Re: nettime Post-digital - Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside (with Howard Rheingold)
I mainly agree. The realistic take has always been and should always be: Whatever technology and/or social process that can be used to strengthen the interests of strategic power, will be used to strengthen the interests of strategic power. Is a very apt description of what is the main challenge for me. Concerning the Panopticon problem, I have seen no mention here of a position that is the best bet I know of : that of Sousveillance advocated by David Brin : http://davidbrin.blogspot.be/search?q=Sousveillance http://www.davidbrin.com/transparency.html Has it been discussed and rejected, or never been considered ? -- Frederic # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Post-digital
Felix Wrote Where the terms makes no sense, in my view (and also in Florian's), is sociologically. The most powerful forces that transform globalized societies, are all dependent on, and amplified by, digital technologies. If anything, we are in the middle of the historical run of this development rather than at the end. The idea that the digital is just one dimension of society and that we can abandon it, is ludicrous. Along with Sociology might it also be a worth including psychology in the mix. Particularly in those spaces where digital management tools such as gantt charts and other popular workflow apps along with their digital jargon have shaped influential forms of pop psychology, such as the Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) (whose very name is self incriminating) In turn these 'instruments' insinuate themselves in to the working day of most organisations becoming the default argot of neo-manegerial audit culture with its positivistic lexicon of 'solutions' . This landscape is described in rich and entertaining detail in Evil Media by Mathew Fuller and Andrew Jofey who have done us a great service of mapping and describing this domain of what they have dubbed 'grey media'. A range of connections linking computing, and digital management and business applications with NLP type psychology and management self help books. Collectively this digitally inspired constellation has metastasised into a weirdly seductive language (seductive because it suggests the possibility of controling our events) that is all the more powerful BECAUSE it is unspectacular. As the term 'grey media' suggests it fades into background becoming the social and psychological infrastructure of the grey media age. In a weird inversion of the Debord, Grey Media deploys digital culture to bring us the 'society of the unspectacular' David d a v i d g a r c i a new-tactical-research.co.uk # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Post-digital
Rousseau comes fleetingly to mind: The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. And a short extract from my dissertation that resonates with that question of how to proceed while propping up the wider techno-social system *less*: We most impact the power concentrations of the Regime by cultivating an understanding of where our energy comes from, at all scales, where it goes, and most importantly, where our attention is engaged: on which signals, on which flows. In the process of paying close attention to the highly mediated, amplified, signals of the Regime, directed by its protocols, we confirm our reciprocal role as its optimized energy source. By (re)turning our creative attentions to the granular sources of the Regime's energy -- to the individual Others around us -- and spending our life-energy, our life-time in less mediated Dialogue with them via our own protocols, we immediately begin draining the Regime of its primary power source. We preserve those limited life-energies for more local and immediate encounters. It is within these energized encounters, these Dialogues between the Self and the Other, where transformation, (r)evolution, and change are ultimately sited. As a media artist, it is this generation of localized protocols that is perhaps the most effective strategy to mitigate or even reverse the slide toward hierarchic centralization [and consequent surveillance!!]. It should be some solace that though we cannot escape the ultimate destiny of Life on the planet: in the mean while we may choose to go with the flow of dialogue, embracing change in the Self and in the Other, here, now. and this aside, crucially: http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/1199 Cheers, John -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD photographer, media artist, archivist http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Post-digital
This discussion, especially related to questions of mindful disconnection, recalls Sigfried Giedion's 1948 anonymous history, Mechanization Takes Command. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;idno=heb01139 As he put it: Never has mankind possessed so many instruments for abolishing slavery. But the promises of a better life have not been kept. All we have to show so far is a rather disquieting inability to organize the world, or even to organize ourselves. Of course, the idea that any instruments have the potential to abolish slavery has to be read against Eric's statement: Whatever technology and/or social process that can be used to strengthen the interests of strategic power, will be used to strengthen the interests of strategic power. Nonetheless, I found it a very useful historical analysis to consider alongside these discussions. Best, ryan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Post-digital- Cyberclasm of the 1960s
Browsing through the files of Amsterdam?s Institute for Social History (as you do) I found Tjebbe van Tijan?s excellent essay written in 1998. Below is a short taster. Full essay to be found: http://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/digitial-ways-forgetting.pdf Digital ways of Forgetting: Smashing Computers and new forms of cybeclasm The recent phenomena of cyberclasm started with radical student actions in North America against university and military administration facilities. One of the earliest examples was in 1969 at Sir George William University in Montreal where, during a conflict about racism on the campus, students stormed the computer center of the university, threw out thousands of punch cards from the windows and smashed the computer equipment. At that time computers were mostly stand alone machines with limited storage capacity and data was either stored in punch cards, that needed to be processed mechanically, or on reels of magnetic tape. A year before a little book with the title The Beast of Business: A Record of Computer Atrocities was published in London, containing a guerrilla warfare manual for striking back at computers that, according to its author Harvey Matusow, were on their way to grab power: from now on it is them or us Read on d a v i d g a r c i a new-tactical-research.co.uk # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Post-digital
2% of people -- across socio-economic class, meaning it isn't about cost -- do not want a telephone in the home having lived that way for many years, i can report that the pleasures of it are quite real sandra braman - Original Message - From: Nick nett...@njw.me.uk To: nettim...@kein.org Sent: Sunday, March 9, 2014 8:58:27 PM Subject: Re: nettime Post-digital Quoth Felix Stalder: Enzensberger's text was just a joke, and the FAZ printed it because it would stir controversy, not because it had much to offer intellectually. Was it really just a joke? I'm not so sure dismissing it as that is appropriate. Sure it necessarily isn't a deep critique of the power dynamics at play with some of the newer technologies people are using now, but it wasn't designed as that, and I for one find the provocations basically reasonable. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Post-digital
Am 10.03.2014 um 09:51 schrieb mp: and this is not a joke either: communal/collective spaces for communication can be really good. A place to meet. A digital square. i have to admit i less and less believe in this. the only thing i am strongly recognizing is, that friends, people and socitey are getting more and more unreal, the more they are integrated in this digital communication sphere. the same thing applys to you. i can insult you, laugh about you, ignore you, or praise you. nothing happens. fact is, all of you are not real. so i am i to you. i am just an e-mail with some texts, letters, etc for you. believe it or not. this is the new antisocial reality. sincerely an e-mail --- -- - http://www.floriankuhlmann.com mobil 0175 / 4 17 26 05 mail kont...@floriankuhlmann.com twitter @fkuhlmann skype florian_kuhlmann --- -- - # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
