Re: nettime A Movement Without Demands?

[Prem Chandavarkar]

On 06-Jan-2012, at 5:33 AM, Brian Holmes wrote:

 You say the Occupy movement lacks strong core principles that could serve to 
 define itself as a transformative force in society. I agree. 

Brian,
A few thoughts:
To examine the Occupy movements in terms of demands or principles is to only 
see the movement in political terms.  It may be worthwhile to also examine it 
in spatial terms.
Spatially, when OWS says we are the 99%, they are only seeking to articulate 
their presence.  Your presence is notional until it is physically and spatially 
defined - that is your body is located within space and is recognized and 
acknowledged by all others within that same space.
The reason why articulation of presence is important is that mediatized 
democratic politics has begun to revolve around fanatical minority positions.  
John Allen Paulos in his book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper argues that 
it is naive to believe that in a democracy it is the majority that prevails.  
Votes of the majority are extremely difficult to mobilize because of the 
unavoidable fact that their opinions do not coalesce into a discrete set of 
issues which can be sensationalized in the media into a political discussion.  
So politics is based on making a set of vague generic promises that can obtain 
a base level of votes, and then to court constituencies of single-cause 
minorities that will swing the election one way or the other.  Eventually it is 
the agenda of these single-cause minorities that become the agenda for 
mainstream political action, and the majority are sidelined.  Demonstrating 
presence becomes a problem of the majority.
The recognition of presence is a prerequisite for any discourse on demands or 
principles.  What is the point of your seeking a discussion of your demands and 
principles if I do not even recognize your presence?  Perhaps if the 
powers-that-be genuinely said to OWS We recognize your presence and the need 
to listen to your voice the movement would feel it had accomplished its 
purpose.
The spatial strategy of OWS can be read in terms of the work of Michel de 
Certeau who postulated two ways of dealing with urban space which he called 
?strategies? (which are based on place) and ?tactics? (which are based on 
time).  Strategies represent the practices of those in power, postulating a 
?place? that can be delimited as its own from which relations with an 
exteriority can be ordered and managed.  Such places are posited as the natural 
order of the city, by suggesting a set of ?proper? places, either spatial or 
institutional, that represent political, economic and scientific rationalities. 
 In contrast, ?tactics? are ways of operating without a proper place and so 
depend on time. Tactics lack the borders necessary for designation as visible 
totalities.  The place of the tactic belongs to the other  - tactics are the 
art of the weak, incursions into the field of the powerful.  Without a proper 
place, tactics depend on seized opportunities, cleverly chosen movements, 
 and on the rapidity of movements that can change the organisation of a space.  
Tactics are a form of everyday creativity, and by challenging the ?proper? 
places of the city, this range of transitory, temporary and ephemeral practices 
constitutes counterpractices to officially sanctioned urbanisms.
In cities in India, and many other parts of the developing world, the poor (who 
constitute a majority) sustain economic and social life through tactics rather 
than strategies.  In the absence of a welfare state, this is their only choice. 
 And they are able to do so because master planning is weak, and its 
enforcement even weaker, so they are granted the space to operate informal 
systems of tenure that do not necessarily conform to officially sanctioned 
spaces.  
Till recently, in the western city a highly regulated welfare state, driven by 
notions of the social contract, did not require the middle class majority to 
resort to tactics for economic or social life as officially sanctioned urbanism 
provided for their homes.  This allowed most people to experience the cities in 
terms of strategies rather than tactics.  
But there were exceptions in the western city:   poorer communities who were 
marginalized due to problems of race or recent immigration that was unable to 
integrate; and these communities wound up in the spatial condition of ghettos.  
The space to operate in terms of tactics was restricted due to the overwhelming 
regulation of the tightly planned city.  Which is why discriminatory barriers 
are seen as far more rigid.  A classic differentiation drawn in urban planning 
literature is the differentiation between slums of hope and slums of 
despair: and it has been argued that this difference in attitudes is of 
greater significance than differences in the material conditions of slums.  It 
is significant that the examples cited of slums of despair tend to be in the 
developed world where the stranglehold of 

nettime The Death of the Avant-garde in the Attention Economy

[Prem Chandavarkar]

These are some speculations that have been bouncing around in my head
for some time, particularly with reference to architecture - the
discipline I practice - but perhaps having wider implications: Ever
since the early stages of the modernist movement (since the second
half of the 19th century) artistic innovation has been underpinned by
the idea of the avant-garde.

The avant-garde are (to use a term from Thomas Kuhn) paradigm
shifters. Their work consists of two facets that operate
simultaneously . One is a deep critique of current paradigms of
cultural production. And the other is production of artistic work
that demonstrates a new paradigm and a new set of possibilities. One
cannot privilege either of these facets saying it is primary, and
the other derives from it - the relationship between the two is far
more complex. However the two always go together. Gradually the works
of the avant-garde become accepted and are mainstreamed. But this
mainstreaming is subject to displacement by the next generation of the
avant-garde. This continuous thread of displacement forms modernism's
alignment with progress and history.

As has been pointed out by Goldhaber, Davenport and others, we are
now in an attention economy. If we are in the information age, the
one thing that information consumes is attention, and consequently
attention becomes a scarce resource. As an economy is substantively
affected by those resources that are scarce and important, our lives
are now being affected by the quest for attention.

The scarcity of attention is exacerbated by the changing nature
of alienation (as defined by Baudrillard). Alienation was earlier
characterized by distance - a separation from the normal routines of
life. But it is now characterized by an overwhelming proximity to
everything. The construction of sheltered spaces for reflection, which
were provided by the regular routines of life, are now difficult to
come by, and require substantive and sustained effort that few are
willing to devote effort to in an attention starved world. Deprived of
space for reflection, we face the challenge of being reduced to pure
screen: a switching centre for the networks of influence.

The twin problems of attention and alienation have created a rupture
in the avant-garde. The facet of critique, which requires rigorous
attention, does not now receive sufficient consideration. The facet of
artistic production receives far greater attention, but tends to be
read superficially, focusing on the work's apparent visuality.

Two major modes of capturing attention are scale and novelty.

Scale involves achieving a size that is difficult to ignore. It is
seen in the increasing scale of real estate projects, the wave of
corporate consolidation through mergers and acquisitions, and the
leveraging of technology to achieve self-referential size (as seen in
the global financial services sector).

The impulse to novelty centres on displacing us from the anesthetizing
influence of habit, and making us see and notice things.

The avant-garde are now recast as a resource to be mined for the
production of novelty. Their work is taken, detached from its critical
foundations, and presented for its apparent visual novelty. So one
sees architects such as Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, whose statements
early in their careers aligned with an avant-garde identity of
iconoclastic rebels, and whose work is now being utilized as vehicles
of mainstream branding.

It could be argued that this detachment from critical foundations is
a normal process of mainstreaming the avant-garde. However the speed
with which it now occurs is significant. In an earlier generation, the
first step in mainstreaming the avant-garde occurred through a set
of enlightened patrons, whose idealism could be aligned with the
cultural critique of the avant-garde. For example, if Jawaharlal Nehru
hired Le Corbusier to design the new Indian city of Chandigarh, it was
because Nehru's vision of modernism for his newly independent nation
could be aligned to Corbusier's critique of traditional urbanism and
the potential he saw in new city forms.

But it is rare to find patrons with this idealism today. The patron
of today tends to have motives that are largely commercial rather
than idealistic, whose primary request to the artist is make me
noticeable on the global stage. The resultant quest for novelty makes
the disruption between the critique and production of the avant-garde
occur with a speed and vehemence that threatens the very status of the
avant-garde.

In an earlier era, the engagement of an iconic star avant-garde artist
was substantively affected by an ideological alignment with the
artist's ideology. But now the iconic status of the artist, together
with the novelty of the work, have become ends in themselves. We are
reminded of Daniel Boorstin's prescient definition that the celebrity
in this world of pure image making is to be a person well known for
his well-knownness.

The impulse to 

Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Are we getting into the right issues here?  The debate seems to have moved
to the ethics of sites like Facebook and whether they are exploitative,
whereas this thread started with the question of whether capitalism will
survive a world of value abundance.  To begin with this, my sense is that
it will.  See Kevin Kelly's essay Better Than Free at
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
While I do not agree with all that Kelly says, I concur with the thrust of
the argument which is that in a world of value abundance a different set of
activities will get monetized.  So it is not likely that scarcity will
disappear, it is just a question of what are the new activities that will
be scarce.

Moving on to the issue of where the thread has moved: I am not sure whether
it is productive to see the problem in terms of labor.  Lets imagine a
couple of pre-internet physical-world instances to explore this further:

INSTANCE 1:  A well-known anthropologist, tenured at a famous university,
publishes a study on the cultural life of a tribe on a little-known island
in the Pacific Ocean.  The study becomes widely known both in academic and
general circles.  The anthropologist earns substantial royalties from the
book rights.  The resultant fame creates highly paid opportunities on the
lecture circuit, and also increases the wages that the anthropologist could
demand at any reputed university.  So you can clearly say that the
anthropologist has profited very well out of this activity.  Where does the
life and labor of the Pacific island tribe fit into this?  Have they been
exploited?

INSTANCE 2: There is a well-known coffee house in a large metropolitan
city.  A company realizing that many people frequent this place decides
there is value in putting up a billboard advertising their wares on one of
the walls of the coffee house, and offers the owner of the coffee house a
substantive sum of money to do so.  The advertisement is so successful that
the advertiser offers the coffee house owner even more money for the right
to place the billboard.  Eventually the coffee house owner senses that
advertising gains him more money, and begins to offer the coffee and other
menu items for free so that more people will visit the place, and he can
earn more from the advertisements.  The basic activity in the room remains
the same: people still enjoy the coffee and conversation here, which is why
they visit; except now they no longer have to pay for the coffee.  However
the business model of the coffee house owner has completely changed.  Now
imagine this going one step further.  The advertiser realizes that if he
has more information about the kind of people who frequent the coffee
house, then he can produce better advertisements and earn a greater profit.
 So he offers the coffee house owner some more money in order to construct
and rent a high platform within the coffee house.  He posts one of his
employees to sit on this platform to watch the behavior of all the patrons
of the coffee house, and draw patterns of information from his
observations, which can be utilized to design better advertisements.  How
do the patrons of the coffee shop react when they see this man on the
platform observing them?

Each of these instances highlights some problematic issues.  The instance
of the anthropologist raises the question of opportunity symmetry.  In any
intersection of people within a space, do all the players involved operate
with the same set of possibilities being offered to them?  In this case the
answer is no - and I would cite here Edward Said's argument of Orientalism
where modernist scholars began to devote a fair level of attention to the
Orient, and this might be seen as an ethical impulse to recognize the
Orient.  However this attention is found to be based on the portrayal of
the Oriental as an exotic other who does not have a voice and therefore
requires the Occidental scholar to speak on their behalf.  The scholar
enjoys all the freedom, mobility and possibilities that modernity offers.
 These benefits can be preserved only if the Oriental is retained as an
exotic other, for the scholar's intellectual production depends on this.
 For this two operations are necessary.  Firstly, the discourse is
constructed in terms that only permit intellectual rationality, and any
other mode of thought is dismissed as myth or folklore and therefore not
worthy of entering the discourse; so an Oriental presence in the discourse
requires another voice to speak on the Oriental's behalf.  And secondly,
the exoticism of the Orient is romanticized and portrayed as desirable, and
therefore the Oriental should seek to preserve and remain within that
world, and should not desire the options available to the modern Occidental
scholar.  The point of whether the Oriental finds his/her cultural world
desirable is not the key point - what matters is whether he/she is given
the option of remaining within this world or choosing other 

Re: nettime crowd-funding on nettime

[Prem Chandavarkar]

One way to look at it is from the viewpoint of information symmetry. When a 
forum revolves purely around ideas, then once the idea comes into the public 
domain of the forum everyone has an equal relationship to it. So the forum is 
founded on high levels of information symmetry. Monetary transactions however, 
even when they are mutually beneficial to all, are essentially asymmetrical. It 
may not seem to be a big issue right now, but what would happen if over time 
the initial crowd funding posts on Nettime achieved a level of success that 
they began to outnumber the posts aimed at exchange of ideas?  I would prefer 
to preserve the essential character of this forum by keeping it dedicated 
toward high information symmetry. 

Prem

Sent from my phone. Please excuse brevity and typing errors

On 27-Aug-2012, at 4:51 PM, nettime's_mod_squad nett...@kein.org wrote:

 Hi, Nettimers --
 
 It should come as no surprises that over the last few years, a growing
 number of people have sent crowd-funding announcements to this list.
 It hasn't been a steady rise, and the frequency is hardly significant
 -- one every few months at most. But, amidst a global trend of funding
 cuts in arts and culture settings, it seems likely that we'll see
 more. Some of them will be very deserving. Some.
 ...


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Re: nettime Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE)

[Prem Chandavarkar]

This discussion thread indicates that (a) there is a high level of discomfort 
with the current situation of the digital panopticon, and (b) bringing the 
oversight of engineers (or other humans) into the loop is not really going to 
change things much because there are wider systemic issues at stake here.   

So what do we do about it?  Or given that it is likely to be a long and arduous 
struggle: where do we start?  My sense is that a fundamental issue on which a 
great deal of work is needed is the question of how presence is authenticated 
within space.

