general intellect; but in a 
form that no longer severs humans from either the technical or natural 
environment. Resource and information extraction are both terminal 
trajectories; finding alliances with the repressed and oppressed world is 
intrinsic: dead labour is even more intrinsic to living than it was when Marx 
was writing Capital; the labours of Gaia ditto. An eco-technic commons is the 
means and the goal: the only question is how move it from some kind of ontology 
into practice


Sean


From: Andreas Broeckmann 
Sent: Friday, 20 March 2020 8:32 PM
To: Sean Cubitt ; nettime-l@mail.kein.org 

Subject: Re:  Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

Dear Sean, folks,

thanks for the useful historical references. I've already gone on record
here as being against speculations on who should die in what way.


<>




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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Sean Cubitt]

The term 'public health' has never quite gone away, even when privatised 
medicine pretended that private health could be purchased.
The Spanish flu of 1919 is often cited; more apposite perhaps were the great 
cholera epidemics of the latrer 19th century. The proximity of the underclass 
to the rulers, notably in Central London, is what drove the equivalent of 
hausmannisation - the destruction of the old slums ('rookeries') described by 
Dickens, extraordinary efforts to rehouse the poor (and to build aristocratic 
enclaves like Bloomsbury) to ensure a *public* hygiene.
The proximity of the homeless to the billionaire class in any major city today 
could lead to mass incarceration; but it just might lead to providing decent 
health and housing for those ejected by the existing system.Here the liberal 
quandary Brian notes is at its deepest. It is inhumane to sacrifice the public 
good to the survival of the private good; but to as with the economy, it has 
been clear since 2007/8 that the market is incapable of providing even for its 
own survival. And that the state has an essential role.
At the height of the potato famine Nassau Snr, a powerful politician, opined 
that there had not been nearly enough deaths, and that Ireland's population 
needed to decline far more. Radical ecologists and BoJo seem to agree on that 
perspective.

But there is only public health. And the best way to secure it, if deaths are 
required, would be the removal of that miniscule proportion of the population 
that has accrued all the money.

yours till the broadband gives out

sean





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morales / lingua franca

[Sean Cubitt]

I had been thinking of a response to the Latin discussion .

we already have a universal language, in fact three at least: mathematics, 
logic and code
the last, the most recent, already shows signs of the long hand of capital; the 
others as we know are bent by economists and politicians. There is no pure and 
universal language (on which subject Eco wrote an amusing little book)

What there is as cultural resource is the plurality of languages (including the 
current state of Englishes, shattering as latin did 1500 years ago into new 
languages - Naija, Patois, Ebonics, Hinglish . . .) AND crucially indigenous 
languages, languages smaller than (current) nation states, among which Quechua 
and Aymara.

The tragedy of Morales (as a narrative of betrayed hope, whoever and whatever 
is to blame) also teaches that even marginalised languages cannot in themselves 
guarantee anything; that linguistic determinism is as useful as technological 
determinism, which is as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike (a metaphor, 
intended to demonstrate that neither is language as such of no use: it enables 
rather than determines, but to evolve it has to reach to resources beyond 
itself - not necessarily in other languages, but in the world of motorbikes and 
ashtrays (two words I do not find in my latin dictionary)

sean


Sean Cubitt

Goldsmiths, University of London
from 2 jan 2020: University of Melbourne



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Re: Latin as revolutionary act?

[Sean Cubitt]

Eheu Morlock

sadly you picked the wrong language: the UK premiere B Johnson has made a habit 
of adding latin tags to his outrageous posh-boy persona behind which hides a 
refusal to publish a budget, the official financial predictions for Brexit, the 
results of an enquiry into alleged financial impropriety and the results of a 
major enquiry into Russian interference and donations to his party. Obscurity, 
especially in latin, is not a gurantee of anything

perhaps ancient Greek . . .


Sean Cubitt

Goldsmiths, University of London

(U of Melbourne from Jan 2020)


From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
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Sent: 10 November 2019 11:00
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Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 146, Issue 17

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   1. Latin as revolutionary act? (Morlock Elloi)


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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2019 14:48:36 -0800
From: Morlock Elloi 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject:  Latin as revolutionary act?
Message-ID: <5dc74244.8090...@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

What would be consequences of using Latin language among
group/clique/cabal/underground/elite for discourse, publishing, idea
exchange, tweets? (let's ignore for the moment how does one get the
above set to learn Latin)

First of all, the noise goes down, as there is intellectual effort
barrier involved. Feeble-minded, distracted, low IQ, vacuous, and other
nobodies are out. It would be like early Internet (1990s) - only nice
and interesting people, no rabble. Only more resilient, because the
'price' of learning tongue will never go down, unlike computer equipment
and access.

Second, the cross-pollution from deluge of mechanically augmented media
firehoses goes way down. Language is the medium, and, of course, the
medium is the message. It's much harder to influence those thinking in a
foreign tongue.

Third, the isolated hermetic nature of such setup would allow thinking
to mature, being spared from cretinous cheering and booing from the
unwashed crowd. At the same time, it can use modern networking
technology to attract interest globally.


Perdidi unum in mediis soccus lauandi, et iam sentire perfecta!



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CO2 tax (was: left wing climate denial (franz schaefer)

[Sean Cubitt]

Hi Franz (and David etc)
the question of a green new deal can't be separated from capital and what 
alternatives we might build
Utopianism is debarred by a large tract of the Marxist tradition I grew up 
with, but we need some now. So


  1.  No country that restricts the free movement of people should be allowed 
the free movement of goods and capital: this is a rule of the EU, and it should 
be applied globally. Once we in the wealthy nations have to confront the mass 
movements of climate refugees and the global poor we might realise that only if 
we stop plundering them will they stop having to move.
  2.  Steps towards the restoration of the commons: everyone has their 
favourites: P2P economics is for me essential; so to is the restoration of 
indigenous lands, halting the mass expropriation of African grazing. 
Progressive steps towards  dismantling private property and eminent domain, 
like death duties intervening in rights of inheritance, and ceasing to treat 
corporations as property-owning individuals ()especially when they cannot be 
brought to court as individuals when they commit crimes). Taking any dwelling 
used for less than a month a year (then two then three) into social ownership 
for social housing. Make private vehicles pay the full economic and ecological 
cost of infrastructure and pollution. Etcetera.
  3.   there are no magic technological solutions. Ban petrol, go electric, and 
you need lithium, and the extraction of lithium has devastated the Chilean and 
Argentine Andes and is about to devastate Bolivia's Salar de Uynyi: every tech 
solution demands materials and energies that are as ecologically damaging as 
fuel (hence Big Oil's interest in Big Energy of other kinds - a small turbine 
on every home is far, far less damaging than vast wind farms.
  4.  the more centralised ownership, governance and regulation of the internet 
becomes, the more important it will be to give up on the idea of a single, 
universal network. It did not provide the public sphere we dreamed of thirty 
years ago. There are already alt.nets, largely driven by an american ideal of 
freedom and therefore vulnerable to its excess of trade and speech. A 
self-governing, peer-to-peer network-of-networks, starting at community level, 
may be the only way to assert both autonomy from corporate domination and ways 
of holding users accountable for the social effects of their behaviours
  5.  no new taxes are necessary: make the wealthy pay the ones they already 
owe (close the tax havens, tax loopholes, make tax avoidance the same as tax 
evasion with the same penalties, and apply the law to corporations as well as 
individuals)

