Re: rage against the machine
Dear all, the days of "direct democracy" v. "the few" are over. The days of a "movement" without "momentum". Why should the "vote" of "the people" matter? All talk as the Don would say. Am 30/03/19 um 22:20 schrieb John Young: > Was it not long known all communication is pornographic? Otherwise > nobody would be aroused to communicate while awaiting to fuck, or be > fucked by, a warm body, bidding time just masturbating alone from tyke > to tyrant. Godards "She does not talk" comes to mind. > > As seen here, the lonely habitual digitalization, quickies or > laborious. Googling oneself, maillisting, SMing, browsing, preaching, > teaching, groveling, adoring and citing the momentarily greatest aloners. > It can come in many ways. > Some senile frustrators argue its now, always had been, all kiddie > porn practiced like Trump and Pope Francis, et al. Machines aid, abet > and entice, hands on. The church is a part of life. Reality is stronger than fiction. H. # 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: Managing complexity?
I have not read Castells, but your paraphrase brings an interesting memory to mind. The day after Brezhnev’s death, I found on the street in NYC, near the Mission of the USSR to the United Nations, a number of 16mm films, including B’s massive biopic, “Life Story of a Communist.” More interesting in this context was a short film called “Machine Construction in the Soviet Union.” In it, the latest achievements in computerization and applied robotics were extolled. The configuration of devices depicted was symptomatic of a certain kind of “oversight” in both senses: it was a computer controlled-robot which assembled with great precision mechanical wrist watches. Further East, the first Casio watches were soon to appear. Keith Sanborn > On Mar 30, 2019, at 4:19 PM, Brian Holmes > wrote: > > The idea that the current global disorder results from a failure to manage > complexity is an elegant formulation. It offers a concise guide through a > welter of contradictions, ranging from domestic political squabbles all the > way to inter-state disputes, declines in corporate profit rates and > ecological breakdowns. Plus, where could one find a more striking observation > than that of Manuel Castells, when he says that the Soviet Union fell into > terminal stagnation due to its inability to produce a personal computer > industry? After all, computers bring order to large amounts of data, and > personal computers extend that ordering capacity to ever larger amounts of > people. Maybe a better computer (AI) could solve our present problems? > > However, the surging sense of intellectual mastery brought by the phrase, > "managing complexity," declines percipitously when you try to define either > "management" or "complexity." The latter is vexing because the disorder > comes from so many sources: faulty airplane equipment, disgruntled voters in > the north of England, the harvesting of behavioral data by Internet > companies, persistent trade imbalances between Germany and Southern Europe, > the volatile relations of US and North Korean leaders, etc. When exactly does > complexity get bloody complicated, and for whom? > > Management looks easier to define, since it's just about resolving problems. > But how do we even know what counts as resolution? Is Kim Jong Un his own > self-contained problem or is he inseparable from nuclear proliferation, the > rearmement of Japan, Iranian centrifuges, the emergence of a Chinese > blue-water navy and the US "pivot to Asia"? Is all that international > complexity even an issue, or is it just a distraction from the more urgent > conundrums of feminism and race relations? Who decides and why does their > decision matter? Is it a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty situation where a > clear definition of resolution makes a full enumeration of complexity > impossible, and vice versa? > > Felix, I am totally curious about how one could redo, for the present > conjuncture, Castells' fascinating observations about the Western countries' > long search for new ways to manage complexity in the 70s and 80s. Does one > first need to define a systemic order in which certain phenomena become too > complex? Does one need to develop categories allowing for the identification > of significant perturbations? Do the complexities also have to be sorted as > to scale? Are there functional or normative criteria that could help one > decide when complexity is sufficiently well managed? How could one create an > anticipatory image of a new (meta)stable state? How to develop a practical > approach to the spiraling chaos of the present? > > best, Brian > > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Managing complexity?