This springs from Lawrence Lessig's argument that there are four primary 
factors that condition our behaviour: (1) Laws; (2) Markets; (3) Social and 
cultural norms; and (4) Architecture.  And it is at the level of architecture 
where things have changed the most.  When all architecture is physical, the 
spaces we move through are directly and explicitly tangible to a high degree.  
We sense and perceive the spaces we are in, their limits and links, their 
division into private and public realms, which space is proximate, which one is 
distant, and who inhabits these spaces along with us.  And we plan and adjust 
our behaviour accordingly.  But all architecture is not physical any more, and 
many of the spaces we inhabit on a day to day basis are virtual.  This affects 
not only the tangibility of the space, but also the dynamics of presence within 
it.

An example that brings the issue into focus is a pornography store.  In its 
physical version, if you see an eight year old child walking into the store you 
can quickly form a judgment on whether this is acceptable or not.  More 
significantly, on the basis of such judgments society can legislate on whether 
children should be allowed in such stores.  But in the virtual version of the 
pornography store you never have a clear sense of who has entered the space.  
You cannot even clearly define the limits of the space to the level you could 
in a physical store, which further obscures the possibility of your perception 
of who inhabits the space along with you.  The challenge of defining 
acceptability in a wider moral sense now becomes problematic to a high degree.

The reason why one is uncomfortable with allowing a young child into a 
pornography store is that there is an inherent power imbalance contained in 
this juxtaposition.  Pornography deals with a realm of behaviour that demands a 
minimum threshold of physical and psychological maturity, and when a child who 
has not yet crossed this threshold enters such a space the child does not 
possess the means to cope with the demands that the space makes on him/her.  
And if you are thrown into a situation whose demands you cannot resist because 
you are not empowered with the means of resistance, then the power imbalance is 
likely to lead to a compromise of rights that are believed to be fundamental.  
The child's right to liberty is compromised in a pornography store by the high 
possibility of psychological disturbance and sexual exploitation that could 
result from this juxtaposition.

So when you spend a substantial portion of your life in virtual spaces, and an 
inherent characteristic of such virtual space is that presence is never 
properly authenticated, then you will never know who is in that space with you, 
and therefore are not in a position to perceive the power imbalances you are 
subjected to.  It is like a child walking into a pornography store that has 
worked out a way of masking its identity, so that the child is not even aware 
of entering such a store.  In such a situation how can you protect and preserve 
fundamental rights?

The destabilisation of presence causes further complications to our social 
contract.  In our current notion of the social contract we surrender a certain 
level of freedom to authority in order to benefit from the order that ensues.  
So we agree to be subjected to the authority of government, judiciary, or 
police.  But we do not grant this authority to everyone, we confine it to 
specific institutions.  And we place constraints on these institutions to limit 
the possible abuse of authority: we confine their operation to specific spaces 
such as courthouses, and when we cannot enforce such spatial constraints we 
insist on uniforms or badges of identity and insist that the presence of these 
identity markers is rendered explicitly visible when their authority is 
invoked.  And on top of this we seek systems of checks and balances, where each 
of these institutions is subjected to oversight from the other, and finally 
subjected to public oversight through the right to information, a free pres
 s, and democratic vote.  All this springs from the age old question of who 
will watch the watchmen.  How do we tackle this question in virtual space where 
the lack of authentication of presence prevents us from even recognising the 
watchmen?

And then there is the issue of the traces we leave of our 

Re: Return of the F-scale

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Patrice,

True, Havel was in a very different kind and level of authoritarian
state. But it is a prescient warning that ideology can offer a tempting
security where the centre of power is allowed an equivalence with the
centre of truth. And this can happen across the entire range of
pre-fixed ideologies, from right to left. What we need is a separation
of these two centres, where the role of the centre of power is to
facilitate rather than own/control the debates on the centre of truth.

I agree with you totally that collaboration and scale are crucial. But
several questions need further work. 

The key to collaboration is the construction of a commons. Capitalism is
sceptical about the idea of a commons, believing that the tragedy of the
commons, that Garrett Hardin articulated, is inevitable; for which state
regulation is the only cure.  With the neo-liberal belief that that an
'inefficient' state must concede space to an 'efficient' private sector,
we have a tragedy of the commons of a different kind. 

Elinor Ostrum argued that Hardin's tragedy of the commons occurs when
the situation is structured as a version of the prisoner's dilemma, a
non-cooperative game where the participants do not interact with each
other during the course of the game. This is the state of affairs under
current models of capitalism where rational self-interest is supposed to
lead to the efficiency of the market's invisible hand. Ostrum's studies
show that where interactive participation is foundational, people are
able to negotiate and sustain a nurturing of a commons. 

Most of Ostrum's work is on communities of a fairly small scale, and
your question of scale remains.  How can one scale up these efforts? I
suspect the foundation is to deploy the principle of subsidiarity where
the lowest level of the hierarchy does the maximum it can, and what it
cannot do it delegates upwards. The higher levels are subservient to the
lower levels, which is a reversal of the convention where the highest
level determines the overarching strategy, and delegates details and
implementation down the hierarchy.  How this happens needs further
elaboration, and I am not aware of any theory that offers clear
direction on how it is to be done.  The organisation most often
mentioned where the principle of subsidiarity was coined and implemented
at a global scale is the Roman Catholic Church, and the extent to which
they have remained faithful to this principle is a matter of some
dispute.

The issue of collaboration and participation is also one where the
picture is not clear.  Majid Rahnema, in his analysis of participatory
development, identifies four dimensions: a cognitive dimension where the
development discourse is constructed and comprehended through
participation; an instrumental dimension where participation is deployed
as a strategy for greater effectiveness; a political dimension where the
development project is legitimised through participation; and a social
dimension where communities are built or reinforced through
participation.  It  Most governments maintain the status quo of power by
foregrounding the instrumental dimension, giving some ground to the
political dimension, but largely ignoring the cognitive and social
dimensions.

We remain wedded to the idea of a social contract that is constructed
through technical expertise in a centralised, often opaque, manner.  We
are far from the full description of participation that Rahnema
describes, or the orientation toward nurturing commons that Ostrum has
studied and theorised. There is still much work to be done on a new
political theory.

Best,
Prem

> On 29-Feb-2016, at 2:29 PM, Patrice Riemens  wrote:
> 
> 
> The question is then whether authoritarianism is the TINA for
> security/ well-being of 'the masses' (which Geert wants to re-educate,
> apparently). One must not forget that Havel was living in such an
> authoritarian state which also operated as a 'nanny'. He obviously
> longed for the 'liberties' we had in the West - and which we were
> using very poorly (to consume mostly). There surely must be better,
> co-operative, collaborative options. But then I think a 'reduction in
> scale' (of almost everything) is the prime condition to move forward.
 <...>

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Re: Forms of decisionism

[Prem Chandavarkar]

When one accepts that the exception is the rule, the question changes
from "How do I recover social order?" to "How do I live with being
lost?" Rebecca Solnit argues that we must acquire the wisdom of the
woodsman who can wander into the most unfamiliar woods, but because he
has learnt to discern the signs (the sun, stars, wind, smells...) he can
recognise the constancy of the universe and thereby knows, in the midst
of the most unfamiliar, how and where to return. As the title of
Solnit's book evocatively argues, we need "A Field Guide To Getting
Lost". 

If you are always lost, you stop expecting sameness or order.
Paradoxically, you have to drop that expectation to find your anchors.
Take human rights - and we forget how short a history the quest to
universalise rights is, and therefore how limited our understanding is.
The quest to universalise rights is based on the argument that rights
are inherent to the human condition: in other words, rights are
predicated on sameness. This leads to a distortion where rights are only
recognised where conditions of sameness exist. So a community can take
comfort in the recognition of rights within itself, and remain
relatively unmoved by the violation of rights of those who are remote
enough that their lives do not impose intersections that are both
routine and significant. Unfortunately, remaining remote is no longer
assured, and the resulting intersections release a vicious cycle of
increasing violation of rights. 

When you are always lost, you start with the condition of difference,
and rights must be predicated on difference. Rights are truly universal
when you recognise them in the person most different from you, the
person you are least able to speak to. In such a case, sameness or order
(I prefer the word 'resonance') is something you must actively and
continually seek and construct, rather than expect or demand as as a
priori condition. 

So, here's to being lost...

Sent from my phone. Please excuse typing errors

> On 15-Jul-2016, at 11:44 AM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> Past a certain point of chaos, the question is no longer whether or
> not to enter a state of exception. The question is when, how, with
> whom, by what means, and to what ends.
 <...>

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Changing winds?

[Prem Chandavarkar]

   Till recently neoliberalism was treated as a gospel that should not be
   questioned.  But now, some of the institutions that had championed
   neoliberalism are beginning to question it.

   The IMF has raised questions about how neoliberalism increases
   inequality, which in turn causes fragility in economic growth.

   See the following two IMF papers

   Ostry, Loungani and Furceri, "Neoliberalism: Oversold?"

   http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm

   or

   Ostry, Berg, Charalambos, "Redistribution, Inequality and Growth"

   https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf

   Or a research project by McKinsey Global Institute that shows that in
   the advanced economies the percentage of households with flat or
   falling incomes has increased from 2 percent in the early 21st century
   to over 60% by 2015

   
http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/income-inequality-why-so-many-households-are-not-advancing

   If institutions such as the IMF and McKinsey are articulating such
   views, are the winds beginning to shift?

   Prem

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Where is Liberalism?

[Prem Chandavarkar]

   While written specifically for an audience in India, I believe it is a
   question that affects all geographies.

   [1]https://premckar.wordpress.com/2016/12/28/where-is-liberalism/

   Where is Liberalism?

   A few weeks ago, I attended the launch of a book titled [2]What Does It
   Mean To Be A Liberal In India.  The book is the product of an essay
   competition for young thinkers that was held by The [3]Friedrich
   Naumann Foundation for Freedom, and from over 300 entries, 19 selected
   essays form the content of the book, all written by young Indians in
   their 20's.  Three of the authors were present at the event, and
   participated in discussions with contemporaries from the network of
   [4]The Takshashila Institute (who had organised the event).  It was
   truly encouraging to know that young adults in India are thinking
   seriously on both the importance and nuances of liberalism.  And the
   event was also a provocation to think more deeply on liberalism,
   specifically in the context of a country like India and the current
   challenges faced.

   There was some discussion on whether liberalism is an import from the
   West, given that its concepts and methodologies have largely been
   developed in Western contexts.  But the consensus was that a core
   feature of modern democracy is that it seeks  to replace earlier models
   of feudalism and colonialism, and the resultant priority granted to
   individual freedom means that the ethical imperatives of liberalism
   render the geography of its origin as irrelevant.  However, when we
   develop protocols of liberalism that derive from other contexts, we run
   up against problems in the specificities of our own context, and there
   was speculation on whether the definition of liberalism needed tweaking
   or adjustment in the Indian context.

   This dilemma is reflected in a question that came up (but was not
   adequately tackled) in one of the discussions: does a Muslim woman who
   feels she must wear a burkha as an expression of her identity need to
   be made aware that this identity is also a means of repressing her?  A
   liberal position would tend to argue against the burkha as a
   prescriptive norm; for even if it is justified as something that serves
   the woman's safety, by doing so it recognises that there is a problem
   of predatory sexual behaviour in which women are the victims, yet fails
   to challenge the patriarchal bias from which the problem springs by
   pushing a solution that places the onus on the victim to repress
   herself rather than on the perpetrator to behave with decency.  But if
   the liberal argues that the woman should not wear the burkha, and the
   fundamentalist argues that she should, both are guilty of the same
   crime: they both instruct the woman to instantly adopt an identity that
   someone else has constructed, instead of empowering her with the means
   to go through the process of deriving it on her own.

   All of us are victims of our own conditioning to an extent that we
   rarely recognise.  It is not easy escape it, and we need help and time
   to break free of repressions contained in our past.  What the woman
   really needs is a sheltered space where she can confront this question
   free from external coercion or pressure, where she can find information
   that presents both sides of the question, where time is granted to her
   so that she can unhurriedly work her way through this dilemma, where
   she can access the support systems she needs, and most importantly,
   where she is given the assurance that whatever conclusion she arrives
   at will be accepted because it is her own free choice.  The overriding
   question then becomes one of where she can find such a sheltered
   space.  Which throws light on where the problem really is when we
   realise that such spaces are in very short supply.  Without such a
   space, the woman will find herself helplessly buffeted between
   conflicting forces: a conservative community of conformance within
   which she has grown up; a civil society made of people very different
   from her, and whose expectations are based on precepts largely foreign
   to her; and trolling from fundamentalists in both physical space and
   social media.  Deprived of the sheltered space she needs, she cannot
   exercise a liberal freedom to construct her own identity, is likely to
   choose an option based on the pressures of the moment, and realise the
   consequences only much later when it might be too late or too difficult
   to retract.