I am also in favour of all exhaust fumes having to pass through the passenger 
compartment of petrol-powered vehicles; and of push-button-operated traffic 
lights being set to default on pedestrians wakling, so drivers have to get out 
of their cars and push a button to get a green light. No-one said utopia would 
be easy . .  .


Sean

PS I deleted a speculation about evening up sweated labour and energy-intensive 
manufacture: I don't know how that might be achieved: ideas? Intuitivel;y it 
seems to link to the idea of a global debt moratorium,  but if so how?

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 21:09:28 +0200
From: franz schaefer 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject:  left wing climate denial
Message-ID: <20191002190927.vwedchw4zl43s...@mond.at>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii



Anyways: what I wanted to talk about is the left wing climate denial.  So I
was surprised to learn that some groups on the left where opposing a CO2
tax: with the argument that it would make goods more expensive for the poor
and the rich would not be hurt as much.  Others more along the line of: The
CO2 tax works within the capitalist system and without changing the system
we are screwed anyways and thus lets just oppose it.

So while this is not technically "climate denial" I think it is pretty
close: The underlying assumption is: things are not as bad as we are told
and we have enough time to change things later and lets just sit and wait
for the revolution to come until doing something now.

This is stupid in many ways.  Instead of using the fact of climate change to
indicate the urgency of a system change the message is: just wait its not as
bad.  If one does not acknowledge that it is an urgent issue then one will
not be able to communicate that more is need.  Above all: even if we could
establish an e.g.  socialist society today: we would have to also do the
same optimizations in our production that a CO2 tax would bring: compute the
amount of CO2 that is produced by producing a certain good when it is
produced by a factory of type A or by a factory of type B and then choosing
the one with the lower ecological footprint.  Is it cheaper to import
bananas from far away or produce them with an extra amount of energy in
local glasshouse once you have to pay a lot for the CO2 emissions?  So a CO

Re: from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

[Sean Cubitt]

Hi again

seconding Max's mention of Calvino's Six Memos (followed a few years later by 
Eco's lectures Six Walks that riffs on them) - the concept of the encyclopedia 
he builds there is inspiring for the tasks ahead.

I've got a book out in February that works with both, and with the effort to 
decolonise eco-criticism, with some elements of what I meant by 'aesthetic 
politics' so I won't go on here


Today's UK papers leak a Boris Johnson memo (only one) proposing to prorogue 
parliament - not 'pirogue' it as I first thought, though the image of 
parliament navigating shit creek without na paddle seems germane to the 
discussion.


Of the elements of aesthetics, truth seems the one at most immediate risk 
(though I'm convinced the Good and beauty likewise follow from the national 
populist position - as Brecht told Benjamin, not a cell left untouched by their 
agenda). Sadly the movements I've been part of embraced a form of social 
constructivism that has also been taken over by anti-vaxers, climate-change 
deniers and the 'alternative facts' of bannerism, and we have no real ground to 
stand on when we assert the rightness of the science we've spent so long 
describing as, effectively, 'just theories'. The encyclopedia offers one way of 
conceiving of what we have to do


I take david's point that Jodi Dean mistakes fascist deviations of tactical 
media for an intrinsic problem in tactical as such: it's the same problem, and 
it's as old as national Socialism, and shares a specific trigger, the words 
'the people', established as the workers in Communism, but perverted into the 
national ethnie in fascism. A wise bird commented after T May's doomed attempt 
to secure a majority after the referendum: 'The people have spoken; we just 
don't know what exactly they've said'.


The US 'people' voted for a caricature billionaire, Russia for a caricature 
apparatchik, and the UK for caricature aristocrats. I'm guessing a similar 
analysis would similarly place Erdogan, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Widodo, Modi (and 
though no votes changed hands Xi ) meaning the vast majority of the world's 
population live under these men's men.


The aesthetic I'm chasing in relation to truth starts from realism (pictorial, 
sonic) and the relatively new symbolic order of data visualisation, but also 
embraces truth to materials and truth to the Subject. Thanks so much for the 
ideas below Brian: we have to recall Benjamin's line about fascism 
aestheticising politics and communism politicising aesthetics. Your notes and 
my intuitions suggest that this time round we have to reverse that: the task 
may be to aestheticise - to drag politics back to the pursuit of truth and the 
common good, and a beauty whose character is utopian and ecological


Sean Cubitt

Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Goldsmiths, University of London

New Cross, London SE14 6NW



From: Brian Holmes 
Sent: 25 August 2019 07:43
To: Sean Cubitt ; a moderated mailing list for net 
criticism 
Subject: Re:  from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

Sean wrote:


"I'm beginning work on a hypothesis about aesthetic politics, so very timely"


Well, I don't know if the below will be of any help, but anyway, here goes.


I think the usual shortfall when it comes to the relation of aesthetics and 
politics is to assume a seamless transition between them. In retrospect you may 
find a single dominant aesthetic and correlate it to a dominant politics, as 
Hegel or other Romantic historians did with their notion of Spirit (Geist). In 
the mid-twentieth century, that led some political regimes to try to impose 
such a totalizing correlation on their people. But in lived experience, 
individuals usually encounter multiple aesthetics, that is, multiple sensuous 
patternings that they partially internalize and use, not always very 
consciously, as a way to navigate the endless questions of good/bad, like/don't 
like. What the old saws about "there's no accounting for taste" cover up is not 
some absolute determination of the aesthetic by the political. They cover up a 
longstanding political recognition that what really matters in the aesthetic 
experience of populations is not total unity, but instead, individual 
satisfaction and catharsis. When aesthetic satisfactions make people 
politically compliant, that's perfect for the rulers. The plethora of divergent 
aesthetic experiences available to neoliberal subjects is a case in point.


