Re: what does monetary value indicate?
Felix, what you're talking about looks theoretical, but at root these are really just questions of provenance, which the art world knows about only too well. I have several artworks that, in theory, could be pretty valuable but in practice are probably worthless because I can't (or, really, can't be bothered to) document or prove their provenance. As art prices have soared and arty milieus have mushroomed over the last decades, standards for authenticating works have gone completely mad. Their ostensible purpose is to reduce the risk of forgeries, but mostly it just creates bullshit jobs in the culture sector. "What did you do today?" "I verified that petrified mass of shrimp carcasses and noodles in a garbage bag as an authentic artifact of Rirkrit Tiravanija's seminal 1992 performance at the 303 Gallery rather than, as most thought, a contemporary forgery or, as some believed, an artifact of the performance he did three months later at Andrea Rosen. And how was *your* day?" It's just plain-old manual proof-of-work. This growing focus on provenance is just one tiny facet of the rising culture of authentication. The same kind of thing has also happened with people's work résumés and academic records, process and product certifications like ISO 9000/1 standards, heightened security techniques from currency design to 2FA techniques, commodity-sourcing certifications (everything from Fair Trade agricultural products to isotopic analyses of nuclear materials), ART STOLEN BY THE NAZIS – the list goes on and on and on and on. Taken together, this all makes it clear that we live in the Age of the Fake. That's not to say everything *is* fake or anything is real — it just means that, as a civilization, we're more and more consumed by the endless busywork of trying to establish not-fake. When you log in to some account you aren't proving who you are in any meaningful sense, you're merely giving the receiving end evidence (i.e., reasonable grounds for limiting their liability) that you aren't who you aren't. And, of course, when you prove you "aren't a robot" by doing some re/captcha, you're helping to train ML systems to do image-recognition, or at least a few years ago you were. By now there are probably dozens if not hundreds of abstract meta-derivative auction systems built on top of that that, so you kill time clicking on pictures of fire hydrants instead of taking up more valuable CPU cycles bothering someone else with whatever you're on about. If that hasn't happened yet, it will soon enough: for example, a service that targets neo-nazis and wastes their time so they don't waste everyone else's would be a really good thing, wouldn't it? But, then, an entire task force at McKinsey could waste time preparing a report surveying which political beliefs are most easily 'triggered' into clicking on cows rather than getting something done. Oh, wait, Facebook, never mind. Also, it's worth noting that pretty much zero disinterested third parties ever have actually gone to the trouble authenticating some NFT-ish art thing. In practical terms, doing so might be difficult to the point of impossibility. I could claim "I have *the* ur-NFT" but for you to validate my claim, you'd need to spend $BIGNUM effort learning masses of hypertechnical bullshit involving some ridiculous hodgepodge of protocols, services, providers, actors, reputations, etc. Who can be bothered? $SMALLNUM time passes and hey, presto, my claim has gone unchallenged — and, as with most things, all that was aerial condenses into some good-enough approximation of solid, and in itself it comes to serve as de facto evidence of authenticity. Because, really, no one can be fucking bothered. To anyone who's spent some time thinking about the modern sense of information, this should sound 'eerily' familiar. In Shannon's model, information isn't the thing itself, it's better understood as a measure of the reduction of uncertainty that it might be something else. When we think someone has transmitted the letter "A" to us, we didn't really get an A, we just got [letter] are and able to establish a high level of confidence that it isn't B through Z. But as you read this mail, you aren't concerned with "Wait, is that apparent instance of the letter A *really* an A? And what would it mean if my confidence level were lowered by N%?" You just read. It's the same with NFTs, except the people who make them are getting paid better than I am for typing this. But I'm reasonably confident that this email is somehow more important than whatever pot-induced NFT stunt Elon Musk is doing today. Rachel, on one level your summary is obviously right — and, at the same time, it's not so simple. The last ~artwork I made sold to a guy who showed his collection in the Deichtorhallen: what he bought was a stack of photos, schematics for an installation, and the right to print and build it. As it happens, on the
Re: what does monetary value indicate?
On 13 Mar 2021, at 19:07, Felix Stalder wrote: > On 13.03.21 15:14, tbyfield wrote: > >> If I drew a venn diagram of how uninteresting mass digital art, the >> art-systems economics, and cryptographic para-currencies have become, >> you'd think it was just a circle > > Ted, you, of all people, know that 'interesting' is not an attribute of > objects, but of questions, and that Venn diagrams indicate the absence > of any. Brilliant. Touché. > My question, which may well be uninteresting nevertheless, did not > concern digital art, art-system economics, or even cryptocurrencies, > para or not. Your question was interesting, but the answers weren't going to be. One distinctive feature of the last decade+ — since the 2008 meltdown — has been the normalization, even banalization of a 'Powers of Ten' illogic. The leaps in 'public' numbers are so far beyond any grounded comprehension that words *literally* fail: in writing and speech, the difference between millions, billions, and trillions is just a letter or two. That 'problem' has played a non-trivial role in governments' willingness to bid bailouts up and up and up, on scales that ceased to be linear. You can hear almost the conversations: "Millions?! Bob, we need *billions* — hell, TRILLIONS." And, lo, it becomes so: trillions are given away, even as knuckle-draggers obsess over how the $5 or $22 or $60 million that went to some cause they detest. Take contrast between Trump's trillions-strong tax cut for the rich and powerful against the lint-covered pocket change that went to the Mueller probes, which generated far more vocal opposition: it's easy to dismiss that as yet another rightist diversion (it is) or sign of the rightist public's financial *literal* illiteracy (it is), but it's also indicative of just how quickly and far behind these shifts in orders of magnitude have left the public's ability to imagine. The linguistic accident that orders of magnitude are distinguished not by mind-bending math but, instead, by a letter or two has played a pivotal role in enabling this escalation or acceleration. After decades of having austerity beaten into our heads, skins, and bones, you'd think governments spending these upper-echelon orders of money would cause the earth to split open, but amazingly enough life just plods along, with one day like the next. The result is a real, if rarely remarked, cognitive dissonance. Things like the NFT bubble, almost a kind of foam so many and interconnected are the constituent bubbles, is a direct result. Between breathtaking bailouts, globe-spanning corporate consolidations, exploding exec 'compensation,' and unicorns and dragons run amok, people just don't a fuck: M, B, TR, WTF ever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The spread-out stacks of hundreds in a pseudo-gangsta influencers' instagram are *numerically* more apprehensible and, therefore, meaningful. We see this everywhere, most clearly in the US public's incomprehension of Covid, where deaths that have reached genocidal proportions are dismissed as a hoax, a super-flu, insurance-scamming by doctors and hospitals because people *cannot* correlate the numbers with their very tangible everyday lives. But of course these differences aren't really reducible to a few letters, are they? Hence, in part, the growing reliance on graphics to 'show not tell' what the differences mean. Over the last year, no thanks to Covid, we saw these graphics consume entire front pages of newspapers not just to a degree never seen before but in *ways* never seen before. As happened in a cruder form in the wake of 2008, though, the shifts in order are so extreme that they even challenge the physical formats of a print media (which webbified versions still refer to and depend on). Yesterday's gob-smacking gyrations becomes tomorrow's barely perceptible noise at the foot of an impossibly steep visual cliff. A prime example is the 27 March 2020 issue of the NYT, which depicts a nightmare only a designer could love — the entire sixth column is stripped of any prose and taken over by a graphic spike: https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/wp-cms/uploads/2020/04/i-3-17-90494758-why-the-new-york-times-is-breaking-every-rule-of-newspaper-design.jpg But what I see in that isn't just a one-off visual gag. It's one more tremor in a tectonic shift in how organizations are struggling to understand 8and adapt to* what's going on. When the NYT published its first edition on the web on 22 January 1996, it was one big gif of what looked like a front page designed by a ten-year-old. In the 25 years since, the institution has turned upside-down and inside-out to become, in many ways, a global 'paper of record.' That required a complete transformation of its organizational structure, hierarchies, priorities, and procedures. But my intent isn't to dwell on the NYT: it's changes are one example of coun
Re: what does monetary value indicate?
Felix, your questions have triggered some noise (what doesn't these days?) but they don't seem to have generated much light. But some parts of the world are pretty much consigned to darkness If I drew a venn diagram of how uninteresting mass digital art, the art-systems economics, and cryptographic para-currencies have become, you'd think it was just a circle. There was a time when all three of these areas were fascinating, but in each the substantive groundwork was laid decades ago. What's happening now no longer has any intrinsic relation to the specific, let's say 'crafty,' details of these area. What's happened is they've become mass phenomena: the driving force is massification, and the action is just frothy wealth sloshing around, guided, to the extent that it's guided at all, by the peculiar interests of the people and institutions forming new constellations. The best metaphor is 'elephant toothpaste: https://youtu.be/XXn4fP3CnJg It isn't driven by any innovation in, or expansion of, the capacity to produce hydrogen peroxide or potassium iodide — it's just an arbitrary chemical reaction whose spectacular effects read well on social media. We can ask why now, as Rachel does, talk about hoaxes as Stefan does, or lament the environment impact as John does, but I don't see any of those lines of inquiry leading anywhere insightful or definitive. At a certain point in history, the cost–benefit of digging down in an effort to find something 'real' will become — like art bubbles, crypto-currencies, and assorted media objects — little more than an arbitrary way of framing some variation on 'proof of work.' Do you really think that, a decade or two from now, we'll look back with 20/20 hindsight and regret ignoring this froth because it turned out to be seminal (or germinal) in some respect? I don't. There are lots of non-events we were right to ignore as noise. This conjuncture is one of them. Cheers, Ted On 11 Mar 2021, at 11:46, Felix Stalder wrote: > I'm sure many have followed the NFT art saga over the last couple of > months and seen today's headline that somebody just paid $ 69,346,250 > for a NFT on a blockchain, meta-data to claim ownership of the > "originalcopy" of a digital art work. > > https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/first-open-beeple/beeple-b-1981-1/112924 > > I don't want to start a discussion on the revolutionary vs reactionary > character of this emerging art market. All of that has already been > said. If you want a close approximation of my perspective, I refer you > to this: > > https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3 > > What I'm more interested in here is to ask two things. > > What -- after a decade of quantitative easing and crypto-currencies > rising into the stratosphere -- monetary value is indicating for the > segment that profited the most from these developments and what does > that mean for the rest of us? > > And, assuming that this is not a cartoon version of a potlatch where > wasting resources serves to put rivals to shame, how many different > scams -- money laundering would be an obvious contender -- are being > layered on top of one other to create this? > > Quite puzzled. Felix signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: A Dead Professor Is Teaching an Art History Class
Sort of like a book. Cheers, Ted On 1 Feb 2021, at 11:42, nettime's post-mortem slave wrote: > How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Leaders of the Capitol insurrection
On 27 Jan 2021, at 12:45, Brian Holmes wrote: I think sitting back and being cynical when a country is in danger of being taken over by fascists is a mistake. This is going to happen to many countries. At some point, when the leisure collapses, you actually have to take a side - compromising as that may be. Thank you, yes. I really don't want nettime to become a vector for lazy conspiratorialism that bears out the horseshoe theory of politics The reporter who broke the story about Tarrio is one of my best friends, and you can be sure he'd have NO patience for vague theories that the putsch was "really" a provocation or led by provocateurs or whatever. That's not to suggest that anyone has to blindly submit to the political beliefs of journalists, let alone at second hand. But if we're going to accept their work as true (and I don't see anyone here doubting the story), we should also consider that what they publish is just a subset of what they know — so we'd do well to take their wider views seriously. Especially since the alternative is a consumerist model of the news where we pick out details we like from stories we like, without few or no constraints, and jumble them together however we like with old resentments, narratives, and legends. Sound familiar? Here's a useful exercise: when you read a story like the one about Tarrio, ask yourself: Would this reporter believe the putsch was steered or led by the FBI or some secretive police-type force? Probably not, right? Since being careful with the facts is the hallmark of good journalism. But if you'd answer the question YES, doesn't that seems a bit nostalgic, given that president was openly inciting insurrection for months? Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: In God We Tryst
On 25 Jan 2021, at 13:40, McCorkle T. Diamond wrote:
This idea has been on my mind for a while and is serious. The U.S.
equivalent of de-Nazifying white supramacists needs to be done. When
-
immediately. How, is the question.
Pretty hard, given that they've rightist lore about "brainwashing" and
"mind control" has been an article of faith for them for many years. As
with lots of conspiracy theorizing, you'll find lots of little truths
scattered throughout the fictions. In this case, citations and
references to '50s-era scholarly studies of mass-manipulation,
interrogation techniques, and so on are a staple in Whitist fantasies.
It serves a few purposes: it provides a ~genealogical link to
McCarthyite anti-communist rubbish and POW–MIA dolchstossquatsch,
which is both legitimizing and nostalgic. It serves as a preemptive
rhetoric of projection ("You're brainwashed, not me!"). And it functions
as a kind of conceptual vaccination, by internalizing a basic critique.
It's worth noting that these functions all kind of blur together and
form a sort of continuum — which is pretty much what epistemologies
do, isn't it? So de-nazifying would mean de-epistemologizing.
In the case of Germany post-WW2, the fact that the country — its
people, landscape, government, institutions, economy, and more — had
been shattered certainly made the task of de-nazification more
tractable. If the physical proofs that nazism worked were broken, it
didn't require a big leap to conclude the nazi worldview was broken too.
In the US now, it would require a leap-in-place: believers would have to
wake up one morning believing all their Whitist stuff is true, after N
days have passed, wake up and see, smell, hear, and do all the same
things yet believe their Whitist nonsense is false. That kind of thing
is extremely difficult for an individual to do, let alone a population
stretches across an entire continent. I don't believe it's possible.
But the first thing we'd need is get past the starting gate and build a
consensus that Trumpism is more 'like' nazism than not. The last four
years of Arendt-splaining, scholastic quibbling about how Trump isn't
*really* fascist, how 500K killed by the use of biological agents for
partisan ends isn't *really* genocide, how using every legitimate and
illegitimate lever of power to overturn or overthrow a democratic
election isn't *really* a coup — all this has made it plainly clear
that the historical analogy is a non-starter. Seriously, if Trump openly
acknowledged a trove of documents that explicitly said "I will use every
power I have to cause Covid to kill 25% of the Democrats in the US so
the GOP can establish a one-party system that lasts for 500 years,"
within a few days you'd have Serious People arguing that Democrats
aren't ethnically homogeneous and 500 isn't a thousand. The first step
to solving a problem is admitting you have one, but the dominant chatter
in the US is all denialist.
Fortunately, I think the whole epistemology analysis overstates the
case. AFAICT, the number one factor that's caused the Qrazies, Three
Percenters, and their spoor to chill out is the de-platforming of Trump.
It takes a LOT of energy to maintain absurd, obsessive, and
action-oriented beliefs, and that energy comes from relentless torrent
of nazi media. Turn that off and it turns out the vast majority of the
believers are deplorable but not much beyond that.
So, basically, the first big step toward de-nazifying the US would just
be a functional FCC.
Cheers,
Ted
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Re: The List needs a new Topic
Yes please, and thank you, Geert. The endless navel-gazing of the WEIRD nations’ senescence is recursively dull. The point is not what do the usual suspects think about China (or whatever proxy you like), it’s whether they — we — can extend the nettime project. Not so it can absorb new milieus; if anything, so it can be absorbed by them. Cheers, Ted On Jan 20, 2021, 4:01 AM -0500, Geert Lovink , wrote: On 19 Jan 2021, at 9:52 pm, bronac ferran wrote: The List needs a new Topic Bronac, I agree. This was a tense thread, but also a worthty enof the Trump er On a bright note, look at this video again: Trump rapping China, China, China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDrfE9I8_hs In general it would be would for nettime to focus more on China :) Or let’s be more clear, to fellow Chinese critics, artists, coders, theorists, researchers and other dreamers. To get an understanding of the Party and its relation to the business elites is one, but can we still have a direct dialogue with people out there? Or how dialogues with Hong Kong? How are people coping there, after the great showdown of 2019-2020? How can we strenghten ties with critical forces in Taiwan? With Trump gone our own Chinese Question (and how to relate with the official forces there) will be even more important as the authoritian grip of the Xi regime is only further tightening. Will you except an invitation from a school or art institution in Shanghai? Will there be a cultural boycott of China soon? In whose interest owuld this be? Has Hong Kong already lost its status aparte for you? What else is there to discuss on nettime as the world moves on to Telegram and Signal? What to make of social media governance? I do not think this will get us anywhere... Internet as public infrastructure aka stack… yes. The clash of cultures and strategies in the (de)centralization debate are unresolved. Can federation scale? How to dismantle Google and Facebook? Ciao, Geert # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)
"Words have meanings" is one of those sayings that needs to go away. It
sounds so sure, so blunt, but it obscures so very much. Yes, words have
meanings: they have lots of meanings, many of them ambiguous or
contrary, and those meanings change to keep pace with historical
circumstances.
This thread is trying to describe the murky area between things working
normally and things breaking hopelessly. More specifically, we're at a
moment when the president of the US is spewing torrents of claims that
are upside-down and backwards. And he's supported in large part by
widespread silence across his party and rabid supporters who've
completely lost their grip. What we're seeing is a profound breakdown in
the language we use to describe our world.
The definitions of a word like "coup" in a US or UK dictionary evolved
in a world where it was assumed (as they say) it can't happen here —
so *of course* those definition will all but insist that the leaders
wear aviator shades, ridiculous regalia, and all the rest.
The US is breaking down, so it's not at all surprising that some of its
language for describing the world would as well.
If you think that consulting dictionaries and insisting on definitions
is the best way to make sense of this, go for it. Myself, I think that
kind of prescriptive tendency is part of the problem. Think about all
the inane, endless debates we've seen about whether Trump is "really" a
fascist: what exactly did they accomplish, except discouraging people
from seeing what was in front of their face?
As for the "nuclear codes," that's a standard lefty fetish. The US
nuclear command-and-control decision tree includes entire branches for
scenarios in which civilian authority is uncertain: nonexistent,
unreachable, contested, unverifiable, and/or incompetent. Little or
nothing is publicly known about the criteria and procedures involved in
switching to one of those branches. I think there's a good chance that a
president firing the Secretary of Defense, purging the DOD, raving about
imagined conspiracies, contesting the election, and threatening to never
leave would meet those criteria. If it didn't, it will within four
years.
Cheers,
Ted
On 15 Nov 2020, at 16:51, Kurtz, Steven wrote:
Interesting perspective Ted, but I can’t call the examples you cite
a coup. The use of political power to reorganize institutions to
better solidify a person’s or party’s advantage or even to gain a
political monopoly is most of what politics is. Machine politics or
the attempt to build a machine is not a coup. And Trump attempting to
reorganize institutions to his advantage in an obvious and half-baked
way doesn’t make a coup. If that is what a coup is then a coup is
ongoing everywhere, all the time from the local to the international.