   In this sense, the book falls into a trap that most discussions on
   liberalism fall into.  It assumes that the major question is "What is
   liberalism?".  This is a question that will hopefully never be
   answered, for to answer it definitively is to limit subsequent action
   to following a formula out of habit.  The questions of liberalism and
   freedom are forever alive, always to be tackled, 

Re: Phillips/Beyer/Coleman: "false assumption that

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 21-Apr-2017, at 8:50 PM, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> The only way to regain any kind of political autonomy - by which I mean, 
> the capacity to relate deliberately to the present - is to form groups 
> that feel, think, discuss and act. The group needs dense ties allowing 
> it to set up an internal resonance that can rival with the systemic 
> noise. It needs times and spaces for members to formulate thoughts and 
> submit them to a discussion that is not erased by next week's emergency. 
> And it needs to act, both to achieve things and in order to experience 
> the capacity to steer something in society. Finally, it needs to 
> interrelate with other groups, not on the basis of the raw expression of 
> the unconscious described in the horrible nazi rant above, but instead, 
> on the basis of a sharable constructive aspiration. Only in this way can 
> it take a further step, toward joining a larger systemic formation that 
> can help resolve the crisis.

Just forming groups may not do it.  In their book The Social Life of 
Information John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid draw a distinction between 
networks of practice and communities of practice.  A network of practice is one 
that comes together for a purpose, but most of the time of its members are 
devoted to a primary purpose that is separate from the network.  A community of 
practice is one whose members come together for a cause which is their primary 
purpose.  In other words practice is a tool for constructing community.

While networks of practice can cause substantive disruption to entrenched 
practices, long-term sustainable change needs communities of practice.  The 
fact that members of a network place their primary focus elsewhere makes it 
difficult to sustain the cause in the long term.  I remember how in the early 
days of Arab Spring, there was so much hope in the capacity of new networking 
technologies to empower political change, but eventually the establishment (a 
community of practice) won over the revolutionaries (networks of practice.   
For all the immense value it has provided to its members, groups such as 
Nettime are networks of practice and not communities of practice.

We have devote thought to structures of practice and not place primary hope in 
structures of knowledge.  Perhaps movements such as Conscious Capitalism 
(https://www.consciouscapitalism.org ) 
are what we should be looking at - not sure if it is the complete solution, but 
a step in the right direction.

In my own field, architecture, I like to say that we only think about the 
practice of architecture, but we must also think about the architecture of 
practice.

Best,
Prem

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Re: Why I won't support the March for Science

[Prem Chandavarkar]

It is a problem when an issue is polarised across two extremes without 
exploring some substantive middle ground.  Am reading Thomas Nagel, whose views 
are quite useful on this subject.  He argues that the objective viewpoint that 
science prescribes is extremely useful, but if you extend this viewpoint to all 
of truth, then it is destructive.  Scientific objectivism only allows 
intelligence and is relatively impotent in handling consciousness.

Nagel says in The View from Nowhere, “What really happens in the pursuit of 
objectivity is that a certain element of oneself, the impersonal or objective 
self, which can escape from the specific contingencies of one’s creaturely 
point of view, is allowed to predominate.  Withdrawing into this element one 
detaches from the rest and develops an impersonal conception of the world and, 
so far as possible, of the elements of self from which one has detached.  That 
creates a new problem of integration…One has to be the creature whom one has 
subjected to detached examination, and one has in one’s entirety to live in the 
world that has been revealed to an extremely distilled faction of oneself.”

Having said that, Nagel refuses to allow the pendulum to swing to the other 
extreme of total relativism, one has to build on the utility of the objective 
viewpoint in order to make a complete life.  One cannot deny objectivism 
totally.  

So if the March for Science is primarily to protest against the denial of the 
sciences in the current political climate, then it is both useful and 
necessary.  But if it seeks to extend that to all truth being only objective 
knowledge, then it is problematic.  

The question is how we can construct and sustain the middle ground.


> On 23-Apr-2017, at 10:24 PM, Florian Cramer  wrote:
> 
> (This was a social media posting, but I thought that I should share it with
> the larger Nettime community. -F)




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Re: Why I won't support the March for Science

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Nagel says in The View from Nowhere, “What really happens in the pursuit of 
objectivity is that a certain element of oneself, the impersonal or objective 
self, which can escape from the specific contingencies of one’s creaturely 
point of view, is allowed to predominate.  Withdrawing into this element one 
detaches from the rest and develops an impersonal conception of the world and, 
so far as possible, of the elements of self from which one has detached.  That 
creates a new problem of integration…One has to be the creature whom one has 
subjected to detached examination, and one has in one’s entirety to live in 
the world that has been revealed to an extremely distilled faction of 
oneself.”

Having said that, Nagel refuses to allow the pendulum to swing to the other 
extreme of total relativism, one has to build on the utility of the objective 
viewpoint in order to make a complete life.  One cannot deny objectivism 
totally.  

So if the March for Science is primarily to protest against the denial of the 
sciences in the current political climate, then it is both useful and 
necessary.  But if it seeks to extend that to all truth being only objective 
knowledge, then it is problematic.  

The question is how we can construct and sustain the middle ground.


> On 23-Apr-2017, at 10:24 PM, Florian Cramer  wrote:
> 
> (This was a social media posting, but I thought that I should share it with
> the larger Nettime community. -F)



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Re: Paolo Cirio: Evidentiary Realism

[Prem Chandavarkar]

The challenge of ‘realism’ is to a large extent a self-created problem in 
contemporary art, resting on an aesthetics of expression: the belief that art 
(or the artist) must say something about the world.  I have long felt that art 
has not sufficiently explored an ‘aesthetics of absorption’, where it is not so 
much about what the work says or means, but how it offers itself to an ongoing 
engagement with the observer/inhabitant, the set of engagements breed memory, 
and meaning arises out of memory.  The quality of the artist springs from how 
she/he stimulates and catalyses this process.

I share here an old essay that explores this idea: full text at:
https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-21251 


This is written largely from the viewpoint of architecture (which is my 
profession), but has analogies with the other visual arts.  More significantly, 
this was written over 20 years ago (1997), so fails to take into account the 
digital revolution, or the ‘space of flows’ displacing or disrupting the ‘space 
of places’ (as Manuel Castells points out).  But the digital could also explore 
an aesthetics of absorption - perhaps another essay is need on this.

Best,
Prem

> On 03-May-2018, at 8:05 PM, Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
> [This is Paolo Cirio's essay from last year, introducing the show
> "Evidentiary Realism" [1], which he curated. He basically formulates a
> program for art that calls for the development of a new aesthetic for a
> world that has increasingly become hard to see and perceive. In this, he
> follows an argument developed by Eyal Weizman with this notion of
> forensics, but ties to less to a criminal investigation and court room
> context, but turns it into a more general call, to develop new ways of
> seeing, an aesthetic in the etymological sense as making available to
> sense perception. There are a lot of things in this essay that one could
> write more succinctly or differently, but as contribution to thinking
> about what art can, and cannot do, at this particular historical
> juncture, I think it's quite useful.]
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.evidentiaryrealism.net/
> 
> 
> “Naturally, in the struggle with falsehood we must write the truth, and
> this truth must not be a lofty and ambiguous generality [but] something
> practical, factual, undeniable, something to the point [..] taking away
> from these words their rotten, mystical implications”. Bertolt Brecht,
> Writing the Truth, Five Difficulties, 1935.
> 
> https://paolocirio.net/press/texts/evidentiary-realism.php
> 
> 
> __ Realism is out of sight
> 
> The real is present and concrete, yet complexity, scale, speed, and
> opacity hide it from sight. The contemporary features of the social
> landscape are unintelligible at first glance. Although we see the
> shocking results of our social reality, we are nonetheless often unable
> to see the systems and processes that generate such conditions. Realism
> in art returns through intersecting documentary, forensic, and
> investigative practices that contemporary realist artists utilize to
> bring to light the unseeble beneath the formation of our society.
> 
> Realism traditionally portrays social oppression, visually illustrating
> people and situations truthfully and accurately. In the visual arts, it
> has primarily been expressed through figurative painting, photography,
> and film. Thus, realism today can be conceptualized as an expansion of
> ways of seeing and portraying contemporary social complexities, while
> maintaining the concern of presenting subject matter factually within
> the aesthetics of visual language. However, this particular realism
> looks beyond visible social conditions. Evidentiary Realism examines the
> underpinning economic, political, legal, linguistic, and cultural
> structures that impact society at large. These evolving social fields
> are highly interconnected and often too complex and high-speed to grasp
> - if not secret, imperceptible, opaque, or manipulated by advanced
> rhetorical devices. Reality today can only be fully apprehended by
> pointing at evidence from the language, programs, infrastructures,
> relations, data, and technology that power structures control,
> manipulate, and hide. This contemporary postvisual condition is
> introduced by Trevor Paglen, commenting on the work of Harun Farocki,
> “wars are being waged through systems that are simply postvisual, or
> more accurately, systems whose imaging capacities exceed those of human
> eyes to the point of being invisible to them.”[1]
> 
> Since the late sixties, artists have responded to increasingly tangled
> socio-political and technological developments. Representations of the
> modern reality of systemic complexity were initially questioned by Jack
> Burnham and Hans Haacke, who argued, “easel art can no longer convey the
> subtleties and complexities of the international business world...If you
> make protest paintings 

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Another argument against the governmental monopoly on currency is Bernard 
Lietaer, “The Future of Money”.  But Lietaer does it for a different reason 
than Hayek.  His concern is that speculative transactions have leveraged 
technology to exponentially increase their volume and presence.  In the case of 
currency exchange, in the 1970’s close to 80% of currency exchange transactions 
were tied to a ‘real world’ economy of moving goods, services and people across 
international borders; and 20% was speculation.  Now the situation is 
completely reversed: the speculation figure dominates, and it is estimated that 
the real economy share has fallen below 1%.

This creates the following problems:
The tail is now wagging the dog.  Exchange rates are not tied to the real 
economy at all.
Since speculation does not like stable rates, there is a systemic interest in 
instability
People who are tied into the constraints of a localised real economy cannot 
compete against a globalised system driven by speculation.  Firstly, the 
economies of scale of the speculative system will easily outprice local 
competitors.  And second, your ability to compete is greatly constrained when 
you can only hedge your risk in a single local currency.
The ability of governments to intervene in the system for a public interest is 
eliminated.  The combined reserves of all the central banks in the world falls 
far short of half the volume of a single day’s currency trading.
Unlike stocks and shares, where most countries have regulatory limits on the 
percentage of a stock you can buy without disclosure, there are no such limits 
in the currency market.  While it is too large a market for any single player 
to influence, a trading system driven by current global communication 
technologies (with many transactions driven by algorithms) can create waves 
that can destabilise a currency within hours.  
The incentive of banks to underpin the real economy by offering credit is 
reduced, as they prefer to deploy their funds elsewhere.  For many of the major 
international banks, currency trading is one of the largest sources of revenue.

Lietaer’s solution is not a virtual currency like bitcoin - for that would only 
offer further opportunity to the speculative system; and the bubble in the 
increase in value of bitcoin over the last year reinforces that fact.  He 
argues that breaking the governmental monopoly on currency should create the 
space for highly localised currencies decentralised to the scale of a city or 
province.

> On 05-Jan-2018, at 4:37 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
> 
> On 12/31/17 8:11 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:
>> Beyond that, bravo for excavating the Austrian ideology of Bitcoin,
>> they're all goldbugs and sure looks and acts like synthetic gold to me.
> 
> The other part of the Austrian ideology of bitcoin lies, I think, in
> appeal that the argument about the "Denationalisation of money", put
> forward by Hayek in 1976, still holds. The book can be easily found
> online. (Despite their unceasing support of markets and property, they
> sure make those texts available easily and freely).
> 
> In the introduction (which, I admit, is all I read), Hayek explains the
> argument as follows:
> 
> "In my despair about the hopelessness of finding a politically feasible
> solution to what is technically the simplest possible problem, namely to
> stop inflation, I threw out ... a somewhat startling suggestion ... that
> government should be deprived of its monopoly of the issue of money.
> 
> The task of preventing inflation has always seemed to me to be of the
> greatest importance, not only because of the harm and suffering major
> inflations cause, but also because I have long been convinced that even
> mild inflations ultimately produce the recurring depressions and
> unemployment which have been a justified grievance against the free
> enterprise system and must be prevented if a free society is to survive.
> 
> As soon as one succeeds in freeing oneself of the universally but
> tacitly accepted creed that a country must be supplied by its government
> with its own distinctive and exclusive currency, all sorts of
> interesting questions arise which have never been examined.
> 
> The main result at this stage is that the chief blemish of the market
> order which has been the cause of well-justified reproaches, its
> susceptibility to recurrent periods of depression and unemployment, is a
> consequence of the age-old government monopoly of the issue of money. I
> have now no doubt whatever that private enterprise, if it had not been
> prevented by government, could and would long ago have provided the
> public with a choice of currencies, and those that prevailed in the
> competition would have been essentially stable in value and would have
> prevented both excessive stimulation of investment and the consequent
> periods of contraction.
> 
> [Because] government more often than any private enterprise had 

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Just looked up my notes from a lecture by Joseph Stiglitz which I attended in 
July 2016.  Some key points:
Sustained economic development requires a learning society
Western economies started the transition into a learning society in the 1800’s. 
 However, this has flattened out towards the end of the 20th century
Schumpeter (and others after him) have shown that technological change has 
substantively more impact on economic growth than the accumulation of capital
The move from an underdeveloped to developed economy is described as a gap in 
resources, but it is much more of a gap in knowledge
Free markets are praised as being efficient.  However, markets are not 
efficient in promoting innovation and learning.  For example, in the field of 
drug discovery, markets direct more effort and resources into fighting hair 
loss than into combating malaria.
Adam Smith’s invisible hand argues that the pursuit of private interests leads 
to the well being of society.  However, although Smith recognised it, 
insufficient attention is given to the fact that free markets underproduce 
public goods.
Unfortunately most governments follow the Washington Consensus which believes 
that development can be best promoted by improving the static efficiency of 
resource allocation and the accumulation of capital.  This policy has gained 
public traction just when economists have proven it to be wrong.
These policies are counterproductive for creating a learning society.
Knowledge is a non-rivalrous public good.  Its equitable distribution should be 
a major factor of public policy, since this will not be ensured by the market.
Education can no longer focus on the transfer of specific skills and knowledge, 
and should be aimed at “learning to learn”.