The idea that the current global disorder results from a failure to manage complexity is an elegant formulation. It offers a concise guide through a welter of contradictions, ranging from domestic political squabbles all the way to inter-state disputes, declines in corporate profit rates and ecological breakdowns. Plus, where could one find a more striking observation than that of Manuel Castells, when he says that the Soviet Union fell into terminal stagnation due to its inability to produce a personal computer industry? After all, computers bring order to large amounts of data, and personal computers extend that ordering capacity to ever larger amounts of people. Maybe a better computer (AI) could solve our present problems? However, the surging sense of intellectual mastery brought by the phrase, "managing complexity," declines percipitously when you try to define either "management" or "complexity." The latter is vexing because the disorder comes from so many sources: faulty airplane equipment, disgruntled voters in the north of England, the harvesting of behavioral data by Internet companies, persistent trade imbalances between Germany and Southern Europe, the volatile relations of US and North Korean leaders, etc. When exactly does complexity get bloody complicated, and for whom? Management looks easier to define, since it's just about resolving problems. But how do we even know what counts as resolution? Is Kim Jong Un his own self-contained problem or is he inseparable from nuclear proliferation, the rearmement of Japan, Iranian centrifuges, the emergence of a Chinese blue-water navy and the US "pivot to Asia"? Is all that international complexity even an issue, or is it just a distraction from the more urgent conundrums of feminism and race relations? Who decides and why does their decision matter? Is it a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty situation where a clear definition of resolution makes a full enumeration of complexity impossible, and vice versa? Felix, I am totally curious about how one could redo, for the present conjuncture, Castells' fascinating observations about the Western countries' long search for new ways to manage complexity in the 70s and 80s. Does one first need to define a systemic order in which certain phenomena become too complex? Does one need to develop categories allowing for the identification of significant perturbations? Do the complexities also have to be sorted as to scale? Are there functional or normative criteria that could help one decide when complexity is sufficiently well managed? How could one create an anticipatory image of a new (meta)stable state? How to develop a practical approach to the spiraling chaos of the present? best, Brian # 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
Everything is already in place to properly regulate this space, except
naming things for what they are.
All industrial/commercial activities that impact humans below cognitive
levels (ie. directly biologically or by exploiting basic innate drives)
are in general heavily regulated:
- sex (rent, lease or purchase)
- food supply
- air
- religious/cult indoctrination
- health/medicine
It is simple and recognized fact that prevalent machine interfaces
provide artificial socializing stimuli and exploit ability to create
biological addiction, in order to make money (either by advertizing or
selling their hapless subjects to influences by the highest bidder.)
Exploiting socializing drive, which in humans is rather prominent, is
not different from exploiting the sex drive, and needs to be regulated
as such.
Current discourse on this, basically porn industry, is ridiculous: it's
as if regulating classic porn (can children view it or not, or can you
put it on billboards) consisted of selecting and vetting actresses and
actors that can perform in a sanctioned way, while banning other ones
(dick too big/small, too fat/too skinny, minority status etc.) It
doesn't matter: as long as dick entering pussy is shown, it's porn. Same
for social media: as long as presence of strangers and interaction with
them ('friends' in social parlance) is simulated, it's porn.
The main issue here is that, while powers that be cannot easily exploit
classical porn (I'm sure they tried - references, anyone?), they can
exploit 'strangers care about you' reflex titillation, so they *like*
this type of porn and won't do anything about it.
On 3/30/19, 09:05, tbyfield wrote:
'innovation' is enabling around the world. The US has ironclad
regulations and norms about experimenting on human subjects, which are
enforced with brutal mania in academia. But, somehow, we haven't been
able to apply them to pretty much everything Silicon Valley does.
Instead, we get ridiculous kerfuffles about Facebook experimenting with
making people 'sad' or the tangle around Cambridge Analytica, which is
both real and borderline-paranoiac. The blurriness of that boundary is a
by-product of, if you like, the micro-epistemological divide that
separates general journalism and investigative journalism. We're
terrible at 'scaling' this kind of analysis or down: either from
subtract to concrete, by saying 'WTF is going on?!' and channeling it
into broad, effective limitations on what infotech companies can do, or
from concrete to abstract, by catching companies
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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