The question then becomes, what is a resistant aesthetics? How does it 
circulate? How does it resonate with other resistant aesthetics? How can 
solidarity be experienced aesthetically? And when or how does aesthetics get in 
the way of political solidarity, which is 

Re: from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

[Sean Cubitt]

Hi Brian, Max,


great to have Shelley join Wordsworth in the thread!


thanks for re-assembling my contradictions (an old marxist habit) and for the 
helpful tips on reading matter


I'm beginning work on a hypothesis about aesthetic politics, so very timely


two notes, which I believe are also (dialectically) connected. Marx talks about 
the formal and real subsumption of labour: 'formal' means I work, i get paid - 
formally that's a commodity exchange. But labour was really subsumed in the 
factory where discipline and interchangeable hands complete the real subsumption


In the 19th century, say with the invention of corn-flakes packets, consumption 
begins to be formally subsumed: a commodity exchange. Network capital completes 
the real subsumption of consumption, where the act of consuming (or often 
multiple acts) are themselves productive of value (some of this I owe Jodi Dean 
and her ide aof compulsory communication). I know this is not a universal 
experience: but I fear the legacy of colonisation and pauperisation is that the 
reserve army of the unemployed is now joined by a reserve army of incompetent 
consumers, and that both are redundant in a system that recognises only fully 
subsumed labour and consumption.  The global epidemic of mental illness and the 
manipulation of stress and anxiety by capital in the form of national-populism 
thrives on the precarity this brings with it


second thought: shifting politics to the aesthetic terrain of global governance 
is driven by two factors:

First that national populism is defined by an ethnically (and therefore 
exclusively humanly) defined nation (allowing for varying degrees of tolerance, 
assimilation and familiarity of select 'ethnicities');

Second the significance of protocols, formats, platforms and their limited 
interoperability (networks are not media as such, and though perhaps share a 
profound p[rincipl;e with natural and historical processes are managed and 
operated under highly sp[ecific conditions - just as human bodies are broadly 
alike over time and space but operate and are managed differently in different 
situations)


the politics of the aesthetic governance of global standards may be one 
critical terrain for contesting the twin process of the subsumption of 
consumption and the political economy of human exclusion; and is the only one 
that operates at the global level required to address the excluded and 
colonised ecology


this seems to have wandered a long way from Brexit . . . but to quote an 
American poet, "what you depart from is not the way"


sean


Sean Cubitt

Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Goldsmiths, University of London

New Cross, London SE14 6NW



From: Brian Holmes 
Sent: 24 August 2019 15:19
To: Sean Cubitt 
Cc: Max Herman ; nettime-l@mail.kein.org 

Subject: Re:  from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

I wonder if this is the first nettime thread to include a Wordsworth poem?

Some of Sean's seemingly contradictory points could be thought together:

This is the message of Greta Thunberg's inspiration to the next generation - 
rethinking the world /with/ the world.

 and


Maybe the next political revolution would have to start at that level of 
expert-managed global infrastructures

Far as I can see, there is an aesthetic shift taking place across much of the 
world. It is double. On one hand it's about retelling and redramatizing the 
histories of colonization, to find out how today's forms of domination emerged, 
and to oppose them at all levels of existence and coexistence. On the other it 
involves a new attention to non-human life and ecological processes, to draw 
out what bioregionalist Peter Berg called "figures of regulation" for the 
guidance of human conduct. These two sides are linked theoretically, but also 
in grassroots practice, which is driving a lot of the theory. The difference 
from a Schiller-type "aesthetic education" is that this is not just about play, 
imagination etc. Instead it unfolds in confrontation with real forces, often 
the most destructive ones.

The question is, can such an aesthetic have any effect at all on 
"expert-managed global infrastructures," where the rubber of industry hits the 
road of transnational logistics? The recent declaration by the US Business 
Round Table is a case in point. They say the purpose of a corporation can no 
longer be that of "maximizing shareholder value," which was the mantra of 
financially driven globalization. Instead the corporation must deliver value to 
everyone with whom it engages, including employees, suppliers, consumers and 
supporting communities. Such a statement is an index of corporate fear. 
Apparently if you're smart enough to run a bank, then 11 years after an 
extremely destructive financial crisis you start to notice the overwhelming 
signs of soc

Re: from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

[Sean Cubitt]

hello Max


I got a similar thought  from Patrice: that a stressed society is perfect raw 
material for manufacturing anxieties. Whether aesthetic or rational education 
are enough to counter the effects of the last financial crisis and the one to 
come, and to counter (here I agree with David Harvey) the increasingly 
successful attempt to reverse the gains of the last 100 years since the Russian 
revolution and restore a pre-1914 gap between rich and poor - well, that's a 
question


Maybe those older solutions, stretching back in Europe through Habermas and the 
Bauhaus to Rousseau and Schiller, have to be rewritten. This is the message of 
Greta Thunberg's inspiration to the next generation - rethinking the world 
/with/ the world.


Mindfulness is rather off my radar but many of the psycho-spiritual techniques 
my generation experimented with tended to be therapies for a self whose 
centrality to the myths of success and consumption are a symptom (if not a 
cause) of the same forces driving us to crisis.


what if the core problem is over-production? The conversion from mass transit 
to private cars solved the 1929 crisis by making oil king; the oil crisis that 
began in 1973 has been ":solved" by the information economy, personal 
computers, and the same built-in obsolescence.


Over-consumption (and uneven distribution) are symptoms of over-production: 
reducing consumption wouldn't stop over-production, which is built in to 
capital.


And maybe - just for a quasi-humorous thought experiment -  the Swiss challenge 
is that wholly admirable topics like reforming prison finance, slowing urban 
sprawl, and revisions to gun  control (2019's initiatives) do not address other 
key issues like the notorious secrecy of the banking system, and the alleged 
criminal use of the Geneva Freeport, or other massive problems. Perhaps because 
a referendum can only address a /national/ issue?