To this, I feel one has to factor in recent developments in digitalisation of 
the economy which has had the following impacts:
Exponentially scaled up the high-capital speculative section of the economy, 
which means that for most people the cost of survival is determined by other 
factors and has nothing to do with the value they provide.
Empowered the aggregation of individualised services by corporate capital, 
which pushes more and more people into a gig economy that offers neither 
economic stability nor social benefits like health insurance
Used big data to move the political economy from public negotiations of 
causation to opaque value extraction through correlation, and overturned the 
equation between the private and public realm.  The value of what one does is 
realised by others.



> On 10-Jan-2018, at 2:41 PM, Patrice Riemens  wrote:
> 
> On 2018-01-09 22:25, Joseph Rabie wrote:
> 
>> Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the
>> same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there
>> has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism,
>> invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a
>> predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent
>> capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation.
> 
> Why does this 'self-evident truth' need to be repeated over again while it is 
> being forgotten over and again?
> Puzzling.
> Ciaoui,
> p+7D!
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Re: Just as rabid as the Unabomber, but safely on the winning side ...

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 21-Feb-2018, at 11:26 PM, Morlock Elloi  wrote:
> 
>> Going back to the traditional architecture and structural engineering
>> business, there is no way that the building code could be successfully
>> enforced without licensing and prosecuting individual
>> architects/engineers (ie. by prosecuting the construction company
>> only.) This was recognized early on. The reasons are numerous, and
>> include the fact that individual engineers usually do not have as much
>> cash for lawyers as companies do, so they will think twice before
>> violating the code.
> 

As an architect who requires a license from a regulator in order to practice, I 
feel that licensing, while necessary, will not solve the problems we are 
talking about.   Licensing regimes exist to protect the general public, and do 
not exist to serve professionals.  They do this by setting up basic thresholds 
of competence, so that only someone who is above this threshold can practice, 
and the public is shielded from the actions of quacks.  But this is a ‘minimum 
standards’ approach, and will not help in tackling the complex and wicked 
problems we face.  Those problems can only be effectively tackled by breeding 
cultures of excellence, and for this we have to critically deconstruct the 
culture that modern design education breeds.

To do this we must critique the cultures of practice through which the design 
professions operate.  Although practice is the primary means through which any 
form of design is implemented, it is a poorly conceptualised term.  We have two 
anecdotal models: (1) the creative personality - a genius from whom all ideas 
flow, and (2) the business organisation.  There are hybrid versions where a 
business organisation hosts a creative personality (Jonathan Ive at Apple being 
an example).  But designers are educated to aspire toward being the creative 
personality, as that is perceived as the cutting edge of creativity in the 
profession.

Neither model serves the design professions adequately.  The business 
organisation model will inherently privilege business over design, and design 
is granted importance only to the extent it serves the profit motive; so it 
will never adequately tackle wider social, cultural or environmental issues.  
And while the creative personality model has undoubtedly produced many 
wonderful works of design, to treat it as the cutting edge breeds a culture of 
heroes and imitators rather than a critically reflective culture that spread 
widely through the profession.

It all boils down to how professionals validate what they do, particularly how 
they validate it to themselves, and how they define the bottom line.  Ask the 
head of a business corporation if the last ten years were successful, and 
he/she would turn to quantitative indicators such as profit statements, market 
share, balance sheets, etc.  But ask a designer the same question, and he/she 
is drawn to qualitative rather than quantitative indicators: reflecting on the 
designs produced over the last ten years, and whether they were good designs or 
not.  Validating a qualitative bottom line is a complex challenge.  There are 
two responses.  

One response is to turn away from critical rigour toward the qualitative, focus 
largely on what is quantifiable, and judge the qualitative purely in terms of 
visual appeal.  This is what many of the engineering design disciplines do, but 
is found in other design disciplines as well, and the elitism that this breeds 
is not well recognised.  

The other response, generally adopted by the creative personality model, is to 
seek social means of validation.  So a set of questions are asked.  Does the 
work win design awards?  Does it merit publication in prestigious journals?  
Does it win design competitions?  Is it discussed with respect in the schools 
of design?  Does it lead to invitations to be on the lecture circuit?  
Questions like this are valid, and seeking this kind of validation is a good 
thing to do.  But it should be realised that questions like this are all 
connected to the judgments made by one’s peers in the profession.  When it 
becomes the dominant mode of validation, it breeds a self-referential culture 
within the profession, where designers are designing for other designers, and 
the public who the designs are meant to serve receive scant recognition.  The 
reason for this is the highlighting of the creative personality model as the 
cutting edge, for that model assumes that all meaning in the design is a 
product of the voice of the designer, and a culture of peer review keeps this 
voice alive at all points of time, rendering the general public as passive 
recipients of design.  This is how designers are educated.

There are three further complications in today’s digital world: the inversion 
of radicalism, the inversion of psychological alienation, and the death of the 
avant garde.

The radicalism problem is defined in an editorial 

Re: Just as rabid as the Unabomber, but safely on the winning side ...

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 22-Feb-2018, at 9:04 PM, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> My sense is that practices responsive to place, and the educational resources 
> that come out of such practices, only stand a chance of being incorporated 
> into the mainstream *after* the predictable breakdowns and disasters of 
> social and ecological balances that we now see in their nascent phases. The 
> position that puts you in today is a complicated one: you have to make your 
> experiments happen in the current prosperous and jaded environment, while at 
> the same time realizing they could only have their real meaning and value in 
> a much more violent and desperate world whose contours are hard to imagine, 
> and whose very existence as a viable context depends on upsurges and 
> social-justice struggles that may never come to pass. What are your thoughts 
> on this Prem?
> 

Hi Brian - so nice to hear from you.  

I think that we, as designers, have to come up with creative responses on how 
we can help.  The problem is less one of unsympathetic clients and more a 
problem internal to the design professions: our training has not provided us 
with either the language or the conceptual frameworks to even begin the 
dialogue or exploration.  There is a line from an old comic strip called Pogo 
which goes “I have met the enemy and he is us!”  We have to recognise this as 
the problem and begin from scratch.

It has been done before - the architects of the late nineteenth century and 
early twentieth century created a new mode of designing that did become the 
mainstream eventually.  Their proposals may have been misplaced, but they did 
what they did from outside the mainstream and without a sympathetic clientele 
as a starting point.  Of course, the situation is very different from what it 
was a century ago, but we have become complacent.  We take modernity for 
granted, whereas that was a generation that was willing to critically reflect 
within a tradition-bound context on what it meant to be modern and fight for 
modernity every day.

A philosophy that defines a solution, which is then applied in practice, is 
likely to remain elusive.  That approach would be a misplaced effort to apply 
linear logic to a non-linear world.  Our conceptual frame should be that of 
non-linear network logic, we should act within our circle of influence, avoid 
being paralysed by the immensity of our circle of concern, commit to the daily 
fight, and take it one day at a time.

That is the best I can offer right now.  Will share more when there is greater 
clarity.  To give you a hint on the direction I wish to pursue, I share some 
recent speculations on sustainable design:
https://premckar.wordpress.com/2018/02/21/to-design-so-as-to-sustain/ 


Best,
Prem


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Re: Shree Paradkar: When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster with the blood of millions on his hands? (Toronto Star)

[Prem Chandavarkar]

In a similar vein:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/10/in-winston-churchill-hollywood-rewards-a-mass-murderer/?utm_term=.61f5a658e188
 


In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer
Shashi Tharoor
 
Shashi Tharoor is author of “Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India 
.”
 He chairs the Indian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
 
“History,” Winston Churchill said 
, “will be kind to me, for I 
intend to write it myself.” He needn’t have bothered. He was one of the great 
mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and 
Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with 
a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary 
Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar.
 
As Hollywood confirms, Churchill’s reputation (as what Harold Evans has called 
 “the British 
Lionheart on the ramparts of civilization”) rests almost entirely on his 
stirring rhetoric and his talent for a fine phrase during World War II. “We 
shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. … We shall fight on the 
beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields 
and in the streets. … We shall never surrender.” (The revisionist British 
historian John Charmley dismissed this 

 as “sublime nonsense.”)
 
Words, in the end, are all that Churchill admirers can point to. His actions 
are another matter altogether.
 
During World War II, Churchill declared himself 

 in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, 
exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing 
of Dresden were the result.
 
In the fight for Irish independence, Churchill, in his capacity as secretary of 
state for war and air, was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing 
Irish protesters, suggesting in 1920 that airplanes should use “machine-gun 
fire or bombs 
”
 to scatter them.
Dealing with unrest in Mesopotamia in 1921, as secretary of state for the 
colonies, Churchill acted 

 as a war criminal: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the 
uncivilised tribes; it would spread 

 a lively terror.” He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia, with an 
entire village wiped out in 45 minutes 
.
 
In Afghanistan, Churchill declared 

 that the Pashtuns “needed to recognise the superiority of [the British] race” 
and that “all who resist will be killed without quarter.” He wrote 
:
 “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, 
filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, 
burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. … Every 
tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”
 
In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the 
forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for 
white colonial settlers and the forcing of more than 150,000 people into 
concentration camps. Rape 
,
 castration, lit cigarettes on tender spots, and electric shocks were all used 
by the British authorities to torture Kenyans 

 under Churchill’s rule.
 
But the principal victims of Winston Churchill were the Indians — “a beastly 
people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called them 
.
 He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet 
colleagues, whom 

Re: ZAD Press release - Intergalactic Call-Out

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Wah wah!

Here’s another in the same vein (from Kaifi Azmi)

Jo door se toofan ka karte hain nazaara
unke liye toofan vahaan bhi hai yahaan bhi.
Dhaare mein jo mil jaaoge, ban jaaoge dhaara,
ye wakt ka ailaan vahaan bhi hai yahaan bhi

Translation:
For those who gaze at the storm from far,
know that the storm rages both there and here.
Join the confluence,  flow as a tributary;
and Time’s clarion call will sound both there and here.

> On 21-Apr-2018, at 2:28 PM, Carsten Agger  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 04/21/2018 10:22 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote:
>> 
>> 
> 
>> Cheers, NDdL ZindabAD!
> Dil mein tufanon ki toli
> Aur nason mein inquilab
> 
> Inquilab zindabad!
> 
> My best wishes for the people at the ZAD.
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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Prem Chandavarkar]

To find our way by constructing a vision of an alternative society may be 
counterproductive. Living systems (and that includes society) are emergent: 
defining ‘emergence’ as the capacity of a system to display at its core 
fundamental properties that cannot be found in an earlier state of the system.  
For emergence to operate the focus should be on the depth, intensity and 
inclusivity of immediate engagement between components of the system, rather 
than a desired final state of the system.  In fact, the focus on a final state 
may destabilise immediate engagement. As Steven Johnson observes in his book on 
emergence, our brains function as emergent systems, and that emergence would 
collapse if each neuron sought to be individually sentient.  Emergence evolves 
iteratively through an impulse toward pattern recognition in the routines of 
daily engagement.

So we need to think about the spaces where engagement will happen: engagement 
that drives widespread reflection on who we are as a society and who we want to 
be, and leave the question of social models rather open.  How do we seed these 
spaces? How do we scale them? The question of where these spaces are is more 
important than what they will produce. And the ideal of the Enlightenment model 
of the social contract, which we tend to assume is still valid, is actually not 
so, and perhaps never was so.