Words have meanings. This word refers to an illegal, unconstitutional,
removal of a party or individual from power through the use of force.
That is not what has happened or is presently happening no matter how
much Trump might wish it so.
The only event I can think of that could potentially resemble a
(bloodless) coup will be when the military gives Biden the nuclear
codes on January 20th, without a care for what legislatures or courts
might think about it. It will even better resemble a coup if they give
them to Trump (which is very unlikely). If the shenanigans get too
wild the military could decide who is president, and the mark of that
decision and its enforcement will be who gets the codes.
I do agree that Emmet Sullivan is a court room hero.
____
From: tbyfield
Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2020 12:47 PM
To: nettime-l
Cc: Kurtz, Steven
Subject: Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)
If there will be no coup, Steven, that's because there already was
one.
But let me explain.
Debates about a "coup" in the US are useless, because they're bogged
down in endless anticipatory "post hoc ergo propter hoc" arguments
("after this therefore because of this," just before *this* happens)
and
coupsplaining ("it's not *really* a coup* because" yadda yadda).
If our litmus test for a coup is tanks in the streets, you're right,
there wasn't and won't be one. But that's mostly Hollywood stuff
anyway:
in times and places where coups have undeniably taken place, there
weren't enough tanks or troops to occupy all those countless streets.
The vast majority of those streets were empty, not an obvious sign of
force anywhere, and yet coups happened. How? Because a coup is less
the
show of force than the doubt, helplessness, capitulation, and
adaptation. In the US, we've spent the last 3–4 years doing that. If
tanks magically appeared tomorrow, few would be surprised, lots of
people would mutter about "2020" and "the new normal," and everyone
would know how to walk / ride / drive past with their jaw
Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)
If there will be no coup, Steven, that's because there already was one.
But let me explain.
Debates about a "coup" in the US are useless, because they're bogged
down in endless anticipatory "post hoc ergo propter hoc" arguments
("after this therefore because of this," just before *this* happens) and
coupsplaining ("it's not *really* a coup* because" yadda yadda).
If our litmus test for a coup is tanks in the streets, you're right,
there wasn't and won't be one. But that's mostly Hollywood stuff anyway:
in times and places where coups have undeniably taken place, there
weren't enough tanks or troops to occupy all those countless streets.
The vast majority of those streets were empty, not an obvious sign of
force anywhere, and yet coups happened. How? Because a coup is less the
show of force than the doubt, helplessness, capitulation, and
adaptation. In the US, we've spent the last 3–4 years doing that. If
tanks magically appeared tomorrow, few would be surprised, lots of
people would mutter about "2020" and "the new normal," and everyone
would know how to walk / ride / drive past with their jaws clenched
tight and their eyes averted. That part is done.
But I'm not arguing that a coup is just a state of mind or some other
irrefutable bullshit, though. I'm saying bluntly that, objectively,
there already has been a coup.
No serious person doubts that Trump would stage a coup if he could, or
that the GOP would go along with it if they could. No serious person
doubts that he's taken concrete steps on a dozen fronts to pull it off,
or that he continues to try. And no serious person doubts that it was
unclear how federal court would resolve election-related cases. Yet a
huge number of the very same people would also argue that what's
happened isn't a coup because it was badly conceived, poorly executed,
and failing. But if that's our standard for acknowledging the reality of
something, then Trump wasn't president and didn't have policies. What
he's done very definitely was a coup: a stupid, flawed, failed coup, but
a coup nonetheless.
But, ultimately, denials that what's happened isn't a coup become
clearest in one area in particular. Trump's attacks on the USPS came
very close to winning him the election. If it weren't for sustained
public and political pressure, huge numbers of mail-in ballots wouldn't
have been delivered on time and wouldn't have been counted — and
there's a few key states would have ended up in Trump's column. And, in
a softer but equally decisive way, I think, the post–Election Day
narrative would have been *very* different: it wasn't just the final
tabulation, it was the erosion, dat after day, of Trump's supposed leads
that killed his claims. We owe an immense debt to all the people and
forces who mounted those challenges, and Emmet G. Sullivan, the DC
Circuit Court judge who issues the decisive ruling and imposed deadlines
down to the *hour* on the USPS leadership, is a legit national hero.
So: there was a couple *and also* the victory of more or less normal,
continuous operations of government over Trump's attempt means there
wasn't one. Resolving that by saying, "well, there was one but it
failed" isn't very satisfying to my ear. The solution is to set aside
silly cinematic assumptions that a coup is necessarily a clearly defined
thing, that it does or doesn't exist, that did or didn't happen.
Cheers,
Ted
On 13 Nov 2020, at 16:52, Kurtz, Steven wrote:
From my perspective there is very little to worry about regarding the
election. There will be no coup, and the electoral college vote will
not be stolen. All the generals who can speak out (because they are
retired) have done so, and do not support Trump, nor do they see him
as the election winner. Trump has not replaced anyone yet with
operational command.
The electorate sent to congress has to reflect the popular vote. Each
state has a law that enforces this. Police, judges (at all levels),
electorate members, a majority of congress, and state legislators
would all have to agree to break these laws to make this theft
possible. Perhaps either of these theft strategies are possible, but
they are adjacent to impossible.
When understanding Trump, the best way is to go directly to the lowest
common denominator. Trump is not a complex, reflective man. What does
he like to do?
1. Loot and grift. If he were to concede the tap of funds flowing into
legally challenge the election would stop. He has no intention of
cutting this revenue source, since half goes to lawyers and half to
his campaign.
2. Display his power. His favorite way of doing this is to make other
powerful people say things in public that they know are not true. An
Orwellian autocratic favorite to be sure. He also likes to remind his
party that his base will follow every order. This is how he plans to
stay a power player in the Republican party. I think a line will drawn
at coup time. Thus far no
Re: 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
David, do you really doubt that media obsessively recycle and theorize the subjective experience of whites, as if there were no others? Or that their output is bent around patriarchal biases? If you do doubt it, please, go ahead and make that argument. If not, it seems like Ingrid's response is pretty reasonable. Didn't it strike you as a bit odd that the authors would nametag 'acedia' with a familiar kind of nonchalant erudition, as if we're all familiar with medieval maladies here, aren't we, and *of course* agree that's the relevant one? In reaching for that precedent, they skipped over *all* of modernity, the period that's literally *defined by* increasingly diverse assertions of legitimacy. And what they found wasn't just male (they specify "monks," not nuns) but overwhelmingly depicted as white and clerical. As if no one else in the intervening 600 or so years had been 'locked down,' or had little idea of or power over the shape of their lives? "Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons," isn't the kind of sentence that rolls off the tongue of the dispossessed. And your snarky response to Ingrid follows a well-known script: a mix of wounded snark, complaints that the privilege you enjoy doesn't meet your aspirations, expressions of care for Others that didn't inform your initial reading, and invoking your experience as the father of a daughter. The thing that jumped out for me was your description of the piece as "eerie." Without fail, when you see that word now it means the writer didn't think it through or do their homework. Without fail. It's almost...uncanny. Cheers, Ted On 28 Sep 2020, at 8:22, d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote: Boohoo indeed Ingrid, strange that you think this is a condition only suffered by white males in these weird and particular times. In the UK at least Black and Asian minorities are disproportionally affected by the pandemic and so also highly likely to be disorientated not just in the old but also in wholly new ways. And from the giddy heights of the middle class privileged life (not) my youngest daughter is currently locked down in a small room in her university housing in Scotland unable to leave her room or mingle with fellow students and neither she nor I have any idea what kind of education she will get. There is no horizon as the lock downs will be a feature for a while to come. And along with the parents of colour this worried white parent is on the phone every day struggling to figure out how to help her get through it. But maybe (as Higher Education is also one of your targets) you think she is also one of the privileged whose turn it is to taste a bit of despair. And maybe my white privileged worry for her future is also richly deserved. But your right we could have it a lot worse so lets reach for the world's tiniest violin Boohoohoo David On 2020-09-28 12:40, Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) wrote: Dear David and all, Oh boohoo. Nick Couldry cum suis are rather late to the party of general hopelessness and lack of future perspective that so many others have suffered from for decades already. Who is the 'we' they are talking about - all the white privileged men who could up until recently still believe in the radical progressiveness of higher education and new media technologies? Welcome to the despair of the rest of the world, Nick and Bruce. Cheers, Ingrid. -Original Message- From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org On Behalf Of d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk Sent: Monday, 28 September 2020 10:53 To: Nettime Subject: 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world' Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier's 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world' which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed we are more likely be suffering from the condition of Acedia. A malady of medieval monks described as no longer caring about caring, a feeling of dislocation when all the normal future contexts that give our lives meaning are suspended no longer providing stable temporal horizon. Here is an extract. At the bottom is a link to the full essay. "Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It’s a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice things we regularly do. What’s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones — real though those worries are. It isn’t even the sense that, if we’re really honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty self-indulgent when held up against the urgency of a global pandemic. It is something more troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go on doing much of what for years we’d taken for granted as inherently valuable." "It’s here,
WTF happened In 1971?
As a rule, we discourage bare URLs on nettime, but with this one there's no other way: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: This is what fascism looks like
On 1 Sep 2020, at 7:46, d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote: However nn a boring response to your final three questions is to get out the vote. Given that the most terrible short-term outcome is the re-election of the unspeakable Trump. All those who can walk, crawl ride or drive should fight to get out every last single Democrat vote out. No matter how disappointing and uninspiring the Biden/Harris ticket may be we know its not the worst that can happen to the American polity. We know it won't be enough in and of itself "de-nazify the USA" but in terms of your first imperative which is to “survive the American Autumn”, it will at the very least buy a little time for progressive forces to re-group and find new ways to confront the deep reckoning that is upon us all. tl;dr: You're right, but...it's a mistake to assume that what's happening now is only, or even primarily, an election. Elections are 'eventual,' in some ways a nostalgic ritual from a bygone world. To understand the current situation requires a sort of parallax view, with one eye on a 'longuer' durée that will run well past Election Day — and, I think, past Inauguration Day. I've been arguing since Trump was elected, and probably earlier, that he won't leave the White House voluntarily. If it weren't so frightening, it'd be funny to see how many mongers of conventional wisdom have been drifting toward this view lately. But they're like customers, of whom it's said that for every one who complains there are a hundred who don't. Washington is worried, but not nearly enough. In a city that — truly — is dominated by institutions, institutionalism runs deep, so the assumption has been that these edifices would somehow be enough to restrain or remove him. Over the past few months we've heard Pelosi and Biden say as much, but we also saw Pelosi say that Trump using the White House as the backdrop for his acceptance speech was "not happening." The result: multiple Trumps did exactly that, and the *entire* RNC was designed to look awfully White Housey. The truth is that the Dems are toothless: they barely have half of a half of chamber in the Legislative Branch, slightly less than half of state governorships, and *maybe* a slim majority of the near-minority (~59%) of eligible voters who actually vote. And what they specifically *don't* have is solid support outside of civil government: not in the military or intelligence, not among police, not on Wall Street, and not even in the media. And the Trumps know it. I speak of them in the plural because there are several; and now that they've tasted the blood of dynasty, they won't give it up without a fight. And Trump Sr wants a fight: he lives for numbers, the bigger the better, and he lives in a world where positive is negative and negative is positive. He's already presided over the hundreds of thousands of deaths, and in his mind millions would only make him greater. But let's get into some specifics about how things may — I think *will* — pan out. Here are a few things I've posted to Facebook (yes I know...) recently: - - - - - - - - - - - - 8< SNIP! 8< - - - - - - - - - - - - 29 AUG My $5 says this is what'll happen (because it *is* happening): masses of surprised purged voter registrations, polls shutting leaving impossibly long lines, scrambled and shuttered precincts, vigilante 'poll watchers,' USPS fiascos, delayed counts, bot networks broadcasting outright lies, right-wing outlets amplifying trivial anecdotes and anomalies, an explosion of FUD from Trump, creepy statehouse legal maneuvers to certify sketchy 'results,' a tumble of judicial rulings that are all over the map, legitimate media triangulating wildly, FB and twitter 'performing' empty actions and policies... The net result: IT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY OR PROVE THAT BIDEN WON. And, in the drawn-out absence of that certainty, Trump will crow louder and louder not just that he won but that he won in a landslide. People who challenge that de facto outcome will be cast as sore losers, delusionals, dupes of Russian propaganda, insidious forces aiming to disenfranchise white grievance voters, or — if they somehow mount a serious challenge — treasonous plotters of a coup. tl;dr: Keep on fighting all the good fights, but don't be fooled into thinking that "election" is the best or only way to understand the mass of what's happening. Elections end and produce results; this one won't. The election underway is just one strand in the Trumps' (plural) strategy. They don't need to win, they just need to not lose — and the way to do that is, as they say, to flood the zone with bullshit. Are you confident that the Dem leadership — Pelosi and Hoyer in the House, Schumer and Durbin in the Senate, Tom Perez as chair of the party — will be willing to rock the boat hard enough to cut through this clusterfuck? If not, who or what would it take? Street protests won't be
Re: notes on cancel culture
Apparently so... On Aug 14, 2020, 1:05 PM -0400, Alice Yang , wrote: > Are we really comparing “cancel culture” which is usually associated with > bipoc and queer people raising red flags over violent behavior with...Nazis? # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: what exactly is breaking?
Felix – I know Castells casts a long shadow in your thought, but not
so much in mine. It isn't an accident that systemic thinkers emerged in
some cultures, like Castells in Spain and the Annalistes in France, but
not so much in others. US intellectualism isn't known for its rigorously
systematic qualities, and in many ways that's an organic expression of
the US itself — its cultures, its sheer scale, its geography, and all
the rest. So we should think twice about analyses that tend to ignore
decisive patterns — and one that's becoming disorientingly obvious is
just how erratic is the illogic of US politics. *That* is one of our
'structures.'
{{ Douglas Bagnall put it well:
On Felix's original question, I don't have a lot to say that wouldn't
be improved by me not saying it. I am wary of predicting breaking
points in America -- more so than in normal countries where it is
already tricky -- because, you see, they *value* chaos over there. I
don't mean an anarchic freedom (though they have pockets of that of
course) but a seething mass of officious disorder. I realised this
after spending five minutes in LAX. Like, we can say the police are
terrible, they need to be fixed/replaced/exiled/whatever, but we are
not talking about one institution, rather thousands or tens of
thousands of autonomous outfits that have an association with the
brand "police". The depressing definition is they carry a badge and a
gun. How can something so splintered be reformed or broken?
}}
When we see nationwide eruptions — challenging how populations are
racialized, the carceral state, the maldistribution of public resources,
and so on — of course these structures have been in the making for
decades or even centuries. On that basis we can conclude that not much
is new, or that what is new is only ephemeral. So, yes, trust in liberal
democracy has been in decline for a long time, pressure has been
building, and it was sparked by a constellation of arbitrary events: one
among thousands of zoonotic viruses, the death of handful of African
Americans among countless others, a rootless conman-impresario
crystallizing the merger of media and politics. But I've lost interest
in that kind of approach, because it's plainly conservative — for
example, in the way it marginalizes the political potentials of younger
people. Not a century ago, they had little overt cultural or political
impact, in large part because they had little discretionary wealth; now
the patterns of how they allocate their money have immense, refractory
impact. Systemic analyses can roughly describe how that impact lurches
around, but only by becoming so abstract and removed as to be useless
— in the same way that, say, semiotic theories can only explain what
the hell is up with memes only by ignoring their specificity. But, in
the US at least, their ridiculous details are becoming increasingly
decisive.
That's particularly true on the far right, which has descended into an
orgy of signification, with networks like QAnon and the even stranger
(imo) pileup of references: Hawaiian shirts and palm trees, igloos,
camouflage, paramilitary imagery (Jokers, Punisher, 'thin blue line'
flags, AK47-like AR15 silhouettes, guillotines and wood-chippers — and
I'm not even getting into the wordplay. In the same way that
pearl-clutching about how cruel the Trump administration is misses the
point ("gleeful cruelty *is* the point"), waving away this epidemic of
signification misses it as well: *of course* these specific images,
motifs, and puns are arbitrary, senseless, ephemeral. But the *glee*
that attends this mayhem isn't.
So, like I said in my last mail, conventional negations only get us so
far. Saying, well, trust in liberal democracy has been on the decline
across the West for decades — yes, of course. But the *gleeful*
destruction of everything from postwar international system to
protestors' bodies, that's a different kettle of fish. In particular,
pleasures — sadistic, nihilistic, fatalistic — are being mobilized
'at scale' to create new world disorders.
I couldn't agree more with what you say about effects becoming causes;
and I think that kind of causal inversion, which is really a temporal
reversal, is the key to understanding why the narratives of so many
systemic analyses are collapsing. But, again, it's time to stop dwelling
so comfortably on the ruins and ask a more frightening question, which
is what is being built?
(Also: a few people pointed out that Google's corpus and/or ngram system
is broken. Thanks to all.)
Cheers,
Ted
On 3 Jun 2020, at 3:59, Felix Stalder wrote:
These kinds of language games aren't as silly as they might seem at
first glance, because pop phrases like that hint — as if through a
glass
or scanner darkly — diffuse assumptions about where we see
ourselves
historically. A world where people are drawn to seeing anything and
everything as *broken* is a world in the past tense;
Re: what exactly is breaking?