As David's post about the EMA points out, there's a huge architecture of 
governance at global levels (including the internet!). Maybe the next political 
revolution would have to start at that level of expert-managed global 
infrastructures - thew logistocs of supply chains that Trump's trade war is 
throwing into sharp focus; their environmental costs; the management of global 
financial flows, electro-technical standards - all things even governments have 
little power over (and often little interest in)


So the climate emergency folks are right to demand something new - and the 
technical-political question becomes whether it is possible a) to really 'think 
globally' while restricting action to the local; and b) how to engage the Alps 
/ Arctic / Amazon in their own governance


Currently migrants are governed without a voice in their own government. 
Solving that would, for my money, force a profound change in the concept of the 
nation-state; perhaps from that and from indigenous struggles for recognition 
in settler colonies we might begin to find models for global political 
engagement - necessarily requiring political-technical invention because time 
is so short


bring back the poli-technics?




Sean


____
From: Max Herman 
Sent: 23 August 2019 21:00
To: Sean Cubitt ; nettime-l@mail.kein.org 

Subject: Re: from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs


Interesting points Sean!

Manipulation of behavior is easier technologically when the goal is triggering 
anxieties.  That is a much more primitive brain-state.  Also, since the target 
populations are already highly stressed they are all the more susceptible to 
fear/hate suggestion and the concomitant primate leader-worship mode.  They are 
also likely more compulsive about their media usage and more prone to clicking.

The contrary effort is to make people de-triggered, calm, wise, peaceful, and 
articulate.  This is a far more complex project, and one which requires 
long-term effort by the target individual (like building a house as opposed to 
setting one on fire).  Short term, the wisdom-fostering is slower and weaker 
and ever has been, which is why it is not referred to as "pushing someone's 
buttons" but rather the opposite.

This opposite, call it calming, teaching, reassuring, enlightening, or, so to 
speak, to "soothe the savage breast" might pertain less to technology than to 
artistic beauty in the highest and most technology-transcendent sense.  Open 
cheap technological communication might have a role in allowing a new aesthetic 
consciousness to form, but it might be more like teaching or pamphleteering 
than cathedral-building because again, some human states are not susceptible to 
button-pushing.  The UK mindfulness project could be a helpful start; I'd be 
curious to hear how that initiative is being received.

One could argue that low-tech pamphleteering and signing off, signing out, are 
actually how most of the great transitions an

Re: from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

[Sean Cubitt]

Hi Michael


Patrice also contacted me off-list with the same point about Switzerland - and 
mentioning the Irish referendum. Solid point.


My problem is the use of media technology, specifically but not exclusively 
social media, and  opinion polling.


I've no idea why the system works in Switzerland.


But it's clear how it failed in the UK: through the active intervention of 
click farms targeting specific anxieties, often with little relevance to the 
question at hand. Though UKIP/Brexit Party are rare among EU populists in not 
having clear links to Putin, the technology of targeted messaging  based on 
profiling suggests that the technology does not produce democracy - I'd be 
interested to hear whether there is anything different about the Swiss case.  
Perhaps extracting the UK from the EU is a more significant goal, seriously 
weakening competition for US/Russian hegemony, and so attracts serious money 
and - to return to another key term - expertise.


And to repeat: a technology that opened on non-human participation in 
collective decisions would be a convincing argument for technological 
solutions. Is there anything to look out for?


sean


Sean Cubitt

Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Goldsmiths, University of London

New Cross, London SE14 6NW



From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
Sent: 23 August 2019 10:56
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 143, Issue 10

Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
nettime-l@mail.kein.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
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mx.kein.org
-- a moderated mailing list for net criticism  is not just a mailing 
list but an effort to formulate an international, networked discourse that 
neither promotes a dominant euphoria (to sell products) nor continues the 
cynical pessimism, spread by journalists and intellectuals in the 'old' media 
who generalize about 'new' media with no clear understanding of their 
communication aspects ...




Message: 2
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 12:56:07 +0100
From: Michael Guggenheim 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs
Message-ID: <454c8e44-df33-64e5-04fb-b209a3f82...@bluewin.ch>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"; Format="flowed"

I beg to disagree, and I would love to invite you to a trip to
Switzerland, where indeed referenda are held 4 times a year on all kinds
of things, from deciding whether to build a new school or (infamously)
whether to ban minarets. Sometimes you and I may agree or disagree with
an outcome, but the last time I checked, overall policy decisions in
Switzerland were no better or worse (according to my parochial judgment)
than those of any other European country without regular referenda.


When I last checked (a week ago), Switzerland was not "frighteningly
fascistic". In fact, it is the opposite. A simple reason is that if
people are asked in referenda /repeatedly/, they /learn/ how to act in
referenda (including the fact that the state develops complex techniques
for administering them, that overcome the beginner mistakes of the
Brexit referendum (was it advisory or not? What were the options
exactly? etc.). Most importantly, they /do/ get engaged in the relevant
questions and are much better informed about issues. They also have the
possibility to decide case by case whether they agree with a certain
policy, rather than being forced to vote for a party with which they may
agree in some issues bit disagree in others.

(Also ask yourself: Are MPs better informed and do they make better
arguments than random people on the street? Answer: They do not, for the
simple reason that they are not trained to be policy makers).


best

Michael




On 23/08/2019 11:28, Sean Cubitt wrote:
>
> John writes:
>
>
> Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:48:41 -0700
> From: John Preston 
> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
> Subject: Re:  From Meat Loaf to Penalty Shoot Outs
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
>
> Technological development puts pressure on social institutions. We need
> a system of governance which encourages rapid iteration and mass
> participation, two features lacking in our current democracies.
>
> the problem is that referendums are not a viable alternative - partly
> for the reasons David gives: abandonment of evidence, argument or -
> I'd add - a commitment to the good life for all.
>
> Judiciously timed, a referendum on restoring the death penalty would
> succeed in any European country. So would bans on abortion, gay
> marriage, modest dress for Muslim women, immigration, and very
> pro

from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

[Sean Cubitt]

John writes:


Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:48:41 -0700
From: John Preston 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  From Meat Loaf to Penalty Shoot Outs
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8


Technological development puts pressure on social institutions. We need
a system of governance which encourages rapid iteration and mass
participation, two features lacking in our current democracies.

the problem is that referendums are not a viable alternative - partly for the 
reasons David gives: abandonment of evidence, argument or - I'd add - a 
commitment to the good life for all.

Judiciously timed, a referendum on restoring the death penalty would succeed in 
any European country. So would bans on abortion, gay marriage, modest dress for 
Muslim women, immigration, and very probably heavy metal

There is surely an arrogance in expertise, and a we-know-best among 
professional politicos. But to exchange that for constant (and compulsory?) 
opinion polling wouldn't change the new problem which is exactly that: 
ubiquitous real-time comment IS government by opinion poll, and it is 
frighteningly fascistic. The new national-populisms rely on just such 
technological by-passes because they know they do not construct the public but 
a plurality of publics, each of which can be triggered by the right (usually 
negative) stimulus - this is the whole strategy of social media marketing in 
the US, UK and across Europe.