Further thoughts at:
https://link.medium.com/isnoWnZL3S

Best,
Prem

Sent from my iPad

> On 28-Dec-2018, at 12:41 AM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> Vincent Gaulin wrote:
> 
> "I want to suggest that our "intellectualizing" actually step up to the facts 
> of existence, i.e. "How do we live vs. how will we live?""
> 
> Vince, I'm fascinated with your post and I'd like to hear more. You're 
> thankful for the work done by the New Deal in your grandparents' day. You 
> speak about a spartan minimalism that pulls away from consumerist excess. You 
> long for a collectivist discipline whose most obvious model is the army. 
> These are sweeping and powerful concerns. I can't get behind the army part, 
> but I admire the risk you took in writing about it, and I see where you're 
> headed - namely, toward a substantial transformation of the social order, in 
> order to address inequality and climate chaos. The question is, how to change 
> life concretely? How to imagine that process at national scale? How to 
> participate in it?
> 
> Here's the thing: there will not be any full-scale infrastructural response 
> to climate change until the situation gets considerably worse. It will take 
> multiple cities getting slammed by hurricane or flood or drought in order for 
> that to begin. However we can see the road ahead, and it starts with the 
> issues around inequality. Inequality is already dramatic, and as time goes 
> by, it will be increasingly clear that the decline of empire and the 
> breakdown of ecological balances impact people very differently depending on 
> their income, their race and their location. As the climate crisis 
> intensifies, economic and environmental justice will become the same issue, 
> IF the ground has been adequately prepared for that convergence. If there is 
> no such preparation, then we will get climate solutions for the rich alone, 
> and failed attempts to cure inequality by rebooting the 1950s industrial 
> economy. The latter is already underway and you can see what a dead end that 
> is.
> 
> So what's to be done is to generate new aspirations, new ideas of the good 
> life, and initial models for putting them into practice at local or regional 
> scale. Please notice, I am NOT talking about individual models - because as 
> much good as that can do is already being done. Instead it's about imagining 
> a transformed government, and a new, more intricate relation between state 
> and civil society. Inequality will be a big driver for this, especially as AI 
> starts kicking in and more and more people lose their jobs, or never succeed 
> in getting one. Flood control, drought response and the relocation of 
> populations will require major collective investments - and here, collective 
> means some level of what is called the state. Anthropocene Socialism will 
> emerge pragmatically, as an increasingly mixed economy, with the state 
> handling problems on a scale that no individual or corporation can address, 
> from medical care to clean energy provision to river management, and let's 
> not forget the geoengineering, because it will be needed at planetary scale. 
> But it's crucial that this mixed economy be democratic. Otherwise we will 
> just get repeats of the kind of failure that centrally planned, authoritarian 
> communist states produced in the twentieth century.
> 
> Are the models of the 1930s useful for moves in this direction? On the one 
> hand, yes: because the New Deal is still in living memory, it's still 
> inscribed in contemporary institutions and on the land itself, and it forms a 
> 

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Prem Chandavarkar]

 at the level of generating noise at 
a scale that will distort signal.
Reflexivity:  Unlike termites, and many other natural systems that evolve as 
emergent systems, human society is reflexive: we can reflect on ourselves, and 
that reflection can change our future evolution.  This was the basis of Karl 
Popper’s argument for an open society.  Emergence in human systems has to 
foreground how reflexivity will evolve constructively: this is not something 
that will happen automatically.
Participation:  Because social media allows individuals to leave public 
markers, it has been assumed that we are automatically empowering widespread 
participation.  But participation is a complex affair.  Majid Rahnema points 
this out by identifying four dimensions of participation: (a) a cognitive 
dimension, where the development project is constructed through participation; 
(b) a social dimension, where communities emerge and evolve through 
participation; (c) an instrumental dimension, where it is argued that the 
development project will happen more effectively through participation; and (d) 
a political dimension, where a development project claims validation through 
participation.  Most discourse on participation centres on the political and 
instrumental dimensions, with scant attention paid to the cognitive and social 
dimensions.  This is tied to an important distinction highlighted by Seely 
Brown and Duguid in ‘The Social Life of Information’: the difference between 
networks of practice and communities of practice.  People in a network of 
practice have functional or occupational links in common, tend to come together 
within the narrow horizon of such links, but otherwise focus on leading lives 
that are separate from the network, connecting primarily through links (today, 
largely digital) that permit connections across distance.  Communities of 
practice are tied to geographical place, depend heavily on face-to-face 
encounters, and rely on serendipity in community to construct meaning in their 
lives.  Communities of practice focus more on the cognitive and social 
dimensions of participation.  Networks of practice focus more on the political 
and instrumental dimensions of participations.  The hopes on emergence did not 
give enough recognition to this distinction.

To me, it is more of a design challenge than a philosophical dilemma.  How do 
we design the social, political and media institutions the will allow the 
conditions for emergence to thrive.  Our reflexivity will not allow these 
conditions to emerge spontaneously.

Best,
Prem

 

> On 30-Dec-2018, at 12:30 PM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:29 PM Prem Chandavarkar  <mailto:prem@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> we need to think about the spaces where engagement will happen: engagement 
> that drives widespread reflection on who we are as a society and who we want 
> to be, and leave the question of social models rather open.  How do we seed 
> these spaces? How do we scale them? The question of where these spaces are is 
> more important than what they will produce.
> 
> Prem, how good to hear from you. I wish you well for the upcoming year.
> 
> Concerning emergence, alas, it was the great idea of the 1990s and early 
> 2000s, which a large number of networked political movements took as their 
> "principle of hope" (to quote Ernst Bloch). The keyword of that whole period, 
> for social movements, was "self-organization," which we hoped would 
> revitalize democracy by overcoming the structural devices of social control. 
> But strategic moves by large-scale actors proved to be enough to dissipate 
> emergent attempts to spark social reflection. This became devastatingly clear 
> at the moment of the global street protests against the impending Iraq 
> invasion in 2003, which were just brushed aside by the American state. Later 
> in 2005, during the self-organized protests against the G8 in Geneagles, 
> Scotland, a terrorist attack in the London underground focused all media 
> attention and made the protest movements simply vanish from public awareness. 
> Emergence had been "pre-empted," to use another of the keywords from that 
> time.
> 
> Nowadays I continue to find the theories of emergence valuable, as a better 
> description of how innovation takes place within and alongside complex 
> organizations. But it seems that emergent phenomena can be analyzed 
> statistically, and once their composition and properties are more or less 
> known, large-scale actors (state or corporate) can reshape the conditions of 
> emergence in order to reassert social control. It is precisely because I 
> lived through this experience that I have returned to asking questions about 
> the state and civil society. It seems clear that major changes of course 
> require the alignment of in

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 05-Jan-2019, at 9:28 AM, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> Maybe you are part of some such attempt? Maybe you are involved in some 
> experiment or initiative that you could describe? 
> 

Brian, I am afraid I do not have a clear answer to your request, as I am still 
early in the search.  I can talk about some dimensions of that search, and 
started out to do so as a response to your email.  Somewhere along the way, it 
morphed into this blog post: 
https://medium.com/@premckar/five-philosophies-to-search-for-3dcb1aab5b3

Best,
Prem
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Re: Managing complexity?

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 02-Apr-2019, at 9:18 AM, John Hopkins  wrote:
> 
> The 'size' of the system is an externally applied abstraction in that, unless 
> one is speaking theoretically, a 'system' is always a subset of wider system: 
> a subset conveniently defined via limits (of interaction with that wider 
> system) and so-called boundary conditions. 

This hits the nail bang on the head.  The diagram that Brian shared is a useful 
reflection, and there is nothing substantive one can dispute about it.  The 
point is whether that diagram is a useful framework or launching pad for 
deciding how one acts, and this is where I have concerns.  To look at the 
diagram (or any diagram for that matter) one must ask where the observer of the 
diagram is - and it assumes there is a neutral ‘outside’ where the observer 
stands in order to perceive the system as a whole, and the diagram offers 
clarity to this gaze.

However, there is no neutral outside ever available.  One is always within a 
system, or rather, always within a hierarchy of systems, almost all of them 
complex and polycentric.  Just as when one is within a room one can never see 
all four walls simultaneously, a position of observing from within a system 
means substantive parts of the system will never be clearly visible to one’s 
cognition.

This should be the starting point for any analysis.  One has to work from the 
inside out rather than the outside in, and begin with the following questions:
What are the boundary conditions that define the limits to which one's 
cognition can clearly perceive the system?
How porous (or how impermeable) are these boundary conditions?

As a sentient being, the clarity and authenticity of my boundary conditions are 
defined by the skin of my body.  As one tries to expand awareness beyond the 
body, this clarity reduces drastically (although there are practices by which I 
can work to expand the limits of my clear cognition).  I cannot treat the 
limits of my skin as a closed and impermeable boundary, for that would violate 
the second law of thermodynamics which states that any closed system moves 
rapidly towards the maximum possible level of entropy (basically, what happens 
when I die).  If I am to continue to live, my body as a system must be open to 
energy flows from the environment.  These may be physical flows, such as air 
and food, or they may be flows such as companionship and community which 
preserve my inner mental health.  

These energy flows must sustain the condition that the biologists Maturana and 
Varela termed as ‘autopoiesis’, or ‘self-making’. The energy flows through my 
body resist entropy and remake my body on a constant basis.  Of course, this 
process is on a declining scale and I will eventually die, but that loops into 
a larger system of autopoiesis at a scale beyond individual bodies.  As long as 
I am alive, I can live only as an open system that achieves autopoiesis - a 
term that some theorists have defined as ‘the ratio between the complexity of a 
system and the complexity of its environment’.

Since I must think and act from the inside out, this implies that I must 
perceive and organise my existence as within a nested hierarchy of complex 
systems.  My body, by itself is a complex system, but then works outwards 
toward family, community, neighbourhood, city, and all of this must respect 
being embedded within the earth (as Gaia?) - the primary complex living system 
that no human can escape.  The principle of subsidiarity must prevail here, 
where the lowest level in the hierarchy is self-sufficient to the maximum 
extent, and delegates what it cannot deal with upwards, and there is a chain of 
communication in both directions along the hierarchy.  Autopoiesis and 
subsidiarity are the basic principles of life that cannot be violated.

Unfortunately the conceptual framework by which we perceive and organise 
ourselves works in the opposite direction.  The economic assumption of the 
invisible hand as a means of managing complexity rests on the assumption of 
each individual as a selfish maximiser of his/her own utility.  In other words, 
governance and market regulation seek to push us towards seeking to be closed 
systems.  And the ideal of the social contract treats the individual citizen as 
politically passive, assumes that government possesses the expertise to offer 
welfare to citizens through the rule of law, and each citizen will willingly 
sacrifice a portion of liberty in order to partake in this welfare.  This 
provokes a top-down system that suppresses subsidiarity.

Any closed top-down system can resist entropy only through power, and since 
power has an inherent impulse to conquest, we create a capitalist model that is 
predicated on indefinite growth.  As Kate Raeworth remarked, we have an economy 
that must grow whether or not we thrive, whereas we need to thrive whether or 
not the economy grows.  There have been two major waves in the history of 
global capitalism that 

Re: Managing complexity?

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 02-Apr-2019, at 11:24 PM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> Because of this permeability, highly invasive techniques are continually 
> designed and applied in order to get people to behave, not as their own 
> system with its own autopoietic compass, but instead, as a subordinate or 
> even determinate part of another, more malleable system. These techniques are 
> turned upon individuals, communities, societies.

Hi Brian,

I gather from what you write that you agree with my quest for care of the 
autopoietic self, the need to work from the inside out, and that the inevitable 
gaze from within the system means that you can never perceive the whole system; 
but the central question is how one resists the invasions of power from outside 
that tend to subvert all of this.  I fully agree that constructing an effective 
resistance is critical, and that we must engage with the political dimension in 
doing so.  The question is how we go about it, and what tools we select for the 
politics we need.  I get the sense that we agree on ends but diverge a bit on 
what we consider appropriate means.

Let me start with observing that this is a discussion thread on how one 
‘manages’ complexity.  I don’t really need to point it out given you are the 
original provocateur of the thread but do so just to draw attention to the 
inevitability of complexity.  And this is where I start having concerns about 
too great a reliance on the construction of structural models of the situation 
as “an analysis that is crucial to action”, for to do so raises the danger of 
losing touch with the fundamentals of complexity.  My concerns are:

To attempt to capture the system in a single model is to resist complexity by 
resorting to simplicity, whereas one must remain within a position of embracing 
complexity.
One can lose oneself in a level of abstraction distanced to the point of 
isolation from the practice of everyday life.
When the model dominates, the self can define itself only in reference to it 
and faces the danger of erasing its own autonomy.
The desire to be comprehensive makes the model too heavy to be useful.

I draw attention to the fact that I do not object to constructing structural 
models per se but am only concerned about having too great a reliance on them 
to the point that one considers them crucial to action.  I should also add that 
in the previous post if I gave the impression that I sought to build a 
dichotomy between open and closed systems, then I apologise that I did not 
express myself clearly.  I would eschew such a dichotomy and posit that it is a 
shuttle between open and closed modes of being that is crucial.  To elaborate, 
let me propose that each of us lives at three levels of experience:

First-Person Experience: Where one is aware of one’s own body and mind as a 
sentient being.  The authenticity of being one feels here is unparalleled, for 
it is not just a conceptual understanding, but a full sensory awareness that 
validates one’s existence in the world.
Second-Person Experience: Where one interacts with other beings.
Third-Person Experience: Where one can comprehend concepts and systems that 
exist beyond the levels of first- and second-person experience.  This covers 
conceptual models and notions of truth, and also covers aesthetics: skilled 
artistic practitioners talk about being ‘possessed’ by their craft once they 
achieve a certain level of mastery in it.