On 31 May 2020, at 6:27, Felix Stalder wrote: I, like probably most nettimers, I have been observing the fracturing of the US with increasing horror (knowing that Europe, over the last 70 years, has usualled followed the US, for good and bad). With the horrific response to Covid-19, things to have now taken an even darker turn, compounding all the simmering structural violence into something, well, into what? Approaching civil war? There are certainly enough heavily-armed militias around who are clamoring for it. Is this a breaking point, and if so, what exactly is breaking? In asking a question like this it's worth remembering that the declaration "_ is broken" — education, regulation, Congress, misc industries, international systems — was a staple of rightist and self-appointed 'realist' rhetoric for several years. It's always hard to pin particular dates on pervasive turns of phrase like that, but the Google ngram for "is broken" is pretty interesting: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+broken_start=1980_end=2012=15=3=_url=t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0 Apparently, things stopped being broken very suddenly in 2005, and by 2012 (when the ngram corpus runs out) everything was working perfectly. Curiously, the 2008 meltdown didn't even register as a blip. Anyway, now it all seems to be breaking — in the present imperfect tense. These kinds of language games aren't as silly as they might seem at first glance, because pop phrases like that hint — as if through a glass or scanner darkly — diffuse assumptions about where we see ourselves historically. A world where people are drawn to seeing anything and everything as *broken* is a world in the past tense; all you can do is *rebuild* — another word that tracks "is broken" with almost hilarious precision... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rebuild%2Crebuilding%2C+is+broken_start=1980_end=2012=15=3=_url=t1%3B%2Crebuild%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crebuilding%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Crebuild%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crebuilding%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0 ...but a world where things *are breaking* all around us is a different kettle of fish, and it's very much in the present. Reading this thread is depressing. Steve says, "Is anything breaking? No, nothing is breaking. The structure is safe," a proposition that will always be true on some level. And Brian says, "Of course, nothing has changed in America in our lifetimes." I can think of quite a few people, ranging from LGBTQIers who enjoy freedoms to ~students who recognize their lot will be depths indentured servitude, both to degrees barely imaginable a few decades ago. But, yes, our analyses must at all costs privilege *the system*. These aren't just accidents of phrasing; the mistakes pervade the analyses, as when Brian noted that "Something like it did happen during the Great Depression. But at that time the electorate was not so deeply divided by racial issues." Well, yeah, it took another 30 years before whites finally allowed blacks to vote... But these are all details. The larger picture is that their commentaries feel more like old people going around in familiar well-trodden analytical circles than responses to the uncertainties opening before us. To say that there are none is plainly silly. Just a few months ago, say the end of January, today's headlines was yesterday's near-term sci-fi. What's breaking is any remaining faith in the last vestiges of trust in government. But the problem with formulations like that is their reliance on negation. Hence, for example, the inability of major media outlets to affirmatively describe Trump and his actions: he doesn't "lie," he "states, without evidence." He's said to be *in*competent, *un*hinged, *in*sane, *in*coherent, and all the rest. These negatives don't say what he *is*, they describe the limits of our vocabulary. So, yeah, he's breaking norm after norm, tradition after tradition, rule after rule, law after law — but, like "is broken" above, those all speak of the past. They don't say what affirmative structures he's building. The question isn't what old things are breaking, it's what new things are building: the absolute certainty — faithlessness — that government at every level is atomized, myopic, arbitrary, and violent. When it comes to details Trump bobs and weaves, makes crazy threats only to back away from the silently, but when it comes to the big picture he says what he'll do and does what says. The snobbishly inclined sneer because they insist on niceties like grammar, syntax, logic, philosophy, the rule of law, procedure and policy, the separation of powers, etc, but Trump is building his dystopia by, almost literally, hurling shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The majority of the US's left / prog / Dem blob impotently shakes its head at his endless stream of "hypocrisy": "He said he'd drain
Michael Sorkin (RIP): two hundred fifty things an architect should
Michael Sorkin, an all-around critical urbanist and familiar face in NYC and beyond, died "from complications brought on by COVID-19." We'll see a rising tide of notices like this in the coming months; and since we can see it coming, we might also think about ways to respond or, I guess, how to 'process' them. I've written several obituaries for nettime and I don't want to write any more, so instead I'm going to forward a short thing Sorkin wrote that encapsulates some of his thinking. It appeared his his book _What Goes Up_ (Verso, 2018), but it may be much older, I'm not sure. Ted - - - - - - - - - - - - 8< SNIP! 8< - - - - - - - - - - - - 1. The feel of cool marble under bare feet. 2. How to live in a small room with five strangers for six months. 3. With the same strangers in a lifeboat for one week. 4. The modulus of rupture. 5. The distance a shout carries in the city. 6. The distance of a whisper. 7. Everything possible about Hatshepsut’s temple (try not to see it as ‘modernist’ avant la lettre). 8. The number of people with rent subsidies in New York City. 9. In your town (include the rich). 10.The flowering season for azaleas. 11.The insulating properties of glass. 12.The history of its production and use. 13.And of its meaning. 14.How to lay bricks. 15.What Victor Hugo really meant by ‘this will kill that.’ 16.The rate at which the seas are rising. 17.Building information modeling (BIM). 18.How to unclog a Rapidograph. 19.The Gini coefficient. 20.A comfortable tread-to-riser ratio for a six-year-old. 21.In a wheelchair. 22.The energy embodied in aluminum. 23.How to turn a corner. 24.How to design a corner. 25.How to sit in a corner. 26.How Antoni Gaudí modeled the Sagrada Família and calculated its structure. 27.The proportioning system for the Villa Rotonda. 28.The rate at which that carpet you specified off-gasses. 29.The relevant sections of the Code of Hammurabi. 30.The migratory patterns of warblers and other seasonal travellers. 31.The basics of mud construction. 32.The direction of prevailing winds. 33.Hydrology is destiny. 34.Jane Jacobs in and out. 35.Something about feng shui. 36.Something about Vastu Shilpa. 37.Elementary ergonomics. 38.The color wheel. 39.What the client wants. 40.What the client thinks it wants. 41.What the client needs. 42.What the client can afford. 43.What the planet can afford. 44.The theoretical bases for modernity and a great deal about its factions and inflections. 45.What post-Fordism means for the mode of production of building. 46.Another language. 47.What the brick really wants. 48.The difference between Winchester Cathedral and a bicycle shed. 49.What went wrong in Fatehpur Sikri. 50.What went wrong in Pruitt-Igoe. 51.What went wrong with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. 52.Where the CCTV cameras are. 53.Why Mies really left Germany. 54.How people lived in Çatal Hüyük. 55.The structural properties of tufa. 56.How to calculate the dimensions of brise-soleil. 57.The kilowatt costs of photovoltaic cells. 58.Vitruvius. 59.Walter Benjamin. 60.Marshall Berman. 61.The secrets of the success of Robert Moses. 62.How the dome on the Duomo in Florence was built. 63.The reciprocal influences of Chinese and Japanese building. 64.The cycle of the Ise Shrine. 65.Entasis. 66.The history of Soweto. 67.What it’s like to walk down the Ramblas. 68.Back-up. 69.The proper proportions of a gin martini. 70.Shear and moment. 71.Shakespeare, et cetera. 72.How the crow flies. 73.The difference between a ghetto and a neighborhood. 74.How the pyramids were built. 75.Why. 76.The pleasures of the suburbs. 77.The horrors. 78.The quality of light passing through ice. 79.The meaninglessness of borders. 80.The reasons for their tenacity. 81.The creativity of the ecotone. 82.The need for freaks. 83.Accidents must happen. 84.It is possible to begin designing anywhere. 85.The smell of concrete after rain. 86.The angle of the sun at the equinox. 87.How to ride a bicycle. 88.The depth of the aquifer beneath you. 89.The slope of a handicapped ramp. 90.The wages of construction workers. 91.Perspective by hand. 92.Sentence structure. 93.The pleasure of a spritz at sunset at a table by the Grand Canal. 94.The thrill of the ride. 95.Where materials come from. 96.How to get lost. 97.The pattern of artificial light at night, seen from space. 98.What human differences are defensible in practice. 99.Creation is a patient search. 100.The debate between Otto Wagner and Camillo Sitte. 101.The reasons for the split between architecture and engineering. 102.Many ideas about what constitutes
Re: A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the
The good news: "States are passing laws abolishing private prisons and
businesses are cutting ties with the facilities. And private prison
companies are planning for a future in which their core service is
illegal."
=>
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/1/20989336/private-prisons-states-bans-califonia-nevada-colorado
The bad news: There's a difference, which gets lost in the outrage of
this Hyperallergic piece, between prisons and the services they rely on:
construction, infrastructure maintenance, healthcare, food, etc. Huge
swaths of those services are provided by for-profit contractors, of
course; so even if privately run prisons go away, that immense apparatus
of commercial services continues. That's why it's helpful to understand
prisons, private and public, in terms of *state economic planning* —
or "economic development," as we like to call it in the US. Many other
prison systems (notably the Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags) have
been structured around extracting labor from prisoners; the US system
— which also extracts labor from prisoners — is more heavily
oriented around prisoners as consumers.
=> See Andrea Pitzer's history of the concentration camp, _One Long
Night_: https://andreapitzer.com/
As for this metered e-reader "initiative" is awful, but on a certain
level all it's really doing is making reading like phone calls. Under
Obama the FCC capped prisoners' long-distance charges at around
$0.25/minute, but Trump's FCC made rescinding those caps a high
priority, so charges may have risen back to what they were before, often
in excess of $1/minute. Extortionate fees like that shock the
conscience; but if you add up the countless ways "us" non-prisoners pay
to read — mobile data charges, ubiquitous logins for paid or "free"
(as in "you are the product") services, ridiculously overreaching DRM
claims, and all the rest — it's pretty shocking as well.
=> Just search something like {prison phone charges}
None of this is meant to defend or soften metering prisoners' use of
e-readers. Just the opposite: the clarity of this example should remind
us just how pervasive and normalized these abuses have become. That's
why it's easy to imagine an activist push defeating this initiative but
impossible to imagine anything other than metered reading being a nearly
universal norm in some arbitrary near future — say, 10 or 20 years.
Ted
On 3 Dec 2019, at 17:49, nettime's avid reader wrote:
A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the Minute to Read
e-Books
https://hyperallergic.com/530216/a-dystopian-new-initiative-will-charge-inmates-by-the-minute-to-read-e-books/
If you’re not already on board with the ways in which for-profit
prisons
are a moral and civic affront and the outrageous and racially-biased
incarceration rate in the United States amounts to a new form of
slavery, I’m not sure what might convince you, but try this on for
size:
prisons in West Virginia are introducing a new e-literacy initiative
that will charge prisoners to read.
<...>
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Europanto 3.0
Europanto 1.0 (1997): https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9703/msg00114.html Europanto 2.0 (1998): https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9803/msg4.html Europanto 3.0 (2019): https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/30/macos_catalina_twitter/ - - - - - - - - - - - - 8< SNIP! 8< - - - - - - - - - - - - You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords Oher sofwae ikey hi y egession in uggy opeaing syse Shaun Nichols 30 Oct 2019 at 21:15 Twitter says a bug in macOS 10.15.1 aka Catalina stops users of the social network's desktop Mac app from entering certain letters in account password fields. When attempting to type their passwords into the application to log in, some characters are ignored, specifically 'b', 'l', 'm', 'r', and 't'. That would make it impossible to submit passwords using those keys to sign into Twitter accounts; pass phrases can be cut'n'pasted just fine. According to Twitter in-house developer Nolan O'Brien, these particular keypresses are gobbled up by a regression associated with the operating system's shortcut support. Normally, users can press those aforementioned keys as shortcuts within the app to perform specific actions, such as 't' to open a box to compose a new tweet. Something changed within macOS to capture those shortcut keys, rather than pass them to the password field in the user interface as expected. So, in other words, when you press a shortcut key in Twitter when entering an account password, the keypress is ignored in that context rather than handled as a legit password keypress. Other programs may also be similarly affected. <...> - - - - - - - - - - - - 8< SNIP! 8< - - - - - - - - - - - - Could be worse — say, if it became impossible to RT anything about BLM. Cheers, [T] # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Wash Post: Greta Thunberg weaponized shame in an era of shamelessness
[a little collaborative text-filtering] < https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/greta-thunberg-weaponized-shame-in-an-era-of-shamelessness/2019/09/25/66e3ec78-deea-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html> Greta Thunberg weaponized shame in an era of shamelessness By Monica Hesse Columnist September 25 at 11:24 AM A vocal cohort of fully grown human adults seems unable to deal with Greta Thunberg. The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, as you might have heard, gave a scorching speech at the United Nations on Monday. "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth," she admonished a crowd of world leaders. "How dare you." Oh, but they hadn't even *begun* to dare. That evening, pundit Michael Knowles went on Fox News and referred to Thunberg, who has Asperger's syndrome, as "a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left." On the Fox show "The Ingraham Angle," host Laura Ingraham compared Thunberg's physical appearance to a character from a horror movie, then quipped, "I can't wait for Stephen King's sequel, 'Children of the Climate.' " "I can't tell if Greta needs a spanking or a psychological intervention," tweeted Breitbart columnist John Nolte. And, actually, if you're in the mood to be unsettled, then I'll wait here while you search Twitter for "Thunberg" and "spanking" and see how many middle-aged men are eager to corporally punish a teenage girl. Finally, as Monday evening drew to a close, the president of the United States sarcastically rang in: "A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!" By Tuesday morning, as a cheeky rejoinder, Thunberg had changed her Twitter bio to President Trump's description. Thunberg does not keep to the model of how we expect fresh-faced child activists to behave. She is not interested in delivering a message of hope or in standing behind a bill-signing politician in a chorus of beaming youths. She is not interested in offering incremental solutions for individual households, in urging consumers to switch to reusable grocery bags or buy stainless-steel drinking straws. She also does not seem particularly interested in using her activism to make you like her. At one point in her U.N. speech, the audience interrupted to applaud. Thunberg looked mildly irritated by the interruption; she just wanted to get on with it. What was she getting on with? With ruthlessly explaining just how badly older generations have ruined things for her own. With castigating politicians for focusing more on keeping power than heeding science. With calling out liberals, too, like Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), who benevolently told her at an event last week that young people would soon have the chance to run for office themselves. "We don't want to become politicians, we don't want to run for office," she responded. "We want you to unite behind the science." At every turn, in every appearance, what she's interested in is making her listeners feel shame. We live in an era that has become impervious to shame. An era defined by a president who views it as a weakness. Shame has become an antiquated emotion and a useless one. It's advantageous, we've learned, to respond to charges of indecency with more indecency: attacks, misdirection, faux victimhood. When Thunberg's noxious treatment began to get attention -- Fox News apologized for Knowles's statement, calling it "disgraceful" -- some of her defenders suggested that she drew so much scorn because she was female. I'm sure that's part of it. The past few years have produced a rash of books explaining how women's anger is historically belittled while men's is seen as worthy of empathy. We have "effectively severed anger from 'good womanhood,'" wrote Soraya Chemaly in "Rage Becomes Her." But I don't think that explains all of the reactions. Thunberg hasn't been treated any more appallingly than Parkland student David Hogg, who, in the course of lobbying for gun control, was labeled a shill and a "crisis actor." He received death threats. What Thunberg and Hogg have in common, along with others like Hogg's classmate Emma González, is their utter lack of regard for our feelings. They do not care if they make us feel bad; their entire point is to make us feel bad. They don't need our votes; they're not elected officials. They don't need our money; many of them live at home with their parents. With every public appearance, they are saying: This is what it would look like, to be free to do the right thing. This is what you would say, too, if you weren't beholden to donors or viewers, if you didn't have to muster the right sound bites for your next reelection campaign, if you weren't afraid of sacrificing some of your personal comfort for the greater good. Thunberg is saying: *Aren't
Re: Supreme Court Rulling consequeces
On 25 Sep 2019, at 8:11, David Garcia wrote: Sorry nettime (press delete anyone who has a life and so is uninterested in UK politics and related constitutional/Brexit shenaningans) Felix and I have been thinking about shutting down nettime-l because (as I'd put it, he may well differ) the list should preserve its historical specificity and energy rather than devolve into yet another forum for debates that are easily available in other venues. If you feel like you need to open your mail with 'Sorry nettime' and tell people to delete your mail, that's probably a good sign that what follows may not be so productive in this context and maybe you should just delete it yourself. I understand the urge to turn to the list as a semi-sane outlet; given how nakedly brutal politics have become, there's a good chance that many others feel similar impulses. But the challenge, then, is to talk about what's happening in ways that are relevant to a wider range of people. Yesterday was a big day in the US, what with the Speaker of the House committing to an impeachment process. But the avalanche of events it led to that came fast and furious, and keep on coming, so the twists and turns seem strangely weightless, as if everything could flip around in a day or a week or vanish in a month. We could argue about what will happen, but why bother? What I'd hear here would be a pale shadow of regular fare on Facebook. That's not to say there's nothing nettimish about these subjects — there could be. But if there is, I think it lies not in specific events but in their generality: the emergence of transnational political networks that are nakedly exploiting the creaky machinery of democracy to subvert traditions, the speed with which aggressively rightist national movements are leveraging each other's strategies, the fates of entire nations becoming the latest bloody-minded 'season' of some global infotainment franchise, the outsourcing of revanchism to hypercapitalist 'makers' in ex-eastern regions, the rise of a neo–Children's Crusade focused more on planetary discourses than the trite figure of the 'local' as the field of action, the specter of military interventions in the service of environmentalism, the ways that rampant disillusionment is entangled with the self-historicizing impulses of graying radicals, the transformation of cities, higher education, and the internet from sites of liberation into machines of economic exploitation, the mutation of art schools into retirement homes, the appropriation of squatting and occupying tactics as impact-free cultural programming... That list could (and should) go on, and — with a jolt of old-school collaborative text-filtering — it could even bring some new energy and people to this list. But stuff that smacks of remoaning – not just remoaning about Brexit but remoaning about anything and everything – will just waste whatever potential might be left. Nettime-l's info page[1] says 'no MIME-attachments,' but no one GAF about MIME anymore, so maybe we should change it to something more up-to-date like 'no attachments of any kind, sentimental included.' [1] https://nettime.org/info.html Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
nettime past and future
(I just dug this up -- maybe of interest.) - - - - - - - - - - - - 8< SNIP! 8< - A- - - - - - - - - - - To: nettim...@kein.org Subject: digestion digest From: nettime mod squad Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 06:27:37 +0100 As nettime comes up on its twentieth birthday, we've started looking back at what happened. What follows is a nearly complete list of more than 700 different identities we've given to nettime's digest function over the last 16+ years. Cheers, the mod squad (Ted and Felix) nettime's.sorry nettime's(.bash)_history nettime's_ _ nettime's_ _ again nettime's_ roving_reporter nettime's___ nettime's nettime's_ nettime's__grand_inquisitor nettime's__detector nettime's_...wait...oh my god! it's alive! nettime's_'r'_critic nettime's_(anti)?thetical_synthesizer nettime's_(g)?lo(b|c)al_pundit nettime's_|<0u||+3r-.* nettime's_1337ologist nettime's_31337_h!5+0r!4|| nettime's_911_compiler nettime's academy nettime's accelerated cycles nettime's accountants nettime's_active_digestresse nettime's_adding_machine nettime's_akademik_zensor nettime's_alarmist nettime's alias nettime's_american_friend nettime's_anal_editor nettime's_anal-retentive-book-editor/librarian nettime's_AND_gate nettime's_annaliste nettime's_annotation_line nettime's announcer nettime's_anonymizer nettime's_anonymizing_service nettime's anonymous coward nettime's_anonymous_login nettime's_anti_war_dig nettime's_antithesis nettime's_api nettime's_appraisal_committee nettime's_arbiter_of_taste nettime's archivist nettime's_armchair_historian nettime's_ascii_infidel nettime's_asciimilator nettime's_assimilationist_system nettime's_attivatore nettime's_autoimmune_system nettime's_automaton nettime's avid crossposter nettime's avid gift giver nettime's avid law reader nettime's avid reader nettime's avid review reader nettime's_avid_reader nettime's_b00xw0rm nettime's_B1FF!!! nettime's_babelfish nettime's bable fish nettime's_balancing_act nettime's_barcode_reader nettime's_barker nettime's_barking_dialogist nettime's_bartleby nettime's_basic_visual_script nettime's_bean_counter nettime's_beancounter nettime's_bear nettime's bifurcated tuber nettime's_big_thumb nettime's_bird_watchers nettime's blockwart nettime's_bloggee nettime's_BMOC nettime's_body_politic nettime's_border_reporter nettime's_bored_summer_intern nettime's broken pumps nettime's_broken_record nettime's_bullshit_detector nettime's_burning_man nettime's_busy_reader nettime's_butcher nettime's_butlins nettime's_c-spammer nettime's_cache nettime's_caching_proxy nettime's cage aux trolls nettime's calculating machine nettime's_captive_audience nettime's_car_warrespondent nettime's caring parent nettime's cartoonist nettime's cash hoard nettime's_cashier nettime's_center nettime's_centrist_urge nettime's_cgi_joe nettime's_charterhouse nettime's_chatterbox nettime's_cheeseburger_to_go! nettime's_chronicler nettime's_chronological_digesta nettime's_circle_jerk nettime's_clerk nettime's closed nettime's_closet_case nettime's coin box nettime's_collection_service nettime's collective nettime's collective theorists nettime's_collective_brain nettime's_colostomy_bag nettime's compiler nettime's_compiler nettime's_compression_algorithm nettime's compulsive gamer nettime's_conditional_dig nettime's confused ontologist nettime's_conscientious_digestor nettime's_convergence_center nettime's copy editor nettime's_counter_counter_counter_something nettime's_counterimagineer nettime's_counterspam_kr!k!t nettime's_CPA nettime's crew of janitors nettime's critic of the critic nettime's crooked dealer nettime's_crusher nettime's_crystal_ball nettime's cuban middle nettime's_cud_chewer nettime's cultural nettime's curator nettime's_d-di-di-digestive_s-s-system nettime's_d-spammer nettime's_dataminer nettime's de-terminator nettime's_deadman_switch nettime's deaf reader nettime's_debabelizer nettime's_decider nettime's decoder nettime's_deep_sea_diver nettime's_deficit_disorder nettime's_deja-vu nettime's_delayed_response nettime's_delete_key nettime's_delp_hesk nettime's_demultitudinizer nettime's_depth_charge nettime's_designative_dig nettime's_dfh nettime's dialetical materialist nettime's_diet nettime's digest nettime's_digest nettime's_digest_ready_to_read nettime's digesta nettime's digester nettime's_digestion nettime's digestive system nettime's_digestive_system nettime's_digestive_system_politic nettime's_digestive_tract nettime's_digestor_of_forwarded_crises nettime's_digger nettime's director nettime's_discursive_constipation nettime's_discursive_digestive_system nettime's_disgestive_system nettime's dishonest nettime's disinfecta nettime's_disintermediation_system nettime's_dogcatcher nettime's_dom nettime's_dot_dot_dot nettime's_dot_matrix nettime's_doubleplusuncountercountercounterreformer nettime's dr doom nettime's_drive_thru nettime's_driving_force nettime's_dumpster_diver nettime's_dumptruck nettime's_dusty_archivist
Re: What Caused Nettime??