Sadly - since it requires far more work - the political solutions are the only 
response to political problems. Yes, any politics in the 21st century must be 
mediated, and media techniques and technologies impact politics just as 
politics impact on technologies and techniques.

The challenge is to build political media that are in service of the good of 
all - including non-humans -- a medium that allows the Amazon a voice, that 
could be interesting . . . .

Sean
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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Re: Nettime is in bad shape. Let's see if we can change it.

[Sean Cubitt]

I've been active long ago, and lurking for a decade or more, with only sporadic 
comments and adds: this look like a good prod to get us silent majority out of 
the closet.


the thing that keeps nettime valuable is a) the contributors, timeliness, and 
swift smart dialogues and b) that there still seems to be a common purpose.


social media start taking the forefront about ten years ago. The neo-populist 
right begins to replace the neo-liberal right about ten years ago. Is there 
some shared diagram?


Other lists died for their own reasons: one because it seemed like everything 
interesting was on blogs, back when the blogosphere was a thing. Another 
because a concept / art movement / political trajectory could be exhausted so 
fast it scarcely seemed worth inventing new concepts etc.


Mailing lists are asynchronous, which is great: more time to think; less kudos 
for fast reaction times. More consideration in every sense of the word


in a few days I'll try to post something closer than this reflection on the 
medium to what I think this list is for: the aesthetics, politics and aesthetic 
politics of the early C21st -- consideration, wonder and hope


Sean




From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
Sent: 08 June 2019 15:45
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 141, Issue 11

Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
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-- a moderated mailing list for net criticism  is not just a mailing 
list but an effort to formulate an international, networked discourse that 
neither promotes a dominant euphoria (to sell products) nor continues the 
cynical pessimism, spread by journalists and intellectuals in the 'old' media 
who generalize about 'new' media with no clear understanding of their 
communication aspects ...


or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Nettime is in bad shape. Let's see if we can change   it.
  (John Preston)
   2. The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors;
  throws in the towel (Bruce Sterling)
   3. Re: Nettime is in bad shape. Let's see if we can change   it.
  (John Preston)


--

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 08 Jun 2019 15:06:56 +0100
From: John Preston 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  Nettime is in bad shape. Let's see if we can
change  it.
Message-ID: <07a59428-bf8f-419b-841a-ea06bddb2...@riseup.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Just forwarding this up.


 Original Message 
From: Karim Brohi 
Sent: 8 June 2019 14:35:45 BST
To: John Preston 
Subject: Re:  Nettime is in bad shape. Let's see if we can change it.

Nettime is in bad shape - as are most (all?) of the email based discussion
groups on the Interwebs now.
I run another mailing list, started in 1995 in a medical specialty area- -
which finds itself in the same state.  Back then email was cool.  Now, for
most, email tends to be a flood of work stuff and a pseudo todo list.
Drafting an email is now work, and not associated with pleasure or pure
intellectual pursuit.

But there's no other suitable medium either.  Social media platforms are
too brief to develop ideas.  Too easy to fire back "your idea is stupid".
Blog posts and newsletters are too one-sided.  Developed/owned by a
specific individual/group of individuals, Comments never have the same
precedence as the original post.  The post 'belongs' to the originator, not
to the community.

Maybe usenet/google groups comes close, but nobody uses them - perhaps
because there's no (effective) 'app for that', and there has to be an
active process of logging in.  (Email alerts end up in... email).

In brief - I think it's the medium not the message.  The whole Internet
needs a new medium that encourages long-form discourse and thereby deep
community.  That was email, but now it isn't email.  I don't know what  is
now.

Karim





On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 at 21:34, John Preston  wrote:

> Just adding my two cents, as per the call. :)
>
> I only discovered nettime in the last few months. I'm a computer-child,
> I've grown up on the net, and one of the people who now take a more
> conservative or critical approach to tech. I came here because I am trying
> to develop as an artist, working with the net as a medium and reflecting
> critically on the net and its constituent parts. I don't post in to every
> thread because a lot of the time I do

Re: Christophe Guilluy: France is deeply fractured. Gilets jaunes are just a symptom (Guardian)

[Sean Cubitt]

>the anger is
>directed against Macron's iron-clad neoliberal "reforms" which have so
>far consisted of breaking the unions and giving tax cuts to the rich.
>
>And after this spree of spending on the rich, when we want to reduce CO2
>levels, what do we do? Of course, we pass the bill to those who can't
>afford it, to blue-collar workers in a small-town France already ridden
>by deprivation.


Macron’s decision to make the poor pay for climate change control is scarcely 
distinguishable from the responses of the oligarchs, sheikhs and billionaires 
to COP24 and the IPCC report. 20th century politics was characterised by 
successive waves dedicated to opposing, overwhelming and ultimately sabotaging 
the gains of the revolutions of 1917 and 1949, backed by the strategy of 
corrupting the successful liberation movements of the Global South in 1950s and 
1960s. Now at last the losers of 1917-18, who lost again at the end of World 
war II with the establishment of welfare states, are poised to restore 
plutocracy on a scale unseen since the end of the Ottoman and Holy Roman 
empires. The new Kaisers and Czars are admittedly closer to Hearst than the 
fantastically bearded patriarchs of the European empires, but no less wedded to 
the model of obscene power and wealth as family business, epitomised by the 
fact that the only staffers who haven’t been churned out of the Trump White 
House are the dynastic offspring.



The engagement of oligarchs and plutocrats in destroying anything that might 
slow the full restoration of imperial-scale gulfs between rulers and ruled 
rests on shattering even relatively toothless bureaucracies who have tried to 
hamper the wholescale looting of the planet. Russian and US billionaires 
spending their tax-free dollars on European fascists desperately want to 
destroy the EU. The only novelty is the triumph of right-wing anarchism: 
destroy the state, unhinge any form of organised opposition, in fact any form 
of organisation, and unleash chaos so the market can triumph.



One of two configurations informs this strategy. Either we have intensely 
self-interested individuals and clans who are happy to see the world go to 
hell, so long as they can amass privilege, power and wealth. Or the logic that 
drives this machinery is not human at all. Because the obscene class have 
already passed the point where ’more money’ makes any sense – you can only live 
in so many palaces, after all – there is every likelihood that the plutocrats 
are not driving this process after all, but that they are components in a 
larger, no longer human operation. We thought cyborgs would look like Arnie 
Schwarzenegger: humans with digital implants. The actually existing cyborg is 
the inverse: a vast network of computers with human implants. The cyborg 
corporation has taken over.