In “The View from Within”, the collection of essays on the study of 
consciousness edited by Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear, the editors’ 
introduction to the book observes that each of these levels of experience are 
embedded within social and natural networks (the inevitable partial view from 
within that lies at the heart of complexity).  Therefore, each level cannot 
hold by itself, and the movement back and forth between the levels is a process 
by which each critiques, challenges, and thereby, validates the other.  Put too 
much faith in first-person experience, and one faces the danger of being 
confined to a blinkered self-indulgent perspective that leads to systemic 
fragility at wider levels of complexity.  Put too much faith in third-person 
experience, and the definition of the self is reduced to referential terms of 
function or purpose, and the self’s autonomy goes unrecognised.  The difference 
with humans is that we are reflexive beings, we can not only engage with the 
world, but we can also think about ourselves and the nature of that engagement. 
 We can be within our own autonomy, or we can conceptually step outside it.  A 
reliance on third-person experience encourages us to endanger our own autonomy 
by anchoring ourselves outside it.  The continued movement between all three 
levels is important.  Third-person concepts require validation by the 
authenticity of the first-person level, and the potential narrow 
self-indulgence of first-person experience needs the challenge of third-person 
experience.  

Re: Managing complexity?

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Let me throw in my two bits worth:
Complex systems can be of two types: linear and non-linear
In linear systems there is a relationship between input and output - small 
inputs result in small outputs and large inputs result in large outputs.  The 
complexity of the system comes from the number of components in the system.
Non-linear systems often do not have a relationship between input and output.  
A small input can result in a large output, and a large input can result in a 
small output.  
Both linear and non-linear systems can exhibit polycentricity - change cannot 
be confined to a single component of the system.  The best metaphor for this is 
a spider’s web - the attempt to tweak the tension in a single strand results in 
a redistribution of tension across the entire web.  ‘Management’ and 
‘complexity’ do not fit well in a polycentric system, for management is an 
activity where one intervenes in order to control output, and in a polycentric 
system, it is almost impossible to ascertain with precision the impact of any 
intervention.
Similarly it is impossible to ‘manage’ non-linear systems, because one cannot 
have any control over the output.
Non-linearity often results from components of the system being sentient - even 
if they do not rise to the extent of self-conscious intelligence, there is a 
genetically ingrained impulse to recognise patterns in the environment and 
respond accordingly, and this can shift the behaviour of the system as a whole.
In polycentric systems and in non-linear systems, the term ‘managing 
complexity’ is an oxymoron.  I find a similar situation in my discipline of 
architecture where the latest buzz word is ‘designing for sustainability’.  
‘Design' is used here in an interpretation very similar to ‘management’ - the 
desire to control results, failing to recognise that climate and other natural 
systems are inherently non-linear (while it is not essential to this post, if 
you want to read more on what I have written on this subject, see 
https://premckar.wordpress.com/2018/02/21/to-design-so-as-to-sustain/ 
)
To live with complex systems we must allow them to be self-organising.  This is 
the argument used in the argument for free markets, falling back on Adam 
Smith’s metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’.
However, self-organising systems are emergent - they can exhibit fundamental 
properties that did not exist at all in an earlier state of the system.  As 
humans, we cannot be blind to what properties may emerge, unless we say we have 
no ethical concerns at all if the system throws up properties such as unfair 
and degrading exploitation of others or ecological imbalances.
These problems are exacerbated because we make assumptions about the system 
that are not correct.  We believe that the system is ‘natural’ in the sense 
that components in the system are there because they inherently belong in the 
system.  But taking markets as an example, as Karl Polanyi has pointed out, 
many of the components of markets were not meant for that purpose.  To pursue 
the goal of markets we force fundamental distortions and reshape them as 
‘fictitious commodities’.  Lives get reduced to labour, and land is stripped of 
its connection with environment and memory and reduced to being an asset.  
Similarly we believe that the social contract can emerge from rational 
communication, failing to recognise emotion, especially when that emotion is 
exploited in political rhetoric to inflame tribal passions.
It cannot be a totally laissez-faire approach.  To live within complex systems, 
our mindset must change from seeking to manage the system to seeking harmony 
with it.  Harmony is a term that has strong ethical implications that we must 
come to terms with.
For harmony, we have to acquire what the philosopher Morris Berman calls ‘a 
participating consciousness’, whereas we currently pursue individualised 
consciousness that is framed by ego.
A participating consciousness cannot come from a knowledge system.  It has to 
be ingrained through rigorous practices by which one builds harmonious 
awareness of consciousness beyond the self.  Such practices are routinely found 
in performing and creative arts, as well as within certain spiritual traditions.
Without seeking to romanticise the past, one must recognise that the incidence 
of participating consciousness has dropped precipitously in modern times.
AI systems do not sit well with consciousness, for AI makes its decisions on 
the basis of statistical correlations derived from computing power, and not on 
the basis of consciousness.  AI systems run into problems difficult to foresee 
or comprehend once the decision process gets detached from sentient 
consciousness, especially when the AI system encounters non-linear contexts.  
The computer has much to offer us.  But we have moved too fast from 
computer-assisted-design to AI-driven-design, and paid 

Re: The World Wide Web 30 years later: We Wove a Tangle (Guardian Editorial)

[Prem Chandavarkar]

A fundamental change is what Hossein Derakshan points out here - the foundation 
of the web experience has changed from the hyperlink to the stream.
https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 




> On 12-Mar-2019, at 1:23 PM, Patrice Riemens  wrote:
> 
> Original to:
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/11/the-guardian-view-on-the-world-wide-web-we-wove-a-tangle
> 
> 
> 
> The Guardian view on the world wide web: we wove a tangle  (Guardian 
> Editorial)
> Mon 11 Mar 2019
> 
> 
> Thirty years ago, a physicist dreamed up a way to organise information from 
> multiple computers all on one screen. The world will never be the same
> 
> 
> For once, the hype was justified. The world wide web really did transform the 
> world in a way that can be compared to the impact of the printing press, or 
> the mass media of the 20th century. The internet existed before the web, of 
> course, but it was hardly used. The genius of Tim Berners-Lee was to glimpse, 
> 30 years ago this week, how it might be brought to life by a simple scheme to 
> allow every part to find, and talk with, every other part, using words, 
> sounds, pictures or anything else that can be digitised.
> 
> This was useful enough. Two further developments made it indispensable. The 
> first was the development of graphical browsers, allowing the web to be 
> navigated through pictures with a mouse; the second was its indexing and 
> organisation by search engines.
> Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you
> Read more
> 
> A world in which anyone can publish anything to anyone else falls rapidly 
> into overwhelming chaos. A corresponding demand for order soon appears. This 
> was answered within 10 years, when the babel of the early web was mapped and 
> by this mapping shaped by the first search engines, and eventually by the 
> latecomer Google. Google’s original advantage was that it understood and 
> worked with the central innovation of the web, which was the link. There had 
> been multimedia forms of computing before the web, and for some years they 
> provided a much better experience, too. But Sir Tim’s invention disrupted not 
> merely the business of multimedia but the substance of it, too. Once anything 
> on the web could be linked to anything else, what was displayed on screen 
> could consist of little fragments brought together from computers all over 
> the world.
> 
> This discovery was later the foundation of the modern advertising economy; 
> and the web has nourished the growth of digital advertising until it will be 
> larger in the US than all other forms put together this year. It has also 
> made possible the sizeable malware industry. The linking at the heart of the 
> web has fundamentally changed the way that we understand the construction of 
> knowledge. It has of course also made possible the construction of 
> counterknowledge, but as Sir Tim points out in his letter to mark the 30th 
> anniversary of his idea, the use of propaganda by hostile states or even 
> malicious individuals was not invented with the internet. Leni Riefenstahl 
> made her films before Donald Trump was even born.
> 
> What seems to Sir Tim to subvert the whole intention of the web has been its 
> capture by the attention economy, in which the interest of the public becomes 
> the only measure of success, however much damage this may do to the public 
> interest. The underlying protocols of the web, and its ability to link 
> content of every kind from everywhere into an apparently seamless whole, 
> emerged from a largely benevolent academic atmosphere. They seemed to its 
> early users to be animated by the values of the communities that built them. 
> In the last 30 years we have learned that they were not. The same protocols 
> allow this page to be read and the surveillance cameras of Xinjiang to 
> maintain the police state there. But it would be wrong to say the technology 
> is entirely neutral. By shortening the loop between urge and action, the web 
> has had a particularly infantilising effect on its users. This is reflected 
> in the extraordinary degree of polarisation, and indeed cruelty, seen online. 
> It is an impulse uncontroller. It has brought enormous benefits to society 
> and will continue to do so. But it has also done harm. Society, and all of 
> us, must also discover a degree of maturity if these great powers are not to 
> work against us.
> 
> 
> 
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Re: The World Wide Web 30 years later: We Wove a Tangle (Guardian Editorial)

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> I feel lucky to have enjoyed the broad audiences of the blog era. And equally 
> lucky not to have gone down the desperately self-seeking Facebook route. 

Thanks Brian,
I made the mistake of going down the Facebook route, and came to terms with its 
problems only very recently.  Derakshan’s essay was one of the provocations 
that made me leave social media.  Here is my blog post on the decision:
https://medium.com/@premckar/a-farewell-to-social-media-33db26074498 


Warm regards,
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Re: rage against the machine

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 15-Mar-2019, at 2:28 AM, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> There is much to critique in the operations of Boeing and of the FAA. But 
> it's not about AI taking full control. 

https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/13464-structural-design-and-thinking-in-approximations
 


This short essay by Robert Silman is about another field totally - structural 
engineering, but the point it makes about our relationship with computers and 
thinking in approximations is significant.  Humans can get a overall ‘feel’ for 
a system that is far more efficient than a computer in understanding the 
holistic character of the system - and to do this requires thinking in 
approximations.

The challenge with the computer is that:
Its capabilities are based in computing power rather than contextual 
understanding, and the learning and decision making in its intelligence comes 
from harnessing this computing power to discern sensible patterns within a host 
of randomly collected factors.  The system works well when it is inserted into 
a context that is within the predictable range of prior learning, but put the 
system into a complex non-linear context (like wind flow, climate, collective 
social choice) and every now and then it will hit a situation that lies outside 
this predictable range.  It then falls apart as its analysis is based on 
finding correlations rather than building empathy or understanding, and it has 
no way of assessing whether the error it finds is minor or major.
It is expected that the human will intervene in such situations.  But because 
these situations are so rare and random, the human gets habituated to the 
routine reality revealed by the computer.  And because the computer can reveal 
tremendous visual detail, the human thinks that he/she is getting a far better 
feel for reality.  The human stops thinking in approximations, loses the ‘feel’ 
for the overall system, and is therefore also ill equipped to deal with crises 
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The City and Complexity

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Since there has been much discussion on complexity here, this conference may be 
of interest:
Best,
Prem



THE CITY AND COMPLEXITY - LIFE, DESIGN AND COMMERCE IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

June 17 - 19, 2020

City University of London 

http://architecturemps.com/london-2020/ 


Round 1 Abstracts: Dec 1st 2019 
Round 2 Abstracts: Apr 1st 2020


-

Enquiries: i...@architecturemps.com 

CITY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON with AMPS and PARADE


-


Global conference on the the city as a complex entity: Urbanism, Architecture, 
Sustainability, Engineering, Housing, Health, Sociology, Business, Governance, 
Art, Culture, History 


Call:

2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Jane Jacobs' The Economy of Cities. It came 
a decade after her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 
and heralded a new age in thinking about the city. The city would no longer be 
a question of design and planning in isolation. From the early 1970s onwards, 
it would be seen as a complex interdisciplinary phenomenon.

The first years of the 1970s saw the introduction of a whole series of notions 
that would mutually inform our reading of the metropolis: social justice and 
the city, sustainability, defensible space, and urban centres as sites of 
public health. It saw the emergence of concepts such as the global city, urban 
economics, the post-industrial society and the cultural city. From art, design 
and cultural perspectives, post-modernism would critique of the whole modernist 
project.

Five decades after complexity theory was first applied to our reading of the 
city, this conference revisits its consequences. It reconsiders the city as an 
adaptive, self-organising and unpredictable system of interconnecting 
interventions, forces and perspectives. It asks how these competing and 
mutually reinforcing factors came into play and how they operate today. It 
questions how the city has been, and continues to be, informed by the practices 
of multiple disciplines.


-


Formats:

The conference welcomes case studies; design proposals, research projects, 
investigative papers and theoretical considerations in various formats allowing 
people to write a paper, attend in person or present via film and have their 
presentation permanently available via the AMPS Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyfWS4KkYSauAaTV2pjrQlQ 


Pre-recorded video (20 minutes) | Conference Presentations (20 minutes) | 
Written Papers (3,000 words) *



Publishers include: Routledge Taylor, Intellect Books, Vernon Press, 
Cambridge Scholar Publishing, Libri Publishing and UCL Press.


-


THE CITY AND COMPLEXITY - LIFE, DESIGN AND COMMERCE IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

http://architecturemps.com/london-2020/ 

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Re: Facebook

[Prem Chandavarkar]

About eight and a half months ago I quit Facebook  and  all social  media.  My 
reasons are given here:
https://medium.com/@premckar/a-farewell-to-social-media-33db26074498 


Having said that, I echo the sentiments expressed by many in response to your 
question: namely that Facebook is a highly flawed system, but useful in many 
aspects.  So it must be a platform that must be viewed with a critical 
discernment, and not taken too seriously at times.  I still miss some of the  
benefits people have listed in this thread, but the sum total still made me 
quit.  So as I note at the end of my essay, if it was a farewell, it was a 
restless farewell.