On 4 Sep 2019, at 15:43, newme...@aol.com wrote: P.S. While "gender" might be your concern, it sure wasn't when we got together. It seems like that "we" involves some pretty big assumptions. If you turn your statement around to say that gender wasn't a focus in the early days of nettime and now it is, I think that's called "progress." And, in fact, if you look back at the archives from that period, you'll see that in the months following Beauty and the East, the list became much less male-dominated — and much more interesting. Beyond that, I'll cite my favorite footnote ever, from Klaus Theweleit's _Male Fantasies_, volume 1: "I am not about to use literature to make this point. Anyone who is interested can discuss it with actual women." But all of this is ancient history. As I said to Geoff: We're interested in the future, not more of the past. Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: radio nettime: 8 Sept 2019 12:00-13:00
Geoff, if you and/or anyone else is committed to nettime as a project, however you see it, then you might consider starting a new list (or whatever) dedicated to that project and recruiting people to contribute. An effort like that would face staggering obstacles, I think. Those obstacles are one way to measure the value of this list — basically, how much would it cost to recreate it? Those costs wouldn't be financial, though, they'd be human. What would it take to rebuild the messy mix of interests — optimism, generosity, sentimentality, habit, desperation at the lack of alternatives — that make people stick to this list? I don't know how anyone would do it, but I think it'd take superhuman effort. A more practical way of measuring the list's value is to look at its actual traffic. Sure, times have changed from the 'silver age' of the mid/late '90s, and we need to adjust our expectations, but even so... The active contributors have dwindled to a few dozen, the range of subjects has become narrow and predictable, discussions quickly fall into ruts, and too much of it sounds like retirees moaning about the state of the world. It's great that some people can look past those faults and see a silver lining. But even if 50 different people suddenly started to sing the list's praises, that'd be a paltry 1% of the subscriber base. If we're serious about trying to understand the list's value, it's hard to ignore the fact that well over 99% of the people who are supposedly loyal to are silent. The disparity between these two ways of evaluating nettime is sharp. To me, it suggests that the list is running on fumes — and that if it continues on its present course, it'll burn up whatever reputation it has left. I'd much rather shut it down on a decent note than let it dodder along until its pathetic state becomes undeniable. And if anyone is tempted to think, "Wait, who are *you* to decide for all of us?" my answer is simple: I'm one of two people who've shepherded this list for the last twenty-one years. The number of mailing lists that have lasted that long is vanishingly small. It doesn't happen by magic, it happens in large part because a list is well-maintained. Until we switched the list to non-moderated status two years ago, *every single message* was approved by hand in a terminal using mutt and vim. And not just approved, but often delayed to modulate the pace of the conversation, compiled into digests with custom names, held when someone sent a second copy to fix a typo, and tons of other things. This list is some seriously bespoke shit. So, if you value this list, then part of what you value is our judgment. And our judgment now is that it's time to think very seriously about shutting it down AND MAYBE ALSO trying something new. But we haven't decided that we *will* shut it down — we announced that we're thinking about it and asking for new ideas. Protesting that the list is still worth it isn't a new idea: it doesn't address the list's serious shortcomings (notably it's catastrophic gender imbalance), it doesn't propose ways to make it more relevant, and it doesn't offer any prospects for attracting new voices / forms / focuses. And if the list can't adapt, then it's just another zombie cultural project lumbering along. I think there's much more value to be found in my initial challenge — encouraging you or anyone else to actively start your own — than in passively hoping that some interesting discussions might flare up every once in a while. If people really rely on this list, then its absence will be a constant reminder of what's needed — whereas its ongoing presence mainly means a few more mails to skim. The labor involved in running this list is trivial — that's not the issue. Felix and I could do it for another twenty years if there was reason to be optimistic. We're interested in the future, not more of the past. Cheers, Ted On 3 Sep 2019, at 22:49, Geoffrey Goodell wrote: Hi Felix, I am confused about the source and scope of the perceived threat that has led to the perception of such urgency to shut down the list. I must ask what it is about the current dynamics that the erstwhile leaders find so threatening. Perhaps it is because I have not been around Nettime back in the twentieth century, but I see nothing wrong with it. In fact, I like it as it is. If the maintainer of the mailing list server would like to quit for whatever reason, then I for one would be happy to take up the task. I'm sure I'm not alone. In fact, I'd run a mailing list for the oldster-tribe just as readily as I'd run a mailing list for the youngster-tribe. I don't have a horse in this race, just bewilderment about what people find so objectionable. Yours in confusion -- Geoff On Tue, Sep 03, 2019 at 10:51:08AM +0200, Felix Stalder wrote: I would try to reverse the question. Not what are the costs (which are hard to calculate anyway),
Fwd: [16beavergroup.org] Our Silence is (also) a Commons -- 05.25.19
Forwarded: From: li...@16beavergroup.org To: gene...@16beavergroup.org Subject: Our Silence is (also) a Commons -- 05.25.19 Date: Sat, 25 May 2019 07:14:49 -0400 Our Silence is (also) a Commons -- 05.25.19 Contents: 1. Our Silence is (also) a Commons 2. First Postscript 3. Second Postscript __ 1. Our Silence is (also) a Commons A few years ago, we wanted to organize a series of gatherings under the heading 'The Comin or the common Depression'. We were hestitant because naming is not a neutral act, and we did not want to call into existence something which we were hoping as a community to avert. A handful of months passed and we received news that Mark Fisher had taken his own life. A brilliant writer and thinker who was himself so present to the challenges imposed by a realism shaped by contemporary capitalism, had been taken under. Again, we were challenged to do something, say something, meet together, read Mark's writings, only to fall within those same weeks, attending to the existential wildfires caused by uprootings and evictions within our midst. In these years, we lost more than one can recount, when even one is too many. Meanwhile the headlines go by, idiot president and hypocrite president before him, and parties, and journalists saying truths while the lies spill from their laps, from their laughs, from their cries. The society of spectacle becoming the spectacle of society. Fake news indeed make good fake presidents and fake politics and fake lives, this analysis was done 50 years ago. Scurrying over to the next protest, the next corruption or scandal, the next evidence that the majority of institutions we inhabit are structurally capitalist, racist, patriarchal, and intimately hooked into the biocidal machine taking all life toward extinction. And we are not allowed to speak about it, we may be deemed out of our minds. Green New Deal up their ass, as our friend Valerie Solanas might have said if she were still with us. And so too the addiction to organization, without ever changing the way we ‘organize’ our lives. As if we would be waiting for the states and the existing forms of institution to bring about the revolution rather than starting from our everyday capacities and looking for the measures and means in our everyday lives with those around us. Already since our meetings with Bifo in 2009, we wanted to orient attention toward one of the shifting terrains of capitalist exploitation and extraction, what Bifo at the time referred to as the mining of the psyche and what he would later write as the soul at work. How many have we lost in this war that is so invisible, so silent, where the very machinery of care or cure, like the hospital, the medications, the doctors themselves become the last and most violent tools of capitalist extractivism. The most bitter pill to swallow for those suffering from and struggling against the wreckage of capitalist life, are the pills whose efficacy are measured not by how many they cure and certainly not by how many they drive to the edge but instead by the billions of profits they bring to their manufacturers. ‘Welcome to the New Paradigm?’ Where the institutions that are meant to protect against racism or ecological ruin help perpetuate them. Or the institutions responsible for educating the young only seem to produce a more generalized ignorance concerning the gravity of our times. Nothing has changed really, only now it appears the forked tongue is more univocal and the masks hiding the racist, colonial, patriarchal, and classist inheritances and underpinnings are momentarily off. Ulrike Meinhof was once rumoured to have said that every suicide is a death by capitalism. And in this sense her note to her sister, "If they say I committed suicide, be sure that it was a murder" can be read beyond that of the specific circumstances of her own murder inside Stammheim Prison. How many silent deaths caused by medications, caused by overdose, by abuse, institutionalized dis-care, by the ‘there is no alternative’ conditions of a capitalist reality which does not give space for other sensibilities, values, senses of life - augmented by devices and apparatuses which aim to capture, extract, profit upon the last bit of intimacy we posses, our imaginaries and our words to one another. And where journals and newspapers cannot read yet alone recall all the signs of a total disaster without adding a list of great books to read this weekend, great shows to see, great recipes to survive global warming, and the right app to organize your estate before parting. So it is with a deep sadness that we interrupt our extended silence/strike to share the passing of a young comrade and friend of the space, Zack Rosen. The crossing of a threshold always needs a leaping into a beyond. We are in the beyond now, remembering a friend of the space, but doing
Re: Ben Quinn: Julian Assange shows psychological torture symptoms, says UN expert (Guardian)
Morlock wrote: > Unprotected penetration of a sleeping woman (or sleeping women) is the > ultimate crime that warrants any punishment one can think of. This > worldview will be remembered as the only lasting achievement of identity > politics and victimhood industry. Considering that ever so slightly more than 50% of the people doing the remembering will be women, even an incremental step toward being able to sleep in peace would a big thing. Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Eric Whitacre, Virtual Choir
If you focus on the final 'product' this can seem transformative, but if you untangle the constituent practices it can also be seen as little more than a networked variation on traditional musical activities: open communal performances, studio-centered processes that rely on session musicians, sampling and sequencing, karaoke, even the precaritization of music. In opera, for example, the cost of bringing everyone together in a prominent venue can be so immense that performers prepare for months on their own then come together only for a few rehearsals before the live performances. If anything, what makes Whitacre's project seem 'transformative' is the presence of an auteur-manager presenting something as entirely new — which itself isn't so new. A few years back, I think, I read something about the mounting frustration felt by the other three Talking Heads while Brian Eno worked with David Byrne to produce _Remain in Light_: Eno's fascination with sequencing samples made them feel more like studio musicians generating snippets than a band working together. My point isn't to judge Whitacre's work one way or the other, though. It's merely to note — as we've seen in so many other contexts — that TED talks and slapping '2.0' stickers on projects tends to blur all the myriad practices that came before it into a gauzy '1.0' that's both idealized and denigrated. And to generate demands for ever-lower levels of technical latency. It's worth noting the Belgian audio pottery hoax in this context for the brilliant way it wove together of a half-dozen strands of techno-cultural fascination around the fetish of lost immediacy: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=belgian+pottery+audio+hoax=ffab=web Cheers, Ted On 29 May 2019, at 8:18, John Preston wrote: The YouTube algorithm gave me a TED talk by Eric Whitacre [1] sharing his work conducting 'virtual choirs' where people recorded their parts separately and uploaded them to YouTube. The individual performances were then rendered together to create the final 'performance'. The project is on-going [2]. I thought this was a nice example of a work of a traditional medium being transformed through network technology. Particularly the asynchronous nature of the process is very different from how a physically co-located choir would operate, and the result is not a conventional performance but a recording (hence my previous quote marks). I'd like to see a live performance by such a physically distributed choir using low-latency technology. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: infrastructural interventions
On 28 Apr 2019, at 2:18, Morlock Elloi wrote: Carpenter was optimist. More a primitivist, I think, but basically yeah. Those NYClink monoliths have an odd history that I don't entirely understand, but very few do. It goes back to the slow abandonment of phone booths, which in NYC used to have an ATM-like function — not as contraptions that dispensed cash to users but as cash cows for the small businesses that owned the ones that weren't in or on physical banks. Phone booths were similar: prominent locations were owned by Nynex / Bell Atlantic, the RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Company) spun off when AT was broken up, but lots were owned and occasionally maintained by independent businesses. In the late '90s "AT" merged with the mobile provider Cingular and, as part of a rebranding process, redesigned its payphones in some ghastly pomo style. But after a city-wide restructuring of payphone contracts in the late '90s (i.e., under Giuliani), most of the remaining indy phone booths were bought up by a privately held 'advertising' company called Titan, which was founded in 2001. Titan let their phones go to hell, but their main aim seems to have been consolidating the easements that allowed payphones to sit on properties the company didn't own. Many if not all of the LinkNYC monoliths make use of those easements now, and they seem to be the culmination of a pretty long and capital-intensive game plan. There are also some odd cases where the monoliths have been tactically deployed in ways that mainly serve to displace pushcart vendors, street used-book sellers, and the like. This page preserves some of the transitional 'branding' mutations under the title "11,000 black holes": https://archinect.imgix.net/uploads/bl/blughezoztprcgs3.jpg I remember hearing rumblings that Titan had been quietly installing network nodes or at least sensors in some of their semi-abandoned pay phones — say, to test a longer-term business proposition — but I never looked into it. The video I note below confirms they were doing just that. But it's worth keeping in mind that this all was happening as NYC was morphing from a post-'70s drug capital into a more future-oriented city organized around the threat of terrorism, so these changes involved lots of moving parts with conflicting interests in small- and large-scale surveillance systems with different players as well as players within players (for example, the NYPD's drug-enforcement hierarchy vs its rising counter-terror forces) — all of which is totally opaque. John Young would probably know more about parts of this history, and Daniel Kahn Gillmor (a/k/a DKG), who's now a senior staff technologist at the ACLU in NYC, would probably know some other parts. Unfortunately, I've never run across any publicly minded telecom geeks with a deep local knowledge of NYC — as in, willing to dive into byzantine city contracts and policies. But the person who knows most is Dan Doctoroff, a world-class self-dealer who was Mayor Bloomberg's point man for infrastructure: he spent much of his time in office trying to marry post-9/11 rebuilding plans with his NYC2012 Olympic bid and the Hudson Yards redevelopment project. Titan's various contracts with NYC were renegotiated while he was in office — I'm sure they made ample use of the crash of 2008 to 'optimize' their various upstreamd downstream dealings — and he went on to co-founded the Google venture Sidewalk Labs, which...wait for it...bought Titan. There are a few trivial snippets of this history still lying around in public, mostly related to a public 'Reinvent Payphones challenge' in 2012–13 — proposals by ~architecture firms, the obligatory warm-fuzzy public-participatory design nonsense, etc: https://bustler.net/news/2812/six-finalists-of-nyc-s-reinvent-payphones-design-challenge https://www.huffpost.com/entry/redesign-payphones-design-challenge_n_2828866 https://www.engadget.com/2013/03/06/nyc-reinvent-payphones-finalists/ But this page inadvertently calls it: while all of the proposals suggest that the kiosks will be widely used for way finding, internet access, phone calls, emergency response and other relevant pedestrian needs in the 21st century, none go into quite as much detail as the I/0 proposal by none other than TITAN360. In case you dont know, Titan360 if an OOH advertising company that has a huge stake in the phonebooth inventory around NYC, collecting ad revenue from a lions share of the 11,000 plus remaining booths. They seem to have taken this contest the most seriously, producing a glossy 5 minute video to explain how I/0 and the average citizen will interact.They seem to have taken this contest the most seriously, producing a glossy 5 minute video to explain how I/0 and the average citizen will interact. http://daily.publicadcampaign.com/2013/03/reinvent-payphones-design-challenge.html It includes a
Re: Guardian Live on Assange's arrest
On 11 Apr 2019, at 14:18, Morlock Elloi wrote:
OK, let's look at it from another angle: who did, in the last 10
years, change public discourse in the desirable (to me at least) way
more than Wikileaks and its staff? Suntanned POTUS? Pope? Habermas?
Mother Theresa? Dalai Lama? Zizek? Beyonce? nettime?
I agree Assange's impact has been immense, but that kind of heroic model
is a counterproductive way of thinking about Assange and his
contributions. If anything, the distinctive (maybe even decisive)
feature of the last decade was its lack of heroes and the growing sense
that we're enmeshed in tangled and collapsing systems.