The logic of the cyborg is to make money now. Extending credit is a way to 
ensure that next year’s income gets spent this year. In order to create this 
year’s profit, spend next year’s earnings. To create this year’s profit, burn 
whatever can be set fire to, and throw the rest into the trash. This system can 
only survive on massive waste. Waste is not an accidental by-product: there is 
no present profit without waste, without dumping our excess into the future, in 
the same way we dump it in the oceans. Cyborg capital runs on waste and debts, 
financial and environmental, which the cyborg has no intention of ever 
repaying. That this means it will consume itself does not figure, because only 
humans consider the future effects of their actions. Forget Transformers and 
The Matrix. We have already been taken over by cyborgs.



Three tasks:

dismantle the cyborg corporations, carefully, chip by chip

defend even the indefensible bureaucracies, those remnants of welfare’s 
handbrake on the worst excesses of unbridled profit

 and set to building peer-to-peer alternatives now so we have the organisations 
we need when the shit hits the fan



Free the human seven billion!



Sean Cubitt

Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Goldsmiths, University of London

New Cross, London SE14 6NW



Message: 2
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2018 10:22:40 +0100
From: Carsten Agger 
To: nettime 
Subject: Re:  Christophe Guilluy: France is deeply fractured.
Gilets jaunes are just a symptom (Guardian)
Message-ID: <05201295-0b3e-339d-70cc-d9e578a46...@modspil.dk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed


On 12/9/18 8:57 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Thanks for these texts, Patrice. Cohn-Bendit's fears of
> authoritarianism notwithstanding, it's clear that until the left
> proposes forms of collective investment that can respond
> simultaneously to climate change and to the predicament of the
> squeezed lower classes that Guilly describes, all the front-page news
> will come from the extreme right -- whether it's their would-be
>

Re: a propos of nothing

[Sean Cubitt]

As others have said, the biggest takeaway form all this AB trolling came from 
Felix


"Our task, in my view, is to develop new languages, and new
esthetics, to account for, and deal with, the sharply increased
complexity. That means, that there is no single privileged point-of-view
or layer of analysis. If there is any strength, it will come out of
multiplicity, out of ways of translating one set of explicit experiences
into another one, showing that how and why resonate with each other."


Not just because it resonates with projects I'm involved with in Europe and 
elsewhere but because it names both the challenges and the route out - an 
aesthetic politics of multiplicity, experience and translation. It's not that 
there's no such thing as class or class struggle or ethnicity, or god help us 
gender. It is that these are concepts, not actualities, not experiences. The 
new languages Felix calls for don't come from juggling concepts but from 
translating experiences, multiple and unique experiences, where the forces we 
describe with these concepts are actually in play, actually over-determining 
(as we used to say), in conflict with each other and with lived reality


it is active, creative, collective work, demanding and in the best sense 
incompletable. This aesthetic commons is both the means and the goal

the solidarity of many nettimers, including lurkers like me, is a part of it, 
certainly not worth throwing away over a neo-con DJ.


Sean Cubitt

Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Goldsmiths, University of London

New Cross, London SE14 6NW



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Sent: 06 November 2018 10:09
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Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 134, Issue 21

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: apropos of nothing (Nina Tempor?r)
   2. Taking sides (Ryan Griffis)
   3. Re: apropos of nothing (tbyfield)
   4. Re: Taking sides (tbyfield)
   5. Re: apropos "relax dear" (Julia R?der)


--

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2018 02:55:41 +0100
From: Nina Tempor?r 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  apropos of nothing
Message-ID: <23203b0a-fa01-448b-b10e-fb0cc4884...@gmx.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Yes, yet another sad moment the ?spot the mistake? game seems a level too high 
here...

If one wants to see a silver lining in this whole incident, it?s that it helped 
make the deep
contempt for certain minorities surface that?ve been lingering in nettime?s 
viscera.

Therefore I also do think It?s an important question Angela posed.

Brian, you criticised AB for flaws in his ?political theory?, yes, and thanks 
for that -
But is cocking one?s head and patiently explaining everything to a verbally 
very grown-up abuser,
At the cost of women and POC, really the right way to change sth?

I don?t think so. With his ?anti-filter-bubble? request, AB has very skilfully 
lulled everyone
Into believing they are anti-democratic when not accepting his kind of speech.
But what he has actually done by this, is extending his very own wellness-zone.


> Am 04.11.2018 um 01:12 schrieb Angela Mitropoulos 
> :
>
> It is a simple and straightforward question that I would like answered. It 
> makes no inferences about whether recruitment is effective, or even 
> deliberate rather than aesthetic. But I'm grateful for the evidence you've 
> furnished, dear, about the way in which women are told to calm down and shut 
> up, no matter the tone they take, so that those who think women and black 
> people are less than human and not entitled to take up space can keep ranting 
> on at length about how everyone other than white guys are less than human. I 
> mean, I'm grateful that you've illustrated the reaso

Re: Adam Tooze: Politics don?t matter; market forces shape our world (The Observer/Guardian) (Brian Holmes)

[Sean Cubitt]

Thanks for sharing the Tooze essay. Brian's last lines of comment hjit on a 
remarkable metaphor


>A full connection to the global financial markets would be the equivalent
>of throwing gasoline on China's economic bonfire. At the very least,
>geopolitical embers will fly.

nettimers might like to look at Audrey Wiozniak's report on the scale of 
underground coal fires. at China Dialogue, 
https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/6296-The-world-s-longest-burning-fires-China-s-unseen-story

The Liuhuanggou was officially extinguished in 2004, 130 years after it started 
- even Xinhua reported that year that this fire"emitted 100,000 tons of harmful 
gases - including carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide - and 40,000 tons of 
ashes every year" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3978329.stm)

There are round a hundred coal fires burning across the northern coal belt, 
maybe more. The Liughuanggou mine seems to have been reignited by wildcat 
miners. They too of course can form part of the supply chain, though they might 
just be scavenging for their own use. There are several reports that mining 
continues at the same sites where firefighters are struggling to extinguish 
long-running fires. There has been a drastic cutback in the number of operating 
mines recently as China moves to improve its air quality and meet emissions 
targets; but Brian's metaphor has a horribly real counterpart.