Best,
Prem

> On 03-Nov-2019, at 9:58 PM, Frederic Neyrat  wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists, 
> environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on Facebook 
> and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this "social" (?) 
> network.
> 
> This article 
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-politics-republicans-right
>  
> 
> is not the reason of my email, but its occasion.
> 
> Thanks in advance for your light on this matter,
> 
> Frederic Neyrat
> 
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The Covid Pandemic: Seven Lessons to be Learned for a Future

[Prem Chandavarkar]

https://medium.com/@premckar/the-covid-pandemic-seven-lessons-to-be-learned-for-a-future-81792f7f175
 



Reflecting on the experience thus far of the Covid-19 pandemic, I propose seven 
lessons we must learn from it for the world we need to build after it is over.
 

1. Markets cannot be the primary backbone:

Ever since the late 20th century, the democratic world has largely reorganised 
around a set of neoliberal beliefs that posit: (i) the self-organising 
capability of markets is more efficient than any form of centralised control; 
(ii) government embodies centralised control, making it inherently inefficient, 
and therefore; (iii) the state must retreat into a minimal role that leaves as 
much as possible to markets.  This logic is even extended to social goods such 
as health and education, and an earlier era of state responsibility for these 
goods is giving way to increasing reliance on the private sector.  The state’s 
primary obligation shifts from reducing uneven development by redistributing 
wealth to enhancing the global competitiveness of private enterprise.

The pandemic has exposed some structural fault lines in these assumptions.  
Markets, because of their short-term orientation and poor accounting of 
externalised costs (such as environmental degradation and inequality), are 
poorly positioned to organise and allocate social goods.  Moreover, markets 
orient toward efficiency rather than resilience and are therefore powerless 
when things go wrong at a systemic level.A healthcare infrastructure that 
aims to work at close to 90% efficiency (as any commercial enterprise would 
seek to do) contains insufficient resilience to deal with a substantive shift 
in healthcare needs, let alone a pandemic.  The consequent helplessness of 
markets under current circumstances sees them desperately crying out for 
assistance from a state hitherto dismissed as inefficient.  

This does not mean completely eschewing free markets.  It is just that we need 
to reverse our priorities.  In his classic text The Great Transformation 
, Karl Polanyi points out that while 
markets have existed since time immemorial, the subordination of society to 
markets is a relatively recent phenomenon that is not found before the 
Industrial Revolution.  This privileging of markets has led to the construction 
of fictitious commodities: commodities posited as a natural component of 
markets when they are embedded into larger networks that extend beyond the 
reach of markets.  Land gets reduced to an asset, and its links in memory, 
culture and environment go unrecognised by the economy.  Lives get reduced to 
labour, and if there is no demand for labour, lives go unrecognised.  Polanyi 
argues that this fiction of markets leading society provokes a countermovement 
of social protectionism that begins to dominate politics, so the claim of 
efficient markets remains a myth that never functions in reality.  Looking 
ahead, we may leverage the potential energy in free markets, but we must always 
contextualise them so that they are subordinate to society. 

We have granted this privileged position to markets on the argument of their 
efficiency as self-organising systems, but this does not mean markets are the 
only means of leveraging self-organising complexity for such principles can 
also be effectively applied to social and political realms.  The mechanisms we 
have needed to call on to deal with the pandemic shine light on what should be 
the primary backbone: (i) resilient localised infrastructures of care; (ii) 
high degrees of citizen engagement and participation; (iii) the foregrounding 
of expertise under conditions of high transparency and accountability; and (iv) 
the stewardship of the state where maximising public health and welfare is the 
primary concern.  The states who have most effectively dealt with the pandemic 
while laying the grounds for a resilient future are the ones who have adopted 
these measures.

 

2. We need an inclusive politics of recognition:

The pandemic has exposed another fault line in the failure by society to 
adequately recognise large sections of the population.  These are the segment 
of people labelled as ‘the precariat’, a term that arose in the 1980’s to 
describe those whose employment and income are insecure, are dependent on daily 
earnings in order to eat, are not granted secured benefits assuring access to 
food, healthcare and education, and exposed to the greatest hardship when the 
economy slows down.  Under neoliberalism, the precariat has been forming a 
larger and larger percentage of the population, especially in recent years.  
Their condition acquires a heightened presence in conditions like a pandemic, 
where their tales of hardship become more and more visible as their collective 
volume becomes increasingly 

Re: The Covid Pandemic: Seven Lessons to be Learned for a

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Thanks Michael,

Perhaps I was not clear.  I do not propose an isolationist self-reliance - that 
is not feasible at all.  International scales of operation are still necessary. 
 I only argue that in the attempt to define what should be done at the local 
level and what should be done at the national or international level, we should 
go by the principle of subsidiarity.  So it is more the question of a layered 
hierarchy of scales than isolating any specific scale.

Many local nuances can have fundamental import and are judged best at a local 
scale.  For example, public health responses in a pandemic are most effective 
when adjusted to local context, rather than swept under universalised formulae 
of lockdown or social distancing.  We have not been able to effectively deal 
with a pandemic without resilient local infrastructure, and where it does not 
exist have been scrambling to quickly assemble some kind of patchwork that can 
best substitute.

All complex self-organising systems start with a stability of local 
interactions, but it does not mean those interactions stay local.  A condition 
of complexity, if it is to be resilient and stable, is that local and non-local 
interactions should be in relative harmony.  I see too many occurrences in 
India (and I am sure they happen in other parts of the world) where the global 
confronts the local with an immediacy that contains an asymmetry of power in 
which the local is doomed.  The suffering wrought is immense.

Best,
Prem

> On 07-May-2020, at 11:41 AM, Michael Goldhaber  wrote:
> 
> Prem has some worthwhile points as a response to the pandemic, but I question 
> the idea that “local government is the core.” Surely an effective 
> international system, rather than the hodgepodge we had, would  have dealt 
> better with an international crisis such as the virus and its spread. Local 
> governments have clearly been shown quite often to be utterly incompetent or 
> downright evil in countering the disease toll. 
> 





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Re: The Covid Pandemic: Seven Lessons to be Learned for a

[Prem Chandavarkar]

My thoughts:
I believe the Wuhan case supports the point I make.  There, local government 
lives in fear of an autocratic centre that is intolerant of dissent to and 
deviance from predetermined norms.  That is what motivated a cover up which may 
not have happened if there was more political freedom and local autonomy and 
flexibility.
I am not preaching an isolationist self-reliance at the local level.  I argue 
for a hierarchy of scales, going all the way from the local to the 
international, and suggesting that the allocation of responsibilities to each 
level of the scale goes by the principle of subsidiarity.  Clearly, effective 
communication between the different scales is key.
No doubt, effectiveness of scale must be acknowledged where it is due.  A hunt 
for a vaccine to the current pandemic is best done at a globally coordinated 
scale.  But once a vaccine is discovered, actually identifying and vaccinating 
people is dependent on effective local infrastructure.
Local nuance must be recognised.  To take a current situation in my home town 
of Bangalore.  Control has been ceded to the centre during the pandemic under 
the Disaster Management Act, so all response has to conform to the central 
government’s prescription. The central government has graded areas as red, 
orange and green with red being the worst case in the rate of infection, and 
defined actions to be taken at each level of the gradation.  All of Bangalore 
has been declared a red zone by central government.  Local government, who are 
positioned to comprehend data at a far finer grain, is arguing that infection 
is not evenly spread through the city, and the gradation should be done at a 
ward level rather than a city-wide level.  By declaring the entire city as red 
zone, already thin resources have been forced into being stretched city-wide, 
unable to take effective action where it is needed the most.  While large-scale 
data aggregation is very necessary, is best done at a centralised level, and 
will drive overall policy and fund allocation, this should not override the 
effectiveness of local action.  Blunting local effectiveness is most likely to 
happen in overly centralised regimes.
The point of local government is tied to the other point I make about an 
inclusive politics of recognition, and the two must be read together.  The 
larger the unit of governance, the more likely that people, and their 
hardships, will go unrecognised.  Here in India, in some activist circles, 
there is a call to establish a basic political unit for recognising people and 
interacting with them at the scale of the area covered under a voting booth.  
High degrees of recognition promote high degrees of citizen participation, 
increasing the likelihood of an effective system of checks and balances.
Putting faith in an internationalisation of governance will create a crisis of 
human rights. As Nancy Fraser points out in her book “Scales of Justice”, the 
current global regime has patterns of injustice that are perpetrated at a 
global scale, and there is no effective mechanism of justice that exists at 
that scale to offer restitution.  Rights remain mere abstractions if not tied 
to a spatial entity that takes responsibility for their enforcement, and human 
rights in a democracy are constitutionally defined and enforced only at the 
scale of the nation state.  Even if we can solve Fraser’s articulation of the 
problem by creating a global mechanism for human rights, there is still an 
issue. To take the scale of the nation state, rights may be defined and 
enforced at the constitutional scale, but must be negotiated on a daily basis 
at local scales.  This mismatch means we have a system that at best can offer 
restitution once rights are violated, rather than taking proactive measures to 
inclusively endow people with rights on a routine basis.  This is where 
concepts such as “The Right to the City”, first articulated by Henri Lefebvre 
and picked up by David Harvey and others, proves so essential.  But there is 
still an issue.  Our current notion of human rights is predicated on the 
concept of citizenship, a category that is held stable at the level of the 
nation state through protocols controlling immigration.  This notion of 
citizenship cannot be literally transferred to the scale of the city without 
causing more problems than it solves, for the city thrives on migration and 
mobility.  Which is why an inclusive politics of recognition is so important, 
and this can happen effectively only at highly local scales.

Best,
Prem


> On 08-May-2020, at 1:15 AM, Michael Goldhaber  wrote:
> 
> 
> Thanks for these clarifications, Prem. But I don’t think even your revisions 
> take account of what the pandemic actually teaches. 
> 
> Start with Wuhan. While the lack of any sort of free press in China certainly 
> contributed to the delayed response, local officials' first instinct was 
> apparently and disastrously to cover up. This is, 

Re: "Consume revolutionary media"

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Brian,
I was on this podcast some weeks ago and will repeat something I said there.
https://www.architecturetalk.org/home/73-jyaga-sa9ls-6wtny-6wgg5-4mgza-kdpel-3rn64-nrbkb-2lpnb
 


The challenge to which the left has not responded well is in constructing 
metaphors of hope.  Our idealism has manifested in abstract discussion on 
democracy, human rights, equity, rule of law, civil society, etc.

In contrast, the right offers tangible metaphors of hope, even if those 
metaphors are mythical fantasies of a glorious past: MAGA, the days of Hindu 
glory, etc.

So the left relies on rationality, the right on stoking emotion.  On any given 
day in politics, emotion will trump rationality.

The left needs to do two things:
Recast idealism in the form of poetic metaphors rather than abstract analysis.
Shift from overriding emphasis on the vertical axis between citizen and state, 
and build constituencies through the lateral connection between citizens.

Best,
Prem


> On 13-Jul-2020, at 11:27 AM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> That was my other favorite slogan appearing on hand-written signs during
> the weeks of protest after the death of George Floyd - protests that are
> still ongoing and that constitute the largest-ever social movement in the
> United States. If, as some have maintained, it takes full commitment from
> only 3.5% of the population to effect basic change, then we're looking damn
> good right now. But which change, in what direction?


<...>



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Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Prem Chandavarkar]

On 07-Jan-2021, at 11:55 PM, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come, 
> yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I 
> had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this.
> 

My sense is the mob at the Capitol is an act in a scene that is yet to play 
itself out fully, and it is still wide open in the way it will play itself out. 
 As Adam Serwer argues, the invasion of the Capitol by a mob was not an attack 
on democracy, it was an attack on multi-racial democracy.
>

The question is whether we view democracy as a means by which a community 
fulfils its destiny, or is it a means by which a community constructs and 
sustains itself as a continual work-in-progress?  

If it is the former, then we start with pre-defined notions of community, which 
means we are trapped within racial and other social divides.  Which means the 
scenes at the Capitol will continue to be replayed in other forms.

If it is the latter, we have to deal with the question Hannah Arendt raised: 
the need to construct an inclusive public commons that is inherently political. 
 On this, there is still clarity to emerge, in both theory and practice; and we 
will continue to repeat what we just saw until we have clarity on this point.

Best,
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Re: The War to come ...

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 11-Mar-2022, at 1:39 PM, Andreas Broeckmann  
> wrote:
> 
> The impression that Prem's analysis might be marred by the conceptual 
> limitations of "imperiology" is underscored by the fact that his examples 
> (anecdotal, but no doubt valid examples) relate only to the US. 

Andreas,
The focus on the US was not to cast that country as the sole imperialist, with 
Russia acting only out of valid security concerns. Russia also has imperial 
impulses (Syria, for example), although not at the scale of the days of the 
Soviet Union. And there are other imperial actors, including, as you point out, 
some non-state actors.