In effect, you're asking the kind of question that the editors of Time
magazine would pose in naming a Person of the Year. That annual ritual
was a central feature of Henry Luce's efforts to project an American
Century: in the face of the growing challenge posed by socialism and all
its messy masses, he drew on a nostalgic model of history ('great men,
battles, and speeches,' as they say) to propose a sort of
philosopher-scientist-king to tickle the fancy of the Washington–New
York consensus. But Wikileaks's most significant actions — Cablegate,
Collateral Murder, etc — were aimed precisely *at* the military and
diplomatic aspects of that US hegemony. And that was and remains
Assange's plight: on the one hand, he wanted to bring down the world
modeled on US hegemony, on the other, he wanted to be the kind of
anti/hero it relied on.
Note, FWIW, the cover story of _The Atlantic_, to the extent that that
former monthly has a cover anymore (YA network effect): 'The End of the
American Century.'
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/end-of-the-american-century/514526/
And note as well Forensic Architecture's statement, which sounds a lot
like something Time magazine would write: Wikileaks 'shattered every
established paradigm of public interest journalism, and ushered in a new
era of investigative reporting.'
https://www.forensic-architecture.org/statement-from-forensic-architecture-on-the-arrest-of-julian-assange/
Like I said, we can think critically about Assange — and acknowledge
his formidable contributions — without lapsing into that kind of
rhetoric. He didn't shatter any paradigms of public-interest
journalism: he bundled together a lot of conventional networky ideas —
about leaky secrets, about enabling direct access to primary sources,
about the expansive capacity of hard drives rather than the limited
space of print news, about the role of security in protecting sources
— and wrapped them in an effective (ugh) 'brand.' That was really
important, and project like ProPublica and the sprawling collaborations
surrounding the Panama Papers etc owe him a big debt.
The important thing to understand why is Wikileaks considered such
danger: unlike impotent philosophiles, left, right and progressives,
Wikileaks uses effective technological tools. Which is why it is
universally hated. You are supposed to only pretend to be effecting
change.
That's the dream of Wikileaks. The reality is that the 'organization'
spent much of the last several years squandering its credibility and
becoming an increasingly threadbare cover for Assange's cryptic designs.
Again, that's not intended as a criticism of *him*. The fact that he
remained at liberty, or at least not imprisoned forever, and more sane
than not through all this is a testament to some sort of strength. It'd
be easy to see what I say as the usual 'moderate' bending with the wind,
but it isn't: I was clear-eyed about him ~25 years ago when he was
banging on about 'rubber hose' cryptography, and I'm
clear-eyed about him now. And YMMV, but I think it's also clear-eyed to
recognize that overly effusive statements now will fall prey to the same
old cycle of coverage that will make him yesterday's news when, as his
many trials drag on, he'll need a more sustained kind of respect. So:
Make no mistake - it's not about Assange or anyone else - it's about
two simple technical facts:
1. Wikileaks servers could not be suppressed neither by rubberhosing
service providers, registrars, nor telecoms. They did try, for a long
time. If they could, none of this would happen.
2. Wikileaks sources were far better protected than anyone else's (and
still are) by using custom submission technology.
#1 and #2 is what put rope around Assange's neck. Use of tools.
Wikileaks works. Effective use of technology cannot be allowed, and an
example needs to be set. Tweeting and blogging on corporate servers is
OK.
I agree, but as long as he's alive it does need to remain, in part,
about Assange. Do I really need to argue why?
Cheers,
Ted
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#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info:
Re: Guardian Live on Assange's arrest
*Semi*-voluntary is just a statement of fact, not an evaluation: he had more choices than someone entirely in custody. None of those choices were good, and, like I said, I don't think any of them could have changed this outcome — that, sooner or later, he'd be physically removed from the embassy. A certain measure of normalization is inevitable: there are kids who were born after Assange entered the embassy but know his name. I think the issue is what *kind* of normalization. As Felix and you both point out, albeit in very different ways, the widespread adoption of Wikileaks's basic vocabulary — both as ways of working and as historical context — is another form. You give Assange more credit than he's due for changing public discourse, I think. The exposure of classified military and diplomatic materials has been going on for half a century or more, and there are organizations — say, the National Security Archive in the US, and other entities in other countries — that have been actively working in a sort of proto-Wikileaks 'space' for decades. If anything, the more promising aspect of Wikileaks wasn't the leaks, it was the wiki — the hope that leaking could become pervasive and transformative (I'm tempted to say, *be normalized*). I'd argue that Assange himself turned out to be one of the greatest obstacles to that hope. But, as absurd as it may sound, I don't say any of this to diminish his impact or to diss him: the best respect is to think carefully about what he *did* accomplish. I tried to get at some of this several years ago, in point/counterpoint piece with Florian Cramer that Mute ~commissioned in 2011: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wikileaks-has-radically-altered-military-diplomatic-information-complex-%E2%80%93-10-reasons-and-against Cheers, Ted On 11 Apr 2019, at 13:02, Morlock Elloi wrote: What was the voluntary part? Lifelong imprisonment in the US or execution are viable alternatives? The amount of normalization is staggering. And it works. From left-talk about revelations of criminal election rigging being far bigger crime than the criminal rigging itself (cretins on the left still believe it, also that Assange is a rapist), to forgetting how Wikileaks profoundly changed the public discourse (cables, war logs, collateral murder, vault, etc etc.) how it saved Snowden from chains, how it enabled effective whistleblowing. And it is enabled mainly by cretins on the left living in psychotic denial of reality. Now watch the sad show of British and their judicial system as they bend over to receive the final ejaculation ... state-size necrophilia. semi-voluntary confinement <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Guardian Live on Assange's arrest
So far, coverage has understandably focused on the event of Assange's arrest. Lots of voices are arguing that it's 'chilling' — as if keeping someone jailed other names for six+ years in a forlorn and ambiguous situation weren't chilling. If anything, the indefinite uncertainty of his semi-voluntary confinement was even more chilling; and the fact that it had to end in something like this, but no one knew when or why, made it even more so. Most of the comments I've seen so far feel like they were pulled out of the freezer to thaw it out for dinnertime news programs: he's an Australian citizen, he had immunity, Wikileaks isn't a US entity, the embassy is Ecuador's sovereign territory, etc, etc. These conditions were all true give days ago, five weeks ago, even five years ago, so they don't add much to understanding what's afoot right now. A better line of questions might involve what's changed since he first entered the embassy. Most of what we 'know' amounts to tea-leaf reading — for example, Manning being jailed for refusing to testify before a grand jury, and the Wikileaks tweet several days ago that he'd be arrested within 'hours, or days,' or something like that. Beyond those scattered crumbs, I think it depends on where you stand on 'conspiratorial' ideas — like how this might related to the trajectory of Mueller's report. But a myriad of other, 'softer' things has changed in a big way. When Assange and Wikileaks rose to power, if you could call it that, the US relied heavily on extraordinary rendition to move ill-defined 'enemy combatants' from secret to secret — 'torture taxi' private jets and 'black sites.' TIRED. What's WIRED is the US brazenly subjecting vast numbers of undocumented newcomers to detention and family-separation policies. And whatever you think of Glenn Greenwald, he was a bit fresher when this Wikileaks thing was starting up; now Greenwald is buried in ossified complaints that his views are hopelessly compromised and ridiculously selective. A few generations of dodgy messaging apps have been tossed in the dustbin of internet history and, among them, Signal has become a way of signaling a certain savvy. And, as Felix points out, Wikileaks's basic proposition — secure drops of confidential data for journalists — has become so normy that some news outlets have already retired their systems. Basically, security isn't 'sexy' anymore. And neither is Assange. The fact that this arrest was conducted not just in the open but in broad daylight can't be ignored — and nor can the way he was half-hustled, half-carried out. It seems like the intent was to present him in the most bedraggled, infirm way in order to strip him of as much dignity as possible. And it also seems like Assange knew that. It's possible he just happened to be so engrossed in Gore Vidal's _History of the National Security State_ that he didn't think much of it when a police truck pulled up and a dozen officers poured through the embassy's door — and that the head officer said, 'Fine, sure, waiting can be boring — why not bring some light reading?' But police tend to be cautious about letting arrestees carry loose possessions, so it's more likely that there was a bit of coordinated choreography there: that Assange chose a book whose cover would be identifiable in even the crappiest video footage, and that the police, who surely handcuffed him, nevertheless allowed him the odd privilege of making some mute comment. But prisoners of conscience brandishing 'significant' books as they move through public settings has become a bit of a thing in the past few years, which suggests that some police forces have developed procedures for distinguishing free speech from blunt weapons. As obvious as it may seem, it's also worth noting that the Ecuadorians didn't just push him out the door and leave him sitting on the steps with boxes of his possessions. In a way, I'm surprised they didn't. Where could he have gone that he couldn't be apprehended on the way? Maybe that would have been to shambolic or, however improbably, too risky. Whatever the case, Ecuador chose to do it deliberately by allowing seemingly normal police to enter the premises (though I'd wager they'll be doing a pretty thorough security sweep to make sure the visitors didn't leave any presents behind). From now now, Assange will be moved from one rigorously specified setting to another: holding cells, secure transport, interrogation rooms, courtrooms. The big question, which drove these events from the beginning, is *which* ones? A few in the UK, then almost certainly in Sweden, then almost as certainly in the US. I don't think anyone seriously believes this odyssey will be driven by a strictly limited questions about the details of his relations with a few women and (as the NYT puts it) 'a single charge [of] conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.' While Mueller's team 'interviewed' a
Re: rage against the machine
On 29 Mar 2019, at 6:32, William Waites wrote: It seems to me it is a question of where you draw the system boundary. If the system is an aeroplane that is flying, then the recording device is not part of the control loop and it is not a cybernetic tool in that context. If the system is the one that adjusts and optimises designs according to successes and failures, then the recording device definitely is part of the control loop and it is a cybernetic tool. This is where 'classical' cybernetics drew the line. Second-order cybernetics, which came later (late '60s through the mid/late '70s) and focused on the 'observing systems' rather than the 'observed systems,' drew that line differently. I don't have a solid enough grasp of the work of people like Heinz von Foerster and Gordon Pask to say with any certainty how and where they'd draw it, but in general their approach was more discursive and less, in a word, macho. So they'd be less interested in the isolated 'technical' performance of a single plane or a single flight and more interested in how people made sense of those technical systems — for example, through the larger regulatory framework that Scot spoke of: regular reviews of the data generated and recorded during every flight. Scot's note was a helpful reminder that the purpose of a black box is just to duplicate and store a subset of flight data in case every other source of info is destroyed. In that view, it doesn't matter so much that the black box itself is input-only, because it's just one component in a tangle of dynamic systems — involving humans and machines — that 'optimize' the flight at every level, from immediate micro-decisions by the flight staff to after-the-fact macro-analyses by the corporation, its vendors, regulatory agencies, etc. The only reason we hear about (or even know of) black boxes is that they fit neatly into larger cultural narratives that rely on 'events' — i.e., crashes. But we don't hear about these countless other devices and procedures when things go right. Instead, they just 'work' and disappear into the mysterious 'system.' (As a side note, this brings us back to why Felix's overview of how different regimes contend with complexity is so stunning — 'complexity' is a product of specific forms of human activity, not some mysterious natural force: https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1903/msg00127.html His message reminds me very much of what I love about Marshall Sahlins's work and, in a different way, of Moishe Postone's _Time, Labor, and Social Domination_: basically, 'complexity' is immanent.) But back to my point: Morlock's original take about the Boeing 737 crashes and how this thread unfolded, or at least to one of the areas where Brian and I seemed to part ways. It's easy to lose sight of the larger dimensions and implications of these human–machine assemblages. For example, media coverage very quickly focuses on detailed specialist subjects, like the design of the MCAS system that's failed on 737s; then, a few days later, it suddenly leaps to a totally different order and focuses on regulatory issues, like the US FAA's growing reliance on self-regulation by vendors. We've grown accustomed to this kind of non-narrative trajectory from countless fiascos; and we know what sometimes comes next, 'investigative journalism,' that is, journalism that delves into the gruesome technical details and argues, in essence, that these technical details are metonyms for larger problems, and that we can use them as opportunities for social action and reform of 'the system.' This journalistic template has a history. I know the US, other nettimers will know how it played out in other regions and countries. A good, if slightly arbitrary place to start is Rachel Carson's 1962 book _Silent Spring_ and Ralph Nader's 1965 book _Unsafe at Any Speed_. (It isn't an accident that Carson's work opened up onto environmental concerns, whereas Nader's was more geeky in its focus on technology and policy: there's an intense gender bias in how journalism identifies 'issues.') From there, the bulk of ~investigative journalism shifted to militarism (i.e., Vietnam: defoliants like Agent Orange, illegal bombing campaigns), political corruption (Watergate), intelligence (mid-'70s: the Pike and Church committees looking into CIA abuses etc), nuclear power (Three Mile Island), military procurement, policy and finance (HUD, the S, etc), etc, etc. I've left out lots of stuff, but that's the basic drift, although these decades also saw an immense rise of investigative focus on environmental issues. Whether the results of all that environmental work have been satisfying I'll leave as an exercise for the reader. That template goes a long way toward explaining how and why journalistic coverage of 'tech' is so ineffectual now. It can't get its arms around *the* two big issues: the extent to which the US has
Re: rage against the machine
Not so fast, Felix, and not so clear. The origins of the phrase black box are "obscure," but the cybernetics crowd started using it from the mid-'50s. Their usage almost certainly drew on electronics research, where it had been used on a few occasions by a handful of people. However, that usage paled in comparison to the phrase's use among military aviators from early/mid in WW2 — *but not for flight recorders*. Instead, it described miscellaneous electro-mechanical devices (navigation, radar, etc) whose inner workings ranged from complicated to secret. Like many military-industrial objects of the time, they were often painted in wrinkle-finish black paint. Hence the name. Designing advanced aviation devices in ways that would require minimal maintenance and calibration in the field was a huge priority — because it often made more sense to ship entire units than exotic spare parts, because the devices' tolerances were too fine to repair in field settings, because training and fielding specialized personnel was difficult, because the military didn't want to circulate print documentation, etc, etc. So those physically black boxes became, in some ways, "philosophical" or even practical black boxes. Several of the key early cyberneticians contributed to the development of those devices at institutions like Bell Labs and the Institute for Advanced Studies, and there's no doubt they would have heard the phrase. In that context, the emphasis would have been on *a system that behaves reliably even though ~users don't understand it*, more than on *an object that's painted black*. Wartime US–UK cooperation in aviation was intense (the US used something like 80 air bases in the UK under the Lend–Lease program), so there was no shortage of avenues for slang to spread back and forth across the ocean. It's on that basis, a decade later, that Ross Ashby called a chapter of his 1956 book _Cybernetics_ to "The Black Box." Given who he'd been working with, it's hard to imagine — impossible, I think — that he was unaware of this wider usage. (An exaggerated analogy: try calling someone looking at shop shelves a "browser.") Some early aviators had come up with ad-hoc ways to record a few flight variables, but the first flight recorders as we now understand them started to appear around the mid-'50s. There's lots of folksy speculation about how these things — which weren't black and weren't box-shaped — came to be called "black boxes." I think the simplest explanation is best, even if it's the messiest: a combination of aviation slang and the fact that they were the state of the art when it came to sealed units. In the same way that the word "dark" clearly exerts some wide appeal (dark fiber, dark pools, dark web, dark money, etc), I think the idea of a "black box" held mystique — of a kind that would tend to blur sharp distinctions like the one you drew. Anyway. Planes are interesting, but what led me down the path of studying these histories is what you point out — that the fusion of the pilot with the plane is an ur-moment in human–machine hybridization. Cheers, Ted On 28 Mar 2019, at 14:48, Felix Stalder wrote: Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each other. In the case of the black box in cybernetics, it stands for a (complicated) processes of which we only (need to) know the relationship between input and output, not its inner workings. In the case of the airplane, the it's just a very stable case protecting various recorders of human and machine signals generated in the cockpit. There is no output at all, at least not during the flight. There is, of course, a deep connection between aviation and cybernetics, after all, the fusion of the pilot with the plane was the earliest example of a system that could only be understood as consisting humans and machines reacting to each other in symbiotic way. So, the main thrust of the thread, and the rest of your post, are interesting, this little detail irks me. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: rage against the machine
Felix, this is really interesting. Normally, I'm allergic to sweeping models of history that involve anything like 'technology' or 'technology,' because they mostly serve as playgrounds for wannabe TED talkers. Yours is different — maybe, in part, because you don't assume that capitalism and computation play well together. You wrote: In the case of the plane crash, it's just out in the open, like in the case of a massive stock market crash. The difference is only that in the case of the plane crash, the investigation is also out in the open, while in virtually all other cases, the investigation remains closed to outsiders, to the degree that there is even one. Yes and no. In theory, plane crashes happen out in the open compared to other algorithmic catastrophes. In practice, the subsequent investigations have a very 'public secret' quality: vast expanses are cordoned off to be combed for every fragment, however minuscule; the wreckage is meticulously reconstructed in immense closed spaces; forensic regimes — which tests are applied to what objects and why — are very opaque. And, last but not least, is the holy grail of every plane crash, the flight recorder. Its pop name is itself a testament to the point I made earlier in this this thread about how deeply cybernetics and aviation are intertwingled: the proverbial 'black box' of cybernetics became the actual *black box* of aviation. But, if anything, its logic was inverted: in cybernetics the phrase meant a system that can be understood only through its externally observable behavior, but in aviation it's the system that observes and records the plane's behavior. Black boxes are needed because, unlike car crashes, when planes crash it's best to assume that the operators won't survive. That's where the 'complexity' of your sweeping history comes in. Goofy dreams of flying cars have been a staple of pop futurism since the 1950s at least, but until very recently those dreams were built on the basis of automobiles — and carried a lot of cultural freight associated with them, as if it were merely a matter of adding a third dimension to their mobility. But that dimension coincides with the axis of gravity: what goes up must come down. The idea that flying cars would be sold, owned, and maintained on an individual basis, like cars, implies that we'd soon start seeing the aerial equivalent of beat-up pickups flying around — another staple of sci-fi since the mid-'70s. It won't happen quite like that. When cars crash the risks are mainly limited to the operators; when planes crash the risks are much more widespread — tons of debris scattered randomly and *literally* out of the blue. That kind of danger to the public would justify banning them, but of course that won't happen. Instead, the risks will be managed in ways you describe well: "massive computation to cope, not just to handle 'hardware flaws', but to make the world inhabitable, or to keep it inhabitable, for civilization to continue." The various forms of 'autonomization' of driving we're seeing now are the beginnings of that transformation. It'll require fundamentally different relations between operators and vehicles in order to achieve what really matters: new relations between *vehicles*. So, for example, we're seeing semi-cooperative procedures and standards (like Zipcar), mass choreographic coordination (like Waymo), the precaritizing dissolution of 'ownership' (like Uber); GPS-based wayfinding and remora-sensors (everywhere) and the growing specter of remote control by police forces. None of these things is entirely new, but their computational integration is. And as these threads converge, we can begin to see a more likely future in which few if any own, maintain, or even 'drive' a car — we just summon one, tell it our destination, and 'the cloud' does the rest. Not because this realizes some naive dream of a 'frictionless' future, but because the risks of *real* friction anywhere above 50 meters off the ground are too serious. And, in exchange for giving up the autonomy associated with automobiles, we'll get to live. That's why criticisms of the 'complexity' of increasingly automated and autonomized vehicles are a dead end, or at least limited to two dimensions. I liked it very much when you wrote that "the rise in complexity in itself is not a bad thing"; and, similarly, giving up autonomy is not in itself a *bad* thing. The question is where and how we draw the lines around autonomy. The fact that some cars will fly doesn't mean that every 'personal mobility device' — say, bicycles — needs to be micromanaged by a faceless computational state run amok. Yet that kind of massive, hysterical, categorical drive to control has been a central feature of the rising computational state for decades. The system that has worked for the last 40 years is reaching the limits of the complexity it can handle. The externalities