Surely no need to mention that coal also provides plastics, many of which find 
their way into covering for wire and substrates for DVDs etc etc - we 
westerners are also complicit . . .

sean
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Re: social media critique: next steps?

[Sean Cubitt]

that should of course have read:

the ruling algorithms are in every epoch the algorithms of the ruling class

From The German Ideology to German Media Theory (and you’re right Patrice, via 
Therborn . .  and Lefebvre and Stuart hall)

have algorithms taken over the role of ideology? Clearer if posed in 
Foucauldian power-knowledge-institution terms of discourse: has the 
construction of truth passed over to algorithms, whose operation favours a 
class that owns the means of their distribution?

subordinate question: is this the work of a distinct class that owns the means 
of production, or is distribution now more significant in the age of 
financialisation? Or, have the algoithms extended the work of autonomisation 
Marx saw happening in the factory system,  from purely productive to 
reproductive sectors, no longer therefore under the control of capitalists but 
rewarding them with obscene bonuses as a form of benign parasite that helps 
them survive and grow - capitalists as symbionts, the gut flora of algorithmic 
capital. 

If any of these hypotheses are true, the forms of struggle against them take 
very different shapes. 

s

> On 16 Jan 2018, at 12:20, Patrice Riemens  wrote:
> 
> 
> Sounds like "What Does The Ruling Class Do When It Rules"
> 
> https://www.versobooks.com/books/292-what-does-the-ruling-class-do-when-it-rules
> 
> Ciaoui, p+7D!
> 
> 
> On 2018-01-16 12:27, Sean Cubitt wrote:
>> The algorithms of the ruling class are in every epoch the algorithms
>> of the ruling class
>> --
>>> Message: 1
>>> Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2018 20:16:59 +0100
>>> From: Florian Cramer 
>>> Cc: Nettime 
>>> Subject: Re:  social media critique: next steps?
>>> Message-ID:
>>> 
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>> 
>>> It means that no Chinese "social credit" algorithm is necessary to
>>> discourage social engagement or political resistance. It is not even
>>> a
>>> question of "better" algorithms - whether "better" algorithmic
>>> governance
>>> within existing social networks or through the creation of
>>> "different"/alternative social networks -, since the issue will
>>> remain,
>>> being one of an 'apparatus' or an 'actor network' transcending
>>> binary
>>> distinctions of machinic and human agency. (The question whether a
>>> troll is
>>> a human or a bot, isn't very relevant.)
>>> Articulation of positions [including artist's positions outside
>>> self-chosen
>>> safe spaces] is rapidly becoming a privilege of those who can afford
>>> their
>>> defense.
>>> -F
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>> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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>> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

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#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: social media critique: next steps?

[Sean Cubitt]

The algorithms of the ruling class are in every epoch the algorithms of the 
ruling class



--

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2018 20:16:59 +0100
From: Florian Cramer mailto:flrnc...@gmail.com>>
Cc: Nettime mailto:nettim...@kein.org>>
Subject: Re:  social media critique: next steps?
Message-ID:
mailto:CADCyihTuCJWc5ed0DcvFxZV5AmpQfFK5V03Tt1t=phj8vby...@mail.gmail.com>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"




It means that no Chinese "social credit" algorithm is necessary to
discourage social engagement or political resistance. It is not even a
question of "better" algorithms - whether "better" algorithmic governance
within existing social networks or through the creation of
"different"/alternative social networks -, since the issue will remain,
being one of an 'apparatus' or an 'actor network' transcending binary
distinctions of machinic and human agency. (The question whether a troll is
a human or a bot, isn't very relevant.)

Articulation of positions [including artist's positions outside self-chosen
safe spaces] is rapidly becoming a privilege of those who can afford their
defense.

-F


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Re: Speculative Intergalactic Network

[Sean Cubitt]

would it be more useful/interesting to establish communication with planet 
Earth?
“If a lion would speak, we would not be able to understand it” (Wittgenstein)
but it is clear that lions (rivers, forests, oceans, reefs, animals etc) do 
speak; but that we refuse to listen. 
Nowhere in the galaxy is more observed by humans than this one yet we are not 
understanding what we see and hear (across multiple spectra) - at least in the 
sense that the only evidence of understanding would be taking action on what we 
learn from what the panet is saying.

But to go back to the SETI thought experiment. The one thing we can be sure of 
is that comms with aliens will be slow: light years intervene. So we need to 
survive in order to have a dialogue. Since we are ecologically-implicated 
creatures, we may need to establish a working planet in the ruins of this one 
if we are going to have a chat with the Greys. 

I see us as naughty teenagers being told by our new interlocutors “Clean up 
your room. Then  you can play on intergalactic social media”

sean

> 
> 
> --
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2018 20:17:37 +0100
> From: K E N O 
> To: christineT , nettim...@kein.org
> Subject: Re:  Speculative Intergalactic Network
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
>> It would probably not be called internet, require a better
>> understanding and use of our "other senses and sensors".
>> Maybe it exists and we dumbs don't perceive it... or we don't know that
>> certain waves effects are signs of it... or we produce too much
>> electromagnetic pollution to be able to catch it, or?
> 
> ? or they are already using gravitational waves for communication. ;) Or some 
> other kind of transmission medium. Or they exist in another dimension. That 
> would be nice: an intergalactic and multi-dimensional internet. What would 
> intergalactic internet memes be like?
> Electromagnetic pollution is an interesting point, since we love (I do, for 
> sure) our electromagnetic communication and broadcasting systems. 
> Nevertheless, we only focus on pollution regarding the spectrum of light 
> because we can see it.
> That leads to the SETI initiative, which I find very interesting from both a 
> scientific and an artistic view. Analysing electromagnetic signals, they are 
> not only able to discover extraterrestrial life, but also to detect other 
> cosmological events. It?s like fundamental research of electromagnetic 
> signals with a chance of finding aliens.
> 
>> For the first amateur radio satellite, they could call it Loretta Strong
>> ( from Copi's theater play) or Walt Dangerfield (from  P. K. Dick's Dr
>> Bloodmoney). I think that should enable a better communication to/with
>> space, cause they are intergalactically known and explicit, nope ?
> 
> They do call it Fox-1D. ;) 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT#Satellite_names 
> .
> 
> K E N O
> -- next part --
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: 
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2018 21:16:00 +0100
> From: Keith Hart 
> To: nettime 
> Subject: Re:  Speculative Intergalactic Network
> Message-ID:
>   
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> As a thought  experiment, consider why we can't communicate with the ants
> or vice versa. Their social organization is stronger than ours and their
> collective intelligence is demonstrable. It may be that one side is more
> primitive than the other. But which?
> 
> Kant held that reason is still largely individual in the human case and its
> potential will only be realized at the species level. He didn't mean that
> we all become one big brain, but rather that we have to learn to pool our
> intelligence and knowledge more effectively than at present. He probably
> had in mind libraries to which we could add mass media (which are usually
> one-way) and now the internet where everyone in principle can be a producer
> and consumer, but it would seem that the organization of collective reason
> is far away.
> 
> Kant also asked if our mathematics were universal and might therefore be a
> means of communicating with aliens; and rejected the idea. His Copernican
> revolution in metaphysics led him to make this observation: "Hitherto our
> knowledge has conformed to objects; but what if objects have to conform to
> our knowledge?" Our mathematics, music etc are therefore culturally
> specific and would not allow us to communicate with aliens. But hang in
> there, maybe, if we don't destroy the planet first, we might get there as a
> species one day. Think again, Steven Spielberg.
> 
> The digital revolution is the most important in human history since the
> invention of agriculture, but we are the digging stick operators in th