Re: rage against the machine
On 26 Mar 2019, at 1:15, Brian Holmes wrote: Despite Ted's excursions into aviation history, which at least he finds brilliant, plus the general manly readiness to cut the throat of, one doesn't know exactly whom, we have gotten no further in terms of understanding the situation than what you have transcribed. It's still about a badly designed plane "fixed" by a cybernetic patch, in a quest for profit that knows no bounds. "excursions into __ history, which at least he finds brilliant" seems like a pretty fair description of your own often-lengthy contributions to the list, Brian. Many of them are interesting, and I admire your commitment to untangling and reweaving disparate postwar intellectual and institutional threads. We need much more of that, in the US especially. But like your work with Bureau d'études, the value of those broad sweeps breaks down where the rubber meets the road, or in the case of aviation where somewhere between aerodynamics and instrumentation. Which is why, I guess, after "looking for something analogous in discursive spaces like this one," you've abruptly rediscovered the importance of the specific problem. But, as I described in some detail, cybernetic thought has been baked into aviation for decades. If anything, it's the other way around: aviation-related research was baked into cybernetics even as that new 'science' was being invented: some of the key players were working on applied problems brought into focus by aviation, ranging from fire control, to various applications of radio, to mission planning. So it's not a patch, it's the entire premise of how that industry works on almost every level. Fixing this one problem in a more sane, humane way would do nothing to resolve the countless areas where dilemmas with similar origins or structures *will* arise. And much as aviation served as one of the main vectors for distributing that style of thought globally, reforming some of the field's dominant design philosophies could do so as well. As for slitting the throats of "one doesn't know exactly whom," no. I wrote: And that begs an important question that leftoids aren't prepared to answer because, in a nutshell, they're allergic to power: what *would* be appropriate punishments for people who, under color of corporate activity, engage in indiscriminate abuses of public trust. Andreas argue that long prison terms are good enough. That answer is easy, because it has the patina of history. But it ignores the disparate real conditions in prisons, which — in many contexts leftists would agree — are far from good enough. I have some vague idea that over the last several decades a few people spent some time thinking about the history and philosophy of punishment. In nettimish contexts (as opposed to ground-level activism in judicial and penal fields), most of that thought was applied to critiques of punishment — certainly more than to imagining new and maybe even constructive ways to address the scale and complexity of corporate criminality. Caricaturing people who'd say we should think about that as "manly" throat-slitters is dishonest and dumb. But my larger point was that systematic reform will require dismantling corporate mechanisms for obfuscating and escaping individual culpability. So, when you say... How to express a necessary anger in a way that increases both people's willingness and actual capacity to act politically? It's the unanswered question I take away from the thread. ...I'd suggest that you start with the anger that's in front of you rather than invoking some romantic notion of diffuse righteous anger so you can position yourself as its philosopher. I offered at least one concrete answer: the labor activism of flight attendant unions, which I think has forced the Trump administration to do an about-face twice. There are others avenues, but finding them may require some excursions into 'aviation history.' If you aren't willing to do that, or at least to respect it, you won't get anywhere beyond unanswered questions. Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
two 'meta' notes (was Re: rage against the machine)
(1) On 18 Mar 2019, at 22:24, Brian Holmes wrote: Ted, I like how you look at disputes from all sides, both for the intrinsic interest of the meta-discussion, and because you put a finger on the very existence of the dispute. For me it boils down to the old question about critique, what it is, how it works, why anyone would engage in such a thing. <...> thanks for the meta, Brian Brian, to put it more bluntly, when it comes to critical discussions of aviation forensics, you are — by your own standards — out of your depth and in the same boat as the legions of just-add-water experts who opine on every subject that's trending on social media. I'm hardly an expert, but I have spent years reading widely about how aviation has reconstructed humanity at every level, from the cognition of instrumentation design, to the history of crash-test dummies, to divergent philosophies for building failsafe systems, to debates about how aviation is transforming geopolitics and even history. Hence the mini annotated bibliography at the end of my mail. So it's funny to read that you 'look for something analogous in discursive spaces like this' and 'stand for a critique of the relations between capitalism and complex systems' — then thank *me* for being 'meta'?! Morlock's comparison of Boeing's marketing of critical safety features with luxury finishes on cars nailed it. More than that, it's the kind of insight that can and should become a rallying cry in efforts to rein in megacorps that treat human lives with leather gearshifts as fungible. I guess we could say that comparison happens in a 'discursive space,' but posh abstractions like that suggest this problem is somehow new and in need of vanguardist theorizing. It isn't and doesn't. On the supply side, this 737 fiasco is just one more chapter in longstanding labor struggles for safe workplaces. Much as the flight attendants' AFA union played a pivotal role in ending Trump's government shutdown, I suspect that combined statements from the AFA and APFA (the American Airlines FA union) that their member won't be forced to fly in 737s sparked the Trump admin's sudden turnaround on the 737. On the demand side, the tradeoff between safety and 'extra' features was clear enough in 1954 to be the punchline of the Daffy Duck cartoon "Design for Leaving": after Porky Pig pushes the 'big wed button' marked IN CASE OF TIDAL WAVE in his newly automated home, elevating it hundreds of feet on a retractable pylon, Daffy Duck appears outside his door in a helicopter and says, "For a small price I can install this little blue button to get you down." https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x34az2i More generally, entire swaths of current 'technology' debates — about automation and IoT, 'adversarial' this and that, how advertising is subverting democracy, etc, etc – are naive historical reenactments of front-page debates from the mid-1950s. Lots of factors enable that naivete, and voguish talk about 'complexity' is one of them. It's not an accident that complexity became a pop phenomenon starting in the '80s: corporations love it because it emphasizes the power of inexorable and inevitable systems rather than our 'simple' power to change them. Sure, the rise of computation made the math needed to explore complexity is more widely accessible; but the idea that what matters is the secret mathematical kinship between the patterns of capillaries in our retinas and the structure of whatever we're looking at — tree roots or urban spaces or networks — is mostly mystification, barely a step above staring at a fractal screensaver. So, when you say you 'stand for a critique of the relations between capitalism and complex systems,' I agree — just not in the way you intended. Effective critique stands *against* that mystification. (2) On 23 Mar 2019, at 6:54, Andreas Broeckmann wrote: friends, call me over-sensitive, but i think that nobody should be burned at the stake for anything in any country; i say this also because this flippant kind of rhetoric poisons the reasonable debate that is so urgently needed on the matters at issue here. (to the contrary, i am glad that some civilised countries find forms of punishment other than that for actual wrongdoing.) - unfortunately, in a world where people get imprisoned and killed for all sorts of things, there is little room for such dark humour... when all the stakes have been taken down everywhere, we'll be able to laugh about this joke again, perhaps. Andreas, you're over-sensitive. Much as Brian's flight into abstraction misdirected discussion away from concrete facts and struggles, your focus on the brutality of Morlock's remark — which I'm pretty sure was a figure of speech, not a specific advocacy for burning at the stake over drawing and quartering or crucifixion — misdirects it away from what matters most: penetrating the corporate veils that limit liability. If
Re: rage against the machine
I'm going to channel a bit of Morlock and Keith, for whom barbs aimed at the list have been a semi-regular feature of their emails, because no one who's weighed in with an opinion seems to know much about aviation. And why would they? I'm not saying anyone should have immersed themselves in the arcana of aerial malfunctions, but, absent detailed knowledge, discussion degenerates into woolly ideological rambling and ranting. Take this, from Brian's reply to Morlock's original message: The automatic function is called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). Its sole purpose is to correct for an upward pitching movement during takeoff, brought on by the decision to gain fuel efficiency by using larger engines. At stake is a feedback loop triggered by information from Angle of Attack sensors - nothing that could reasonably be described as AI. The MCAS is a bad patch on a badly designed plane. In addition to the failure to inform pilots about its operation, the sensors themselves appear to have malfunctioned during the Lion Air crash in Indonesia. This may be a nice distillation of a specific issue, but it lacks the kind of contextual knowledge that Brian values in — and often imposes on — areas he has thought about in depth. Like, where does this issue sit in a range of alternative schools of thought regarding design, integration, and implementation? What are the historical origins of Boeing's approach, and when and why did it diverge from other approaches? How do those other schools of thought relate to the different national / regional traditions and historical moments that shaped the relevant institutions? More specifically, how do other plane manufacturers address this kind of problem? Where else in the 737 might Boeing's approach become an issue? How do these various approaches affect the people, individually and collectively, who work with them? How do the FAA and other regulatory structures frame and evaluate this kind of metaphorical 'black box' in aviation design? Questions like this are part of the conceptual machinery of critical discussion. Without questions like this, specific explanations are basically an exercise in 'de-plagiarizing' better-informed sources — rewording and reworking more ~expert explanations — to give illusory authority to his main point, that 'AI' has nothing to do with it. But Morlock didn't say 'the relevant system directly implements AI.' He can correct me if I'm wrong, but he seemed to be making a more general point that faith in 'AI' has fundamentally transformed aviation. More specifically, it has redrawn the lines between airframe (basically, the sum total of a plane's mechanical infrastructure) and its avionics (its electronic systems, more or less) to such a degree that they're no longer distinct. But that happened several decades ago; IIRC, as of 1980 or so some huge fraction of what was then the US's most advanced warplane, like 30% or 60% of them, were grounded at any given moment for reasons that couldn't be ascertained with certainty because each one needed a ground crew of 40–50 people, and the integration systems weren't up to the challenge. Obviously, quite a lot has happened since then, and a big part of it has to do with the growing reliance on computation in every aspect of aviation. In short, the problem isn't limited to the plane as a technical object: it also applies to *the entire process of conceiving, designing, manufacturing, and maintaining planes*. This interpenetration has become so deep and dense that — at least, this is how I take Morlock's point — Boeing, as an organization, has lost sight of its basic responsibility: a regime — organizational, conceptual, technical — that *guarantees* their planes work, where 'work' means reliably move contents from point A to B without damaging the plane or the contents. OK, so AI... What we've got in this thread is a failure to communicate, as Cool Hand Luke put it — and one that's hilariously nettime. It seems like Morlock, who I'd bet has forgotten more about AI than Brian knows, is using it in a loose 'cultural' way; whereas Brian, whose bailiwick is cultural, intends AI in a more ~technical way. But that kind of disparity in register applies to how 'AI' is used pretty much everywhere. In practice, 'AI' is a bunch of unicorn and rainbow stickers pasted onto a galaxy of speculative computing practices that are being implemented willy-nilly everywhere, very much including the aviation sector. You can be *sure* that Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, Embraer, Tupolev, and Comac are awash in powerpoints pimping current applications and future promises of AI in every aspect of their operations: financial modeling, market projections, scenario-planning, capacity buildout, materials sourcing, quality assurance, parametric design, flexible manufacturing processes, maintenance and upgrade logistics, etc, etc, and — last but not
Re: rage against the machine
>>> On 14 Mar 2019, at 17:43, Morlock Elloi wrote: >> On 14 Mar 2019, at 20:26, Olia Lialina wrote: > On 14 Mar 2019, at 21:58, Brian Holmes wrote: nettime trifecta cheers, t # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: No evidence of digital wrong-doing...
I'd like to know more about the recent history of Citizens' Assemblies, in part because that context would probably dampen any tendency to treat them as yet another panacea in the medicine cabinet of utopianism. The idea of a random group selected to become temporary experts convened as a stage in some momentous state action is hardly new. Exhibit A: the jury. In that sense CAs seem a bit sketchy, somehow old and yet...not old. They're like a wolpertinger[1] made up of bits of juries, focus groups, and reality TV shows. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolpertinger The odd thing is the role of sortition, that is, the more or less random selection of participants. That technique for defeating or circumventing influence networks may not invest the process with positive legitimacy, but at least it aims to divest it of one obvious form of illegitimacy: corruption. But sortition is one of those latinate nouns that serves to mask agency: who or what is doing this (what's the verb?) 'sortiting'? The state of course. In societies where the state is widely seen as legitimate and functional, CAs would tend to work better; but in societies where society and the state are at each other's throats — say, the UK in the throes of Brexit debates — they're likely to be seen more in terms of reality TV shows than as juries. 'Transparency' is the conventional way to address that problem nowadays, but it's another panacea from the same medicine cabinet. Feel like your governance process is out of sorts? Try Transparency™! Unfortunately, huge swaths of The Spectacle now (if I may use that term) are devoted to perverse forms of transparency. Artificial TV dramas that lay bare the ins and outs of group dynamics, tell-all memoirs about participants' experiences in some huge fiasco, even meta-debates about how viral stuff spreads on social media — these are all subgenres concerned more or less with dissecting *how* decisions were made in the past tense. In that respect, the only maybe useful thing I have to add about Brexit in particular is how asymmetric and alienated the debates seem to be. A lot of pro-Bexit rhetoric is cast in a 'historical' perspective, as if the speakers were standing outside it all and looking back on it all retrospectively. In many cases they *are* — moving their businesses abroad, lining up papers in other countries, etc. In contrast, a lot of Remain rhetoric is grounded in concrete benefits here and now and how to extend them — for example, to the next generations. Cheers, Ted On 28 Jan 2019, at 8:55, Felix Stalder wrote: As far as I know from the German Pirate Party, the use of liquid democracy has been pretty problematic, to say the least. But anyway, these are different things, as David said, no either or. Citizens' Assemblies are for a smaller number of citizens coming together multiple times over longer period of times (say one year), discussing, in depth and with experts, contentious issues. The advantages of a small number is that you can be more clear with the selection process (ensuring a minimum of diversity) and you can materially suppor the participants (again, important is you want to include people who canno affort "free labor".). The advantage of such assemblies really lies in the qualitative dimension, people from different backgrounds being forced to listen to each other, respond face-to-face to each other, and seeing where agreements can be reached and were disagreement might be rephrased to change the question into something more productive. This is really hard to replicate electroncially and with large number of participants. But to iniate this process now for Brexit, it's really too late. This takes a long time, and it would mean, in effect, to day inside the EU until the process is finished, and then we will see again, depending on the outcome of the process. What I've always wondered by Labor hasn't come up with their version of Brexit and then called for a new elections to make sure they have the majority to bring it through parliament. At least, then people could vote, even indirectly, for their prefered version of the thing, without having to re-do the vote, which would be problematic, to say the least. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Teen Vogue explains general strikes
< https://www.teenvogue.com/story/general-strikes-explained > And embedded in the middle, a video: "Trending Now: Teni Panosian Shows How To Achieve Cake-Free Makeup in the Summer." Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
'Scaling' is a strange idea. It can be used to describe mom-and-pop
efforts to grow some product line or whatever, but it has a more
important usage that's much more ideological — as in VC efforts to
identify potential unicorns. In that sense, it's invoked as though its
meaning is self-evident and its force is inevitable, like a sort of
abstract manifest destiny — which, of course, is exactly what it is.
It doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, FWIW, just a disambiguation page that
points to a bunch of detailed uses. When you unpack it a bit, it amounts
to something a bit less sexy-sounding, like: 'deliberately designed to
maximally exploit arbitrary resources as quickly as possible without
regard for the consequences.' So, on a certain level, it's kissing
cousins with the idea of conspiracy, mostly distinguished from that by
its technocratic garb and avoidance of morality. I think that's worth
noting, because instead of casting scaling as an intrinsic quality of
some *thing*, the capacity to scale, it shifts our attention to the
environment in which that scaling is said to take place. So, basically,
it's the capacity to monopolize.
It's more complicated than that, of course. I've pieced together parts
of a history of the idea, and it's pretty interesting. If the idea
sounds heroic and inevitable, that's mostly compensation: it arose from
conflict and it aims to stave off chaos. It's a very Apollonian idea,
you could say. That's why it's so bad at beginnings ('deliberately
designed to') and ends ('without regard for the consequences').
Cheers,
Ted
On 30 Dec 2018, at 12:09, Morlock Elloi wrote:
The problem is that this doesn't scale. Or at least the scaling model
has not been discovered. At the same time, the opposition scales
pretty well.
For this scaling to involve machines (computers, programs, networks
and such, and I cannot imagine competitive scaling not involving
machines - anyone?) another problem has to be solved, as the current
crop of the available computing machinery is heavily biased towards
individualistic outcomes. The redesign would be a major effort, as it
definitely does not consist of another 'app'. It involves
interventions at the infrastructure level, and there are $ trillions
already invested in the current one, so it's hard.
How do you motivate open door crappers to lay own fiber, grow own
silicon and use only P2P protocols with source routing? It's hard to
even imagine this.
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Re: Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]
So far, the only parts of my initial message I'd retract is "that, I think, was based on psychological modeling" and the word "bamboozle." Aside from those mistakes — which admittedly carry real freight — my analysis was precise and my conclusions were cautious. In particular, the conspiratorial theories about how the site is 'really' alt.right trolling is people wrestling with their own sloppy reading and straw men. I went out of my way not to say things like that, which was easy because I don't believe them. What I *do* believe is that looking carefully at projects like this site is a good way to cut through the frontal PR and learn more about where they came from (which is *not* reducible to who wrote them — in part because they aren't just texts). For example, the authors seem to be plucking pictures from sites that sell college essays about police corruption, and at some point there was a section called "Let them hang..." (Bad combo, imo.) This is nothing more than the kind of critical analysis you'd apply to any text you take seriously; but when it's applied to visual and technical objects, text-fetishists throw tantrums, condescend, etc. YOU'RE JUST OBSESSING OVER A FONT!!! No. The font caught my attention and then I looked at the rest of the site. Brian's comments are most helpful — not a very high bar, given Ian's threats to take his radical manifestoes home with him and Nina's 'splainy review of the last decade in Good German fashion. But even so, it's a sorry state of affair when it takes a contentious thread to arrive at conclusions like "violent leftist protest can backfire" and we "should beware the consequences." Those should be starting points, not conclusions. And if loud vices on the US radical left are drifting toward the belief that they can light the match that'll spark a conflagration of unicorn farts, then count me a moderate centrist. That's why I'm skeptical about explicit intentions. It's great that the authors throw all the right gang signs in a sympathetic podcast, but why is that the final word? If they talk about warm-fuzzies but devote half the photos on their site to violent fantasies, that's worth knowing. And if their aesthetic choices contribute to muddying basic distinctions between left and right, does it really matter how 'good' their intentions are? Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]
This thing didn't pass the initial smell test, and after spending some
time with it I can say: it stinks.
tl;dr: It's provocateur agitprop made by Americans for Americans, and
it's crafted to blur distinctions between left and right — more
specifically, to lure progressive/leftists into a rightist fantasy
world, with — I think — the intention of normalizing and fostering
consideration and discussion of violence. In part, it's a visual
exposition of the "but Nazis were SOCIALISTS" nonsense that's going
around in rightist circles; but unlike that pseudo-factual claim, this
site is intended to be obliquely persuasive. There are signs that it's
tied to murky efforts to identify leftist college students. Whoever
developed it has put some serious time into studying Nazi aesthetics
and, more than that, has a subtle sense of how to evoke them without
being obvious about it. The fact that it comes in three languages,
English, Spanish, and French is mostly pseudo-'internationalist'
window-dressing. There are signs of a layered, deliberate editorial
development process that, I think, was based on psychological modeling.
This isn't a one-off project made by a band of nutters: it's planned and
executed with subtlety and sophistication, with *very* high production
values. We'll see more efforts that look and sound like it.
Here's why I think so:
It was inevitable that we'd start to see manifestoes/etc whose
philosophy and production values are inversely proportional: as the text
becomes hsallower, the visuals become deeper. They'll require two kinds
of 'reading,' textual and (for lack of a better word) visual. As the
philosophy falls way the value of close readings diminishes, and as the
visuals become more sophisticated the value of 'close looking'
increases. So let's take a close look at the website Ian pulled this
text from: https[colon]//inhabit[dot]global/ — URL mangled because I
don't want anymore links to it in the nettime archive.
The text casts future history as a 'choose your own adventure' exercise.
It uses red-pill/blue-pill rhetoric ("there are two paths") to dress up
a binary choice — which, tellingly, explicitly uses the language of
A/B testing. Not very interesting, imo, except maybe as some sort of
obligatory web-analytics gesture.
Much more interesting is the visual style, which is self-consciously
modeled in several ways on print.
First image: an eagle flying above it all, against threatening clouds
— but they're too close and detailed to be storm clouds, so maybe it's
smoke? Hard to tell, in an almost perfect way.
The color palate, which is *very* unusual in terms current trends,
mimics faded print — and not just any print but the kind you might
expect from, say, 1930s Germany. The solid color fields, in particular,
are reminiscent of propaganda from the period — close enough to hint
at it, but not so close as to be too obvious.
The display type ("Lydia-BoldCondensed," if you chase down the CSS) is
the typographic equivalent of alt.right rhetoric: it evokes Walter
Höhnisch's National and Schaftstiefelgrotesk (literally, "Jackboot
Grotesk") without quite going there, as they say.
https://www.colophon-foundry.org/typefaces/lydia/
http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-24194.html
http://de.academic.ru/dic.nsf/dewiki/1241667
The photographs are all black-and-white, which places them in an obvious
historical register — pre-color photography. But, more than that,
they're processed to mimic paper tinted with age: again, almost *but not
quite* like the discoloration you get from early mass-produced paper
from the '30s, a time when the production of cheap new kinds of paper
skyrocketed but the chemistry hadn't been worked out.
Odd detail: there's enough diversity in how the images were processed
— cropping, blurring, and adding color gradients (in the first and
last images) — to suggest that the art director knew what he (pretty
sure of the gender there) has real experience.
And then there's the substance of the photographs... This part gets
geeky, but bear with me because it's very telling. These images have
been deliberately curated to
* balance racial/ethnic and gender
* appeal to indigenous struggles (Latin America, Dakota Access)
* make reference to internationalist militance
* make reference to survivalist training
I'm pretty sure the ~curator was a white guy.
Below is a list of the photos in order. Here's the legend:
* '+' means a pictures with an identifiable person
* '-' means a pictures with with faces obscured by cropping or
photoshop
* '[+]' means the photo is widely available
* '[ ]' means the photo does NOT turn up in reverse images searches.
— that last category is interesting, because it narrows the scope of
where the images come from.
* [#] means there's some interesting detail (below the list) about
its origin
The photos, in
Re: Fascist "trolls," meta
On 8 Nov 2018, at 14:25, jan hendrik brueggemeier wrote: just to reiterate: AB was an alt-right hack of nettime? times certainly are changing ... (apologies for the slow response). I'd rather spend time on just about anything but Bard, but on this point: As far as I know, Bard's been on the list for many years, going back at least to the Tulipomania conference in 2000, when he was programmed in a debate with (my, how times have changed!) Richard Barbrook and Michael Gurstein. Personally, I think that Bard is "alt.right" and a hack, and it's a fact that he was on nettime, but to suggest he "*was* an alt-right hack of nettime" — no. That invites a level of conspiratorial thinking that's unjustified and unnecessary. I think the last time anyone suggested someone else on the list was part of some hidden plot to target nettime was 20 years ago, probably almost to the day. Let's make the next time it happens in November 2038. If this list should be about anything at all, it should be about advancing some kind of freedom in understanding how individual, collective, and mass beliefs and actions coincide. Conspiratorial implications that cast others as instruments of hidden agendas do the opposite. That said, in a few private mails after being modded Bard made a few remarks that, in my view, confirm hat his ideas have aligned with the extreme elements of the alt.right — for example, something that sounded a lot like the "white genocide" bombast common in supremacist circles. That put an end to whatever reservations I had about modding him — not because those views are proscribed on this list, but because there was no reason to think he'd be able to engage in constructive debate. He also asked to unsubscribed, which he was. So: he's gone off to the happy hunting ground of, as he put it, "the Intellectual Deep Web." But I don't want to say anything more, because it isn't fair to discuss someone in a public context where they can't reply. More generally, a few people have pointed out on- and off-list that open forums where people from across the political spectrum can exchange and debate ideas are desperately needed — as an ideal in their own right and for pragmatic reasons, because the alternative is a world of intellectual inbreeding, feedback loops, and closed systems. If this list needs anything (and it desperately does), it's to expand the range of voices and ideas, not to narrow them and turn inward. So I'll repeat this: You know what would be great? If we — by which I mean all of you, acting individually — could take a few concrete steps to nudge this list in better directions. Rather than make a few banal suggestions of things you can do *right now*, as if this were a political fund-raiser, it's better to leave this as a standing invitation. Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: apropos of nothing
I'd like to go back to lurking, but a few replies below. Mainly, this: Bard occupied too much space, so I hope we de-occupy it with more forward- or outward-looking things. Nettime does best when mods are seen and not heard. On 6 Nov 2018, at 15:22, Nina Temporär wrote: A Nazi gets granted that status only after a long week and many hate mails with many crossed lines, but I was already On moderated status….for what exactly? For softly criticising Felix a few months ago, funny enough, on a related topic, when he totally out of the blue used the Defence of a women as a line of argumentation against someone else? Nina, you aren't on moderated status. Several messages were delayed, as I said, for some technical reason, mostly because of some difference between the subscribed address and the sender. I didn't take notes, so I'm not sure what the issue was in the case of your mail — but it wasn't delayed deliberately in any way. On 6 Nov 2018, at 15:32, Menno Grootveld wrote: Although I certainly do not share all of Alexander's notions and ideas, and although I do not discount the possibility that he actually is one of these 'trolls', I don't support banning him from nettime permanently. I have to admit that I am a bit shocked by the eagerness with which some people seem to be wanting to 'shut him up,' as I do not consider this a productive way of having a discussion. The problem remains of course that a lot of people feel offended by his posts and that the discussion I am referring to has gotten out of hand recently, so the best solution would probably be to put him temporarily on 'moderation watch'. Menno, I set Bard to mod status rather than kicking him off the list. If we call it temporary, we'd need to set up some kind of criteria for switching it back. If Bard wants to initiate a private discussion about that, he can do so of course, but I don't think it's the best focus for the list right now. If he sends any messages, we'll review them at some point — but since his destructive style thrives on speed, we'll do it on our own time. Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: apropos "relax dear"
Julia, your questions — 'so, is that it?' and 'is this normal?'— are really important. A few years ago Felix and I pranked the list on April 1st by announcing that we were shutting down nettime: https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1504/threads.html But it wasn't entirely a prank. Our concerns were very real, and they still are. This list has some serious problems, the most obvious being the all-too-familiar constellation of gender bias: who contributes, what they contribute, how they contribute, etc. Gender isn't an 'issue,' it's the entire world, but our failure to address it well on this list is a *big* issue. Felix and I can and should do more to try to address that, but in many ways that kind of overt effort runs counter to how we see our role *as moderators*, which is more as janitors than as leaders. (So, to JO's question about who cleans the toilet, the answer is the mods do: Felix, Doma, and myself.) Shifting the 'culture' of this list will require collective effort on the part of the subscribers — in particular your lurkers, because you're the majority. I switched Bard to moderated status because his contempt finally crossed a basic line — accepting an indiscriminate political murder on supposedly theoretical grounds. I think that's a good line to draw now *as a policy* now, at a time when deliberate political violence consumes more and more of the world. But drawing a line there might also tacitly suggest that anything short of that is somehow OK. What movements like #metoo are showing more clearly, for more people, is how 'micro-aggressions' are the building blocks of systemic gender violence. So, for example, when someone tells someone else to 'relax,' that single word carries the freight of entire worlds. Complaints about 'PC' this and 'PC' that cast that recognition as though it were oppressive, and indeed it sometimes is. But it can also be liberating to *know* — not a shiny new realization but a conviction — that words can change things for the better. This Bard eruption has shown that nettime, like any other community, can be seized by negativity, even as everyone fully recognizes the dynamic. Flipping him to moderated status fixes that, but there's no software setting for fixing gender imbalances. The only way to do that on a list — or around it — is with words. You know what would be great? If we — by which I mean all of you, acting individually — could take a few concrete steps to nudge this list in better directions. Rather than make a few banal suggestions of things you can do *right now*, as if this were a political fund-raiser, it's better to leave this as a standing invitation. Cheers, Ted On 5 Nov 2018, at 1:57, Julia Röder wrote: about that dear angela, relax dear. it is ok. noone is recruiting anyone here. chill. best, w so, is that it? silence about this from the whole list except from angela? do you all not say anything because you think this is trolling or this is normal?? # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Taking sides
On 6 Nov 2018, at 3:50, Ryan Griffis wrote: I take neither side at Charlottesville Need anyone say more? Nope. 'Charlottesville' was a neo-nazi riot in which a person was murdered. That's a good reason to take a side — against neo-nazis. To not take a side is, in effect, to condone that murder. I think it's reasonable to say that condoning murders, however indirectly, crosses a clear line on this list. For that reason, I just flipped the mod switch on Bard: his messages will be held for review. He's given us a lot to think about lately, so reviewing new ones won't be a high priority. This decision is mine alone — I haven't talked with Felix about it. Comments and criticisms are warmly welcome. Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Identity and difference
Ian, this idea of 'civility' should be unpacked a bit, because the ~word lumps together a disparate range of concerns. At its worst, a lot of babble about civility boils down to is tone-policing, which relies on etiquette as an all-purpose tool for micromanaging rhetoric — and in doing so, limiting and even delegitimizing positions of every type (subjective, relational, political, whatever). In other contexts — notably, in 'centrist' politics in the US — it serves as a rationale for institutionalist pliability: 'bipartisan' cooperation, etc. But those two uses are very different from its function as a foil for the frightening prospect of outright political violence. These different strands, or layers if you like, are hopelessly tangled, and that confusion in itself has serious consequences — hence the culturalist use of the word 'strategy,' which often is used to get at the nebulous realm in which individual behavior aligns with (or 'is constitutive of') abstract, impersonal forces. That's a very roundabout way to get at the obvious problem, which is the direct way that increasingly uncivil political discourse foments violence. And, in a way, that's the problem: the left's path for translating ideals into political practices is hobbled and misdirected at every stage, whereas for the right it's becoming all too direct. My gut sense is that Land is symptomatic of the left's repudiation of force — violence — as a legitimate form of politics. Some, like him, sense that and embark a theoretical trajectory that tacitly accepts or even actively embraces violence. I'll leave that there, because I don't want to debate it or even to see a debate about it on this list. Nettime is fragile, and decades of accumulated effort could be poisoned with a few, um, 'uncivil' messages. There was a time when the solution was widely said to be more speech, but at a time when 'more speech' means trollbot networks that systematically and strategically subvert civil contexts I think that rule is more problematic than ever. As for Bard, whenever his mail appears in inbox my first reaction is "When's the new book coming out?" But that's a rhetorical question — no answer needed, thanks. Cheers, Ted On 28 Oct 2018, at 10:48, Ian Alan Paul wrote: Brett - I don't think that the problem of the Left is that we don't spend enough time with people who think it's worthwhile to discuss the potential virtues of "Candace Owens, Nick Land and/or Adolf Hitler." If anything, the Left needs to thoroughly rid itself of the liberal and depoliticizing notion that we should all simply get along in the name of preserving civility, esp. in a historical moment while fascist gangs are literally roaming the streets beating up migrants, synagogues are being shot up, and pipe bombs are being mailed to politicians. I don't think Alexander's ideas are worth engaging with or even refuting to be entirely honest, as I hope is obvious to most people on Nettime by this point. We live in times that are too extreme and urgent to expend any attention or energy dialoguing with disingenuous apologists for the Right . <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Bad news for Brexit Junkies! - worse news for Labour and remainers
On 16 Oct 2018, at 9:54, James Wallbank wrote: Well, quite clearly I'm beginning to sound like a member of the tinfoil hat brigade - but seriously, the level of democratic failure and delusional thinking at the highest levels of governance are hard to explain in other ways. I agree with your analysis in spirit, but all of those things were true when the UK joined the EU — so it doesn't do do much to explain why this and why now? The nihilistic turn that many established nations are taking is maddening because it's hard to tell whether the driving forces are structural or, instead, if we're seeing the resurgence of the 'great man' model of history (yes, peanut gallery, I know this lot isn't very 'great'). In theory, those two ways of thinking about society are radically different; in practice, they seem to be converging. A handful of people who fancy themselves great have fumbled and maneuvered their way into positions, political and discursive, that allow them to seize — or maybe 'surf' — structural forces. The fact that they're jabbering, sophistical narcissists is all the more frustrating, because anyone with a shred of optimism left would think those personal qualities would make it impossible to rise to such power. And yet we also know that those personal qualities are ideally suited to key aspects of how media works now, again ranging from the structural (for example, the temporal model of 24/7 constant-coverage media machines) to the personal (Rupert Murdoch and his ilk). So what we're seeing isn't just a collapse of the national regimes, we're also seeing the collapse of an epistemic regime that was tied to the heyday of — and depended on — those national regimes to establish facts. People like to cite that chestnut about everyone gets their own opinion but not their own facts, but *in fact* what we're seeing is a rising world in which people *do* get to have their own facts — for a while. The first question is for how long, and second is what comes next? In the US the concern is that the GOP under Trump is assembling a one-party state at an alarming rate. Much of the basic work had already been done before Trump came along, and his forces are now mainly connecting the dots. The result may well be a governmental regime that's adept at manufacturing its own facts on a just-in-time basis — basically shoving crazy short-term noise into media pipelines and networks in order to dominate both *how* things are 'framed' (bleh) and *what* is framed — 'content' (even more bleh). In practice, this relies heavily on subverting the segments of the government whose strength has been that they moved *slowly*: the technocratic and procedural layers of the executive branch, fact-finding mechanisms of the legislative branch, and the analytical authority of the judicial branch. Given the right conjunction — autocratic leaders, solipsistic ruling parties, minority parties in thrall to institutionalism and good manners, and judiciaries systematically subverted over decades — this has been surprisingly to accomplish within individual countries. But this turn involves several (maybe many) countries, which is where it gets really messy. It's hardly worth mentioning the importance of the community of nations to restrain individual countries' excesses, but what happens when these nihilists start to cooperate? We're seeing that all over the place: cabals meeting here, theaters of the absurd there, shadowy influence networks playing next-level jurisdictional games with data, employees, processing. Again, that's not new: for example, the homogenization of politicians and campaigns was clear in the '80s, and the rise of multinational news systems like News Corp heavily shaped the politics of the '90s. But we're only beginning to see how deeply political media consulting has been internationalized, and there's a growing sense of defeat that any existing institutions will be able to establish the facts, let alone determine whether they were criminal, let alone prosecute and the people, organizations, and networks involved. And that's where your analysis, though largely accurate, becomes dangerous. It may help us to understand some of the structural conditions driving nihilistic projects like Brexit, but because it doesn't address my initial questions — why this? and why now? — it doesn't do what's needed: help to lay a basis for new frameworks, institutions, and procedures that are capable of restraining this turn. The dilemma that minority parties face is that they're largely limited to assuring people that the institutions can be renewed through normal civil processes and that we can return to some semblance of sanity. What they can't do is frankly acknowledge the possibility that these institutions are 'broken' or hopelessly inadequate to the challenges. Again, this isn't especially new: we've seen it in proxy wars, flags of convenience, the rise of
IETF Network Working Group Internet-Draft: Social Media (An Apology)
< https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-elders-social-media-apology/?include_text=1 > Network Working Group E. of Internet-Draft The Internet Intended status: Informational July 16, 2018 Expires: January 17, 2019 Social Media (An Apology) draft-elders-social-media-apology-00 Abstract Oops, we did it again. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on January 17, 2019. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2018 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. of Expires January 17, 2019[Page 1] Internet-Draft Social Media (An Apology) July 2018 1. Introduction Recently, you may have noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of opprobrium, outrage, hate speech and overall bile on your favorite social media channel. The Elders of the Internet apologize unreservedly for this disruption. Recently, our attention has been focused on keeping the United States government, Comcast, your local ISP and some guy at the coffee shop out of your bits [RFC7258]. As a result, we were caught unawares when the Internet became the sink for every poorly-considered argument, paranoid thought when you wake up in the dead of night, and shrieking nutjob you'd usually cross the street to avoid. Combined with the magnification offered by "likes" and "retweets", along with the inevitable back-and-forth squabbling that ensures, the Internet is currently having a crippling effect on your ability to work, communicate productively, and - occasionally - breathe. In retrospect, we should have known; USENET was a pretty clear warning. We will do better. 2. Mitigations To partially mitigate the effects of this phenomenon, a number of techniques can be used. Note that none of these is a "fix", and some undesirable effects (e.g., loss of sleep, appetite or democracy) may persist. 2.1. Meme-Only Diet Memes are a time-proven way to express disdain, mocking and other sentiments while maintaining an air of light humor. They can therefore be helpful in a transition away from full-throated, deeply- felt outrage. In other words, they're the methadone of the Internet. Memes are only to be generated or consumed under advice of a doctor, as prolonged use might result in undesirable side effects (e.g., [fourchan]). of Expires January 17, 2019[Page 2] Internet-Draft Social Media (An Apology) July 2018 2.2. Blocklists Blocklists are a proven means of avoiding undesirable content, and responsible social networks (looking at you, Facebook) implement them. They may be able to help you enjoy the sparse benefits of a social network without some of the worst side effects. Recommending a specific blocklist is out of scope for this document, but we suggest starting with "Trump" and working outwards from there. 2.3. Abstention The most proven way to win is not to play. By abstaining from social media, you may find you have more time, a more authentic and meaningful engagement with life, and a corresponding lack of the desire to stock up on canned food and ammunition. Other benefits may include more productive and authentic participation in genuine societal issues (as opposed to "using a hashtag" while binge-watching [Netflix]). 2.4. Whisky For those unable to leave social media or otherwise curtail their use. 3. Security Considerations The security of the