Re: Brexit democracy

[Sean Cubitt]

I came late to Brown’s writing, and was deeply impressed: the diagnosis of 
individualism seems even more astute living for a few months in the States. I’d 
throw into the mix some thoughts from Laclau’s On Populist Reason: that the 
unit of social action is neithe rindividuals nor groups, and certainly not 
society: it is demands. Demand for somehting impossible in the current polity 
such as “Bring Down Washington” or “The EU is a machine for corporate capital: 
let’s get out”. Neither Washington nor Brussels can answer that demand: which 
is why it is truly political. The Left problem has been that it ends up 
defending the indefensible.

In the Brexit case, widespread disillusionment with a decreasingly democratic, 
increasingly neoliberal central pseudo-state only found voice from those who 
have other reasons to attack it: those who want to deregulate food, 
pharmceuticals, pollution etcetra, and those who want to increase their own 
power bases (though the jury is out on whether UKIP tok Russian money it was 
certianly invested in many other right-wing anti-EU populist movements).

Both major parties were torn: a Tory party defending itself against the 
equivalent of Bannonism by assimilating UKIP policies, while the 
agriculture-and-business traditional Tories wanted to keep the financial 
benefits of the status quo; the right wing of Labour believing pretty much the 
same, and the Left only too aware that speaking out against the EU for Left 
reasons would lose them votes from well-intentioned greens, workers-rights 
activists and many more constituencies.

As a result and not for the first time the Left missed the opportunity to give 
direction and political efficacy to the popular demands for a new Europe that 
is not entirely devoted to stripping the assets of Mediterranean and Eastern 
Europe. The Right has a hundred years of practice at doing exactly that.

Vox populi vox dei: but the voice of the people is still not being heard. Rust 
belt America and the abandoned North of England will not get better because of 
new right policies. They will continue to believe that this is because their 
guys have been betrayed. Unless it becomes possible to re-articulate the 
popular voice. Taking back control is a pretty good slogan: its only problem is 
that “we” don’t take back control, “they” do.  What happens if we present 
taking back control as a mission of the Left - if, instead of believing that it 
lacks reason or authenticity, we listen to and act on the popular voice?

regards

sean

On 8 Nov 2017, at 19:47, 
nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote:nd

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2017 19:47:15 -0500
From: Ian Alan Paul mailto:ianalanp...@gmail.com>>
To: Brian Holmes 
mailto:bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>>
Cc: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  Brexit democracy
Message-ID:
mailto:CAM-xAVY9LZGtin=LyDkSpX=8hmldsdflwwjgxqi5+hnansk...@mail.gmail.com>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

...in hopes of pushing the conversation a bit forward, we have this helpful
passage from the end of Brown's most recent book "Undoing the Demos" which
I think quite accurately and concisely sums up the present conjuncture we
find ourselves within:

"The Euro-Atlantic Left today is often depicted, from within and without,
as beset by a predicament without precedent: we know what is wrong with
this world, but cannot articulate a road out or a viable global
alternative. Lacking a vision to replace those that foundered on the shoals
of repression and corruption in the twentieth century, we are reduced to
reform and resistance - the latter being a favored term today in part
because it permits action as reaction, rather than as crafting an
alternative. While the Left opposes an order animated by profit instead of
the thriving of the earth and its inhabitants, it is not clear today how
such thriving could be obtained and organized. Capitalist globalization,
which Marx imagined would yield a class that would universalize itself by
inverting its denigration into shared power and freedom, has yielded
instead paralyzing conundrum: What alternative planetary economic and
political order(s) could foster freedom, equality, community, and earthly
sustainability and also avoid domination by massive administrative
apparatuses, complex markets, and the historically powerful peoples and
parts of the globe? What alternative global economic system and political
arrangements would honor regional historical, cultural, and religious
differences? With in such arrangements, what or who would make and enforce
decisions about production, distribution, consumption, and resource
utilization, about population thresholds, species coexistence, and earthly
finitude? How to use the local knowledges and achieve the local control
essential to human thriving and ecological stewardship in the context of
any worldwide economic system? How to prevent rogue subversions without
mi

Re: nottime: the end of nettime

[Sean Cubitt]

sad if true - very. I've been a sleeper for too long but have always relied on 
being able to access nettime since, what, sometime in the 90s.
yes email is slower, but speed and brevity are not the only virtues, or youth 
the only time for considering the difference between shit and diamond, a 
distinction that the list has been fine tuned to for its several years. If 
indeed it's to go, many thanks to ted and felix; if there are relay runners 
ready for the baton, more power to them; and if anyone knows of places where a 
pace between the blinking of twitter and the geological pace of journals allows 
considered response to urgent issues, please post

Sean Cubitt
Professor of Film and Television; Co-Head, Department of Media and 
Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW




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Re: Adam Curtis: BUGGER

[Sean Cubitt]

The history of the British secret state's incompetence is a rich field. Ezra 
Pound and WB Yeats were arrested as foreign agents while out walking during the 
time they spent at Stone Cottage near the Sussex coast. The incident is 
memorable because of Yeats' involvement in the renewal of interest in the 
Romantic poet William Blake, who was arrested on spying charges while on a 
sketching trip on the Medway in Kent, and again in Sussex on a charge of 
sedition. When Pound was arrested again for his sympathies with Mussolini 
(though not for his virulent anti-semitism) he noted "that free speech without 
free radio speech is as nothing'. Lessons everywhere
sean

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