Shadow libraries in the Washington Post
What a pleasant thing to see this morning — a razor-sharp overview by Joe Karaganis and Balazs Bodo. In the Washington Post, no less. Cheers, T < https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/13/russia-is-building-a-new-napster-but-for-academic-research/ > Russia is building a new Napster -- but for academic research By Joe Karaganis and Balazs Bodo July 13 at 7:00 AM What will future historians will see as the major Russian contribution to early 21st-century Internet culture? It might not be troll farms and other strategies for poisoning public conversation -- but rather, the democratization of access to scientific and scholarly knowledge. Over the last decade, Russian academics and activists have built free, remarkably comprehensive online archives of scholarly works. What Napster was to music, the Russian shadow libraries are to knowledge. Much of the current attention to these libraries focuses on Sci-Hub, a huge online library created by Kazakhstan-based graduate student Aleksandra Elbakyan. Started in 2011, Sci-Hub has made freely available an archive of over 60 million articles, drawn primarily from paywalled databases of major scientific publishers. Its audience is massive and global. In 2017, the service provided nearly 200 million downloads. Because most scholars in high-income countries already have paid access to the major research databases through their university libraries, its main beneficiaries are students and faculty from middle- and low-income countries, who frequently do not. Such underground flows of knowledge from more- to less-privileged universities are not new. But they used to depend on slower and less-reliable networks, such as developing-world students and faculty traveling to and from Western universities, bringing back photocopies and later hard drives full of scholarly work. Sci-Hub scaled this process up to meet the demand of an increasingly interconnected global scientific community, where the first barrier to participation was access to research. Why Russia? Academic copying and sharing has created shadow libraries all over the world. But only the Russian versions have grown into large-scale global libraries. This was not an accident. From the 1960s on, Russian intellectual life depended heavily on clandestine copying and distribution of texts -- on the "samizdat" networks that distributed uncensored literature and news. The fall of communism ended censorship. But it also left Russian readers, libraries and publishers impoverished, trading political constraints for economic ones. The arrival of cheap scanners and computers fueled the growth of new self-organized libraries. By the second half of the 1990s, the Russian Internet -- RuNet -- was awash in book digitization projects run by intellectuals, activists and other bibliophiles. Texts migrated from print to digital and sometimes back again. Efforts to consolidate these projects also sprung up by the dozens. Such digital librarianship was the antithesis of official Soviet book culture, as it was free, bottom-up, democratic and uncensored. It also provided a modicum of cultural agency to Russian intellectuals amid the economic ruin of the 1990s. The big Russian shadow libraries emerged from this mix of clandestine librarianship, economic crisis, technological change and -- at the state level -- regulatory incapacity. By the early 2000s, these shadow librarians had digitized much of the highest-value Russian scientific and literary work. By the mid 2000s, the largest of these efforts had consolidated into an archive called Library Genesis, or LibGen. LibGen equated survival with redundancy, and so made both its collection and its software available to others. Almost anyone could clone the library, and many did. By the late 2000s, the most prominent was the Gigapedia (later called Library.nu), which began to build a large English-language collection. When a copyright lawsuit by Western publishers took down the Gigapedia in 2012, its collection was re-assimilated into LibGen. Sci-Hub was built around similar principles. When a user requested an article, Sci-Hub automatically downloaded that article from publisher databases, using borrowed faculty credentials. Sci-Hub then archived the article with LibGen, to fulfill any subsequent requests. Now, Sci-Hub has its own archive, and LibGen serves as a backup. According to Elbakyan, the complete archive has been copied many times. But what about the legal implications? Much of this activity violates U.S. and international copyright law. In June 2017, a New York district court awarded $15 million to Elsevier, one of the handful of publishers that control most of the world's academic journals, in its lawsuit against Sci-Hub and LibGen. This hasn't stopped either service. But the legal pressure has forced Sci-Hub to periodically change hosting services and access methods. None of
RIP Art McGee
Since I seem to have become nettime's informal obituary writer, I'll pass on the news that Art McGee passed away. Art was an early nettimer, not a major presence, and not since 2003 I think, but he was one of the few — too few — who've brought race-oriented perspectives to the list, both explicitly and indirectly. I have a vague sense that he put a lot of energy into building African-Americans presences online in the early days of the public net. Corey Robin posted the following to Facebook: I've just read on various people's pages that Art McGee has died. Many of you who are friends or followers of this page may not know Art. I can't say I knew him well. Not in real life. But we'd been FB friends for years. And I have to say, within those very real constraints of knowing someone only online, I loved the guy. We didn't have much politically in common. Our differences, at any rate, always seemed magnified by our engagements. He'd appear on a thread of mine, challenging me in the most direct and blunt terms, particularly on questions of race. He'd piss me off, and I'd respond in kind. It never seemed to ruffle him much; he'd obviously dealt with far more formidable opponents in his time. Which is why, I guess, I kept coming back to him. He knew his shit. He pulled not a single punch. But there was never anything in his voice but the integrity and passion of his beliefs. He was old-school. We did share a love of The Drifters, which I remember discussing with him on a late-night thread. And when it came to power and politics, he was an absolute realist, which I always appreciated; there was just no nonsense or bullshit in his vision. And I loved lurking on his page and reading his posts. He knew so much about black politics and culture, and about the left, that I didn't and still don't know. His knowledge was encyclopedic, his range catholic. He gave me an education I didn't know I needed. I don't say this lightly: I'm going to miss him. May his memory be a blessing. https://www.facebook.com/corey.robin1/posts/1821608354571544 Some of Art's postings are here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22art+mcgee%22+site%3Anettime.org=web The Google search embedded on nettime.org turns up more results. Maybe people who knew him a bit better can say more. Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: morlock elloi
On 8 Apr 2018, at 15:18, I wrote: morlock's style has struck me as problematic at times, but other problems concern me much more: the obstinate gender bias, the prevalence of a few voices, the lack of experimentation, and sedentary/habitual tendencies in subject, style, regional focus At the risk of replying to myself, which Jaromil noted earlier, let me clarify: I meant other problems *with nettime's* gender bias etc. Cheers, T # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: morlock elloi
Hmmm. morlock's style has struck me as problematic at times, but other problems concern me much more: the obstinate gender bias, the prevalence of a few voices, the lack of experimentation, and sedentary/habitual tendencies in subject, style, regional focus. I get that his/her/their mail might be a frequent low-level irritant for some people, the kind of thing that sparks eruptions. But for me the nature of that eruption matters more than the cause: ad-homimen attacks, people ordering each other around, and people who've never tired of letting the world remember that they 'founded' nettime decades ago leaping to the barricades in private mail to un-propose a "permanent ban." If we're going to take any drastic action, it'll be to permanently ban anyone who proposes permanently banning someone else. Felix and I have spent twenty years tending to this list, so our views are, at the very least, well informed. Felix can speak for himself if he wants, but I think the tendencies above are a more serious threat than the pace or tone of any contributor. If it's true that one person "is killing the list," then this list is dead already. If it's not true, then it says a lot that such a claim would go unquestioned. Not about the person who said it (more boring ad-hominem stuff, bleh) but about deeper shifts — for example, in whether people trust that an environment like this can change organically or instead needs draconian 'leadership.' If it does, it's dead. A year or two or three ago, I thought the list was pretty much dead. But it has a funny habit of rising from the grave and wobbling around for a while, and there's been a trickle of people de-lurking or first-posting. Nettime needs much more of that, and a much wider range of perspectives, styles, and tolerances. But that kind of pious plea that 'we can do better' smells like something Zuckerberg would say, doesn't it? So let me moderate that: we also need to do worse — much worse. Doing worse has always been a sign of life on this list. Some of you will remember Paul Garrin, integer/antiorp/nn, and jodi — entities that, in different ways, embodied and exploited the list's most extreme possibilities. There was a time when infuriating provocations were seen as good. As usual, Jaromil squeezed five interesting ideas into two sentences: maybe he passed on his account. The sort of replying-myself thing he is doing shows that some sort of twitter ab-user has taken place and the quantity of activity indicates there may be more people behind the account now. I like the idea that morlock is a sort of anti-antiorp. I don't think it's true, but it doesn't matter: nettime has always actively supported a false-names policy. But the idea that morlock is an improper name, a nym for a twitterish performance of a cynical old white techie, is much more interesting than bourgie pearl-clutching about how this is nettime and we...we have standards! I know this is sort of old-school, but if you don't like something, maybe try (a) contacting the person privately with a suggestion and/or (b) filtering your mail. Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images by Geert Lovink & Marc Tuters
It seems weirdly regressive that anyone would need to justify applying 'high' theory to 'low' culture at this point. Those arguments were made — and won – decades ago: they've become the premise of entire schools, disciplines, and even large-scale funding initiatives. When I see them now, it's mostly in the openings of PhDs, where hierarchical conflict is explicit — and has little to do with substance. So what's the blockage in this context? Is it that you're both upping the ante (with quasi-theological arguments with almost apocalyptic implications) and lowering it ante (with an abysmally amorphous object)? Or is this a warmup for some biggish-data project that'll need funding? I don't get it. I sympathize: academia is really bad at images. Its main mode, maybe even its exclusive mode, is to relentlessly and obsessively reassert the primacy of word over image. Images are for being thought about in words; if you try to think about words through images, game over. But I also don't sympathize, because I want to suggest that this essay trivializes memes by drowning them in theory — in Walter Benjamin, no less. There are a bunch of head-scratchers in this essay, but I'll pick out a few to make my point: We should think of memes as local language games embedded within communities of practice and bracketed by the affordances of platforms. Memes are local? Memes are language? As distinct from language games that aren't embedded in communities of practice? 樂 And platforms? MBA-speak tends to be pretty ahistorical, so trying to think through this kind of proposition — say, by asking what the precursors of memes might be — is, as Kierkegaard put it, "as baffling as depicting an elf wearing a hat that makes him invisible." The problem is that, in trying to takes memes Very Seriously, you don't take them seriously enough. If you did, then I think you'd have to address a basic question: are they new, or are they derivatives of earlier ~genres? But rather than do the hard work of dredging up precursors and examining the similarities and differences in how they're used, you offer a grand analogy: Meme genres can thus be imagined as a neo-medieval mise-en-abyme of spheres within spheres in which there will always be a more current meaning that you’re not yet aware of. 樂 I guess arguing that they're neo-bumperstickers isn't sexy enough. This substitution of high theory for base facts has one serious consequence: you get some basic facts wrong. For example, there's no official body that 'certifies' emoticons. There's a inter-institutional standards-setting process for *emoji* (the images), not *emoticons* (punctuation), but it's not a certification process. In networked context, distinctions between authorization, authentication, certification, etc matter. And in vernacular forms that play bog-standard games with appropriation and subversion, it matters a lot. But rather than pick at this and that, I want to show you an example of how and why it's so difficult to think about how popular imagery works: your example of the red pill. Sure, you can call it allegory and talk about it Benjaminian term, but I think doing so misses the much more material il/logic at play in that image — which you yourself treat as emblematic. Your essay gets it wrong — admittedly in a very conventional cult-studs way. The ur–red pill didn't originate in 1999 in the insistently green film The Matrix, it appeared in Verhoeven's 1990 film — *very* red film — Total Recall. In Total Recall, there was only a red pill, no blue, and it was bluntly presented "a symbol of your desire to return to reality." That's a much better fit than the Matrix's red/blue pill for so-called alt-right rhetoric, IMO. But distinctions like this are precious pedantry compared to the driving force behind the alt-right's identification with red: the GOP's deliberate seizure of that color in the 2000 presidential election. Historically, the informal rule was that the two main US political parties switched colors every election (for example, in 1992 Bill Clinton was red). How exactly that exchange took plave is one of those abiding historical mysteries: it relied on an opaque 'standards-setting' process involving tacit, backroom coordination between campaigns and national TV networks. I'm sure that when the GOP captured the red flag in 2000, it was due in part to a few GOP's power-brokers at the time who just liked red more than blue. But it was also a deliberate political strategy. It allowed the GOP to simultaneously *appropriate* the color associated with political threat — insurgency, revolution, and communism — while *negate* those same discourses. And it's on that basis that, a decade and a half later when the alt-right 'took the red pill,' we can see what they were up to: they tried to do to the GOP what the GOP had done to 'the left.' But wait! There's more! You cite Philip K. Dick —
Re: China needs more water. So it's building a rain-making network three times the size of Spain
'Three times the size of' is the new black — like the GPGP, the cryptic-alliteratively acronymed Great Pacific Garbage Patch that, it was recently reported, is three times the size of France and is growing at an 'exponential' rate. Of course, if a scientist claimed that *France* is growing at that rate, s/he would be drummed out of the corps(e). Externalities can grow at such a rate but what we could retronymically call 'internalities' can't. That predicament lies at the heart of most discourses that are, or are inspired by, environmentalism — which is to say, most discourses at this point. I ranted about this in a non-threaded thread on twitter, in response to another thread that Morlock pointed out here, François Chollet's take on algorithms: https://twitter.com/tbfld/status/976850523562356741 In response to: https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976564511858597888 Morlock's message: https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1803/msg00106.html The crux of my argument was that the new dominant historical trope is the crisis, which relies on a template consisting of two 'key performance indicators': one that's linear, usually 'flat' in some sense, and one that's running away (geometric, exponential, asymptotic, approaching 1, approaching 0, whatever, it's all the same, rhetorically speaking). Its logic is damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don't: we're always fucked — fucked if the two KPIs are converging or we're fucked if the two KPIs are diverging. Maybe someone else has pointed out some variation on this already (Theweleit did a bit in _Buch der König_), but either way I think a good name for this is 'the crux': we define our position in relation to the point at which lines ~intersect. So, in a sense, the crux is a secular addition to a list of sacred geometries that, similarly, were efforts to define our place in the world. The crux has some obvious mirrors: in theories of subjective 'intersectionality,' on the one hand, and in the relentless babble about people 'who work at the intersection' of X, Y, and (increasingly, as everything is these day) often a Z. Those theories differ in part in which geometric elements they take as primary: points, boundaries, areas. It should be obvious that all of this rhetoric is, on a basic level, at least tacitly visual: it's partly a vestige of techniques of teaching mathematics. The trick, as with a lot of 'technology'-related discourses now, is that what it describes is both imaginary and real: imaginary in the sense that we insist on evaluating them qualitatively, and real in the sense that that same growing mathematical literacy is a precondition of — and driver or — rapid technological advance. The result is a sort of a feedback loop in which secular data and sacred ideas amplify each other: Google drives around producing views of the 'street,' Uber drives around producing a God's-eye-views, and the oscillation between these two frames of reference drives people insane. In the absence of a clear ground, we run around manufacturing them to explain who were are, what we do, what things are, and most of all where we're going individually and collectively. But back to your point about China: The main difference here lies in how deliberate the activity is. The premise of the theory of the anthropocene is that, for decades or centuries or even millennia, depending on who you talk to, we know not we do — but face the externalities of the fact that we did it. But China's actions are different, because they're planned — they know exactly what they're doing in the myopic engineering sense: internality-wise. But the just-add-water ecological catastrophes that have happened elsewhere in China strongly suggest that, when it comes to the externalities, they either don't know or don't care. Or, worse, both: they don't know *and* they don't care. That places them squarely in line with the centuries-long behavior of previously developed countries (PDCs?) — a historical continuity, as opposed to the discontinuity that lies at the heart of the historical trope of the crisis, which is a form of rupture. So where is the rupture here, actually? Is it in the scale of the activity? Or in the fact that a nation-state is pursuing it? Again, there are precedents — Stalin's White Sea–Baltic Canal, the US Amy Corps of Engineers efforts to change the course(s) of the Mississippi River, even the ways the Dutch have played with their coastlines, even military strategies to despoil entire landscapes — that suggest continuity. Pointing out continuities is often a crypto-strategy for dismissing a question: same old, same shit, etc. That's not my point at all. There's no question that our ability to operate 'at scale' can reach a point that threatens the viability of the planet. The question is whether we *have already done so* — and it's mainly a
Re: Josh Hall: Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead (Guardian)
On 2 Mar 2018, at 15:17, Morlock Elloi wrote: > We need blockchain powered nettime! BLOCKTIME! block.critique # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: I farted
Spector's gesture may have seemed 'well played' to a few people on on a few social networks for few days, but beyond that its impact can only be neagtive. During a lull in high-pressure federal budget negotiations, a posh museum curator insults a famously thin-skinned president who (a) has a penchant for crushing his enemies and (b) rules by pouring gasoline on smoldering culture-war issues — what could possibly go wrong? We learned what can go wrong in the '80s and '90s, when 'art' was hijacked by a handful of attention-seeking pottymouths. But the main result wasn't to establish that the work of Karen Finley or Andres Serrano is brilliant or enduring. Maybe it is, I don't really care. But we do know that arts programs of every kind across the US suffered savage budget cuts — and reactionaries gained a whole new range of weapons to pursue their agenda. But isn't it a bit odd that we'd be debating it in these terms on nettime now? The list's roots lie, in part, in the recognition that huge swaths of contemporary art had collapsed into irrelevance — part theory, part commodity, part ritual, part soap opera. Morlock suggests this is a 'perfect illustration of the dismal state of what once was the progressive left (20 years ago?)' — but 20 years go we were saying 20 years before, ad nauseam. Think for a moment about the range of freedoms Spector had, the resources she could have drawn on, to create some interesting or challenging situation — *exactly* the origins of this list. Instead, she decides to relive the golden moments from her youth. Cheers, Ted On 1 Feb 2018, at 12:03, Keith Sanborn wrote: I give the Guggenheim some credit, though the Cattelano is a cynical piece of crap anyway. The ironies there are instructive. Where is a more fitting home for it than in the bathroom of a racist who is obsessed with gold? And if both analogies are correct, then farting in the Fueher’s face is not an opportunity to be missed. It’s on his level. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