My focus on the US comes from two fronts:
The Pax Americana project which has been a dominant factor in international 
affairs since World War II, and even more so after 1991.
My anecdotal observations suggest that this project endures because (a) Within 
the US, there is a dominant and implicit belief that their country is 
unquestionably on the side of the angels (and one finds this even among college 
educated people who one would expect to be well informed on international 
affairs); (b) this narrative of ’side of the angels’ is reinforced by 
mainstream US media; and (c) Pax Americana is likely to endure far longer if 
this perception gap is not tackled. The perception of global US action is 
radically different in other parts of the world, and my examples sought to show 
that Pax Americana is not only felt militarily, but also in many ways that 
intrude into everyday lives that are free of military conflict.

I agree that, while Pax Americana may be a dominant form of imperialism, it is 
necessary to articulate a critique of the whole spectrum of imperial actors. I 
also agree, enthusiastically, that it is necessary to foreground the interests 
and fears of non-imperial actors, but have doubts on whether this will be 
enough to delegitimise the imperiological narrative. It is probably necessary 
to do both.

Best,
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Re: A new avant-garde of Public Truth

[Prem Chandavarkar]

David, Brian,
I have my doubts on whether an avant-garde is possible any more.

Firstly, we are in an attention economy where attention is the scarce and 
determining resource.  One of the primary means of grabbing attention is 
through novelty, and any avant-garde is seen as a potential that can be mined 
for novelty, their product is stripped of its foundations in critical thought 
and repackaged as pure novelty. I have seen this in my own field of 
architecture where people like Rem Koolhaus, Frank Gehry, or Zaha Hadid sought 
to project themselves early in their careers as an avant-garde of iconoclastic 
rebels, but very quickly became co-opted as vehicles of mainstream branding 
exploited by corporates as well as authoritarian states. One might argue that 
this applies only to aesthetic production, but everything, including politics, 
gets mediatised and aestheticised today.

Second, social media has led to the emergence of what Rand Corporation titled 
as “the firehose of falsehood”: a propaganda technique in which a large number 
of messages are disseminated repetitively and rapidly across multiple channels 
with little regard for truth or consistency. Attention space is grabbed by the 
unceasing onslaught of these messages, and the multiplicity of sources leads to 
belief in their truth, especially when they confirm prior bias. The first time 
the use of this technique came to light (covered in the Rand Corporation 
report) was by Russia in Crimea in 2014, and subsequently in the US election of 
2016. But it has successfully been used by many others, a notable case being 
the current BJP government in India (see Swati Chaturvedi’s book “I Am a Troll” 
- https://www.amazon.com/Troll-Inside-Secret-World-Digital/dp/9386228092 
). The 
relationship between media and truth has always been problematic. But with the 
firehose of falsehood, even what we may call ‘media’, and consequently a 
conceptualisation of the public realm, has become an elusive shadow.

In such conditions, it is unlikely that an avant-garde can emerge - perhaps the 
avant-garde was purely a 20th century possibility. Hope must lie elsewhere.

Best,
Prem

> On 15-Mar-2022, at 5:06 PM, David Garcia 
>  wrote:
> 
> Discussions querying the authenticity of the FSB dissident source do actually 
> matter. And comes back to Brian Holmes intervention on the 26th of Feb in 
> which he 
> argued that we should celebrate the fact that in the run up to the war 
> instead of trying to strategically manage the truth, the US and Britain 
> instead “basically made their intelligence 
> public as it came in. And the intelligence was spot on. What a weird feeling: 
> trustable intelligence. Compare what happened before the Iraq War. It's 
> nowhere near the same circumstances, but still, 
> positive.” 
>  
> Brian concluded with the rallying cry: “Truth is a culture, but an almost 
> dead one. I think it could be the basis of a new avant-garde.”
>  
> So taking Brian’s position on board I do think that caring about the 
> authenticity of the FSB document matters on many many levels that go beyond 
> Ted’s suggestion that authentic sources are as trivial 
> as “asking about its provenance, as if it were an artwork or last will and 
> testament.” Particularly given the reports of recent arrests of Sergey Beseda 
> head of Foreign intelligence and Anatoly Belyukh, 
> his deputy.. all of which suggests that the search for scapegoats has already 
> begun. 
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
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Re: The War to come ...

[Prem Chandavarkar]

izations that chart a unique course 
> and can't be compelled by force, but instead need to engage with each other 
> through some kind of diplomacy. I am for that too, it's the idea that there 
> is no one superpower -- or rather, to some extent there still is, and it's 
> unjust and dangerous. In the present instance, one would have to account for 
> things such as the very real financial devastation unleashed by the so-called 
> "Asian Crisis" of 1997-98, which people in Russia experienced as the one-two 
> punch of the capitalist system, coming right after the "reforms" of the early 
> Nineties. As I recall, that crisis wiped out all sorts of fixed-capital 
> formation in South Korea, Russia and Brazil especially, but it had basically 
> no impact on the US itself, nor particularly in Europe. There is a kind of 
> violence, emanating from the US but also the EU, that is real and people in 
> the old imperial centers need to know it, so that they can change their 
> politics. 
> 
> Here's the thing though. Should Nato really have denied entry to all those 
> Eastern European states that requested it? Remember that most of those 
> states, they had been taken over but not absorbed by the Soviet Union. They 
> lived for decades under significant degrees of political repression. Did they 
> have a valid reason to want to join Nato after 1989? Looking at the brutality 
> of the current war, it seems suddenly obvious to me that they did -- and by 
> the same token, I have suddenly become less certain of what I always used to 
> say, that Nato is an imperialist war machine that should be disbanded. Russia 
> is also an imperialist war machine, for sure (and the two owe each other a 
> lot). But maybe China is also an imperial war machine? And India, maybe not 
> yet?
> 
> Well, at this point I have no idea and would all the more like to hear your 
> insights, Prem.
> 
> The big question for me is how to get a rules-based international order out 
> of a glut of imperial war machines. It's a serious one, and since the 
> glorious leaders of our glorious empires aren't talking about it, we should.
> 
> warmly, Brian
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 12:40 AM Prem Chandavarkar  <mailto:prem@gmail.com>> wrote:
> The fearful scenarios you lay out are all highly plausible, and will dominate 
> till Putin is given greater options by considering a wider history of 
> hegemony in which the US is highly complicit:
> 
> In 1990, shortly after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union was 
> beginning to disintegrate, US Secretary of State James Baker had a 
> conversation with Gorbachev in which he suggested the Soviet Union should 
> support German unification in return for a guarantee that NATO would not 
> expand an inch eastward. On Baker’s return to the US, this option was 
> rejected by George H.W. Bush. 
> NATO’s eastward expansion is bound to be a sensitive matter for Russia’s 
> security. The Cold War established the history of Russia having a hostile 
> frontier to the east, a vulnerability that increased once the buffer of the 
> Warsaw Pact counties disintegrated in the early 90’s. Russia, on its eastern 
> front, is one large plain with no natural defence features such as a mountain 
> range or ocean, so the buffer between its heartland and this hostile frontier 
> is a major concern.
> Since the 1990’s, NATO has been on a major expansion spree eastwards, adding 
> Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, 
> Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Albania and 
> Montenegro. 
> This was bound to evoke a reaction from Russia, with Ukraine likely to be the 
> straw that broke the camel’s back. This was foreseen 12 years ago by William 
> Burns (then US Ambassador to Russia and current CIA Director) who wrote in a 
> confidential cable (released by WikiLeaks), "Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO 
> aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious 
> concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does 
> Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in 
> the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences 
> which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that 
> Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO 
> membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, 
> could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In 
> that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a 
> decision Russia does not want to have to face.”
> As Siddharth Varadarajan pointed out in The Wire (a digital media publication 
> i

Re: The War to come ...

[Prem Chandavarkar]

The fearful scenarios you lay out are all highly plausible, and will dominate 
till Putin is given greater options by considering a wider history of hegemony 
in which the US is highly complicit:

In 1990, shortly after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union was 
beginning to disintegrate, US Secretary of State James Baker had a conversation 
with Gorbachev in which he suggested the Soviet Union should support German 
unification in return for a guarantee that NATO would not expand an inch 
eastward. On Baker’s return to the US, this option was rejected by George H.W. 
Bush. 
NATO’s eastward expansion is bound to be a sensitive matter for Russia’s 
security. The Cold War established the history of Russia having a hostile 
frontier to the east, a vulnerability that increased once the buffer of the 
Warsaw Pact counties disintegrated in the early 90’s. Russia, on its eastern 
front, is one large plain with no natural defence features such as a mountain 
range or ocean, so the buffer between its heartland and this hostile frontier 
is a major concern.
Since the 1990’s, NATO has been on a major expansion spree eastwards, adding 
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, 
Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro. 
This was bound to evoke a reaction from Russia, with Ukraine likely to be the 
straw that broke the camel’s back. This was foreseen 12 years ago by William 
Burns (then US Ambassador to Russia and current CIA Director) who wrote in a 
confidential cable (released by WikiLeaks), "Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO 
aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious 
concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does 
Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in 
the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which 
would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia 
is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO 
membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could 
lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that 
eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision 
Russia does not want to have to face.”
As Siddharth Varadarajan pointed out in The Wire (a digital media publication 
in India), “If Ukraine is to Russia today what Cuba was to the US during the 
missile crisis of 1962 (when it allowed the stationing of Russian nuclear 
weapons on its soil), then its resort to force – reprehensible though it 
undoubtedly is – should not surprise us. Putin’s ‘special military operation’ 
is as much the handiwork of a deranged leader as Kennedy’s illegal ‘quarantine’ 
of Cuban ports was."
NATO’s eastward expansion is driven by the Pax Americana project: a global 
peace underpinned by global economic, political, and military dominance of the 
US. This project is validated by Western governments by the argument that “we 
are the good guys”, the ones supporting the quest for a rule-based 
international order that has been the aspiration after World War II. This 
validation is supported by Western mainstream media, and largely accepted by 
the Western public.
This “we are the good guys” perception is not one that is shared by most other 
parts of the world, which sees the US as one of the major violators of the 
rule-based International order. Some examples are the invasion of Iraq in the 
Second Gulf War, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, support to Israel’s ruthless 
annexation of Palestinian territory, interventions affecting regime change in 
many parts of Latin America, long-standing economic sanctions against Cuba; and 
there are many more. 
The Pax Americana project is perceived by most of the world as nothing more 
than a US quest for global hegemony. This would be felt with greater acuity by 
Russia.
We have now returned to the value-free and rules-free international environment 
that existed before World War II, with the addition of a game changing element 
of nuclear armed nations.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal under International law, a violation of 
the assurances that Russia gave Ukraine as part of the 1994 Budapest 
Memorandum, and must be condemned and resisted. But a way out of the conflict 
depends on a stronger assurance of a rule-based International order,
A precondition for a implementing this is the acceptance that no single 
superpower should possess global hegemony. To achieve this, we would need a 
frank and realistic accounting for the history of hegemony since World War II.
Due to domestic political concerns, it is unlikely that any Western government 
will foreground, or even articulate, such a reading of history. Change is only 
possible with a people’s movement within the West. Sadly, one sees little 
ground for optimism on this count.


> On 08-Mar-2022, at 5:50 PM, patrice riemens  

Re: The War to come ...

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Sorry for a consistent error of saying ‘eastern front’ when I meant ‘western 
front’. A senior moment.

Thanks Andreas for pointing out the error

> On 09-Mar-2022, at 12:05 PM, Prem Chandavarkar  wrote:
> 
> The fearful scenarios you lay out are all highly plausible, and will dominate 
> till Putin is given greater options by considering a wider history of 
> hegemony in which the US is highly complicit:
> 
> In 1990, shortly after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union was 
> beginning to disintegrate, US Secretary of State James Baker had a 
> conversation with Gorbachev in which he suggested the Soviet Union should 
> support German unification in return for a guarantee that NATO would not 
> expand an inch eastward. On Baker’s return to the US, this option was 
> rejected by George H.W. Bush. 
> NATO’s eastward expansion is bound to be a sensitive matter for Russia’s 
> security. The Cold War established the history of Russia having a hostile 
> frontier to the east, a vulnerability that increased once the buffer of the 
> Warsaw Pact counties disintegrated in the early 90’s. Russia, on its eastern 
> front, is one large plain with no natural defence features such as a mountain 
> range or ocean, so the buffer between its heartland and this hostile frontier 
> is a major concern.
> Since the 1990’s, NATO has been on a major expansion spree eastwards, adding 
> Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, 
> Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Albania and 
> Montenegro. 
> This was bound to evoke a reaction from Russia, with Ukraine likely to be the 
> straw that broke the camel’s back. This was foreseen 12 years ago by William 
> Burns (then US Ambassador to Russia and current CIA Director) who wrote in a 
> confidential cable (released by WikiLeaks), "Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO 
> aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious 
> concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does 
> Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in 
> the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences 
> which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that 
> Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO 
> membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, 
> could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In 
> that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a 
> decision Russia does not want to have to face.”
> As Siddharth Varadarajan pointed out in The Wire (a digital media publication 
> in India), “If Ukraine is to Russia today what Cuba was to the US during the 
> missile crisis of 1962 (when it allowed the stationing of Russian nuclear 
> weapons on its soil), then its resort to force – reprehensible though it 
> undoubtedly is – should not surprise us. Putin’s ‘special military operation’ 
> is as much the handiwork of a deranged leader as Kennedy’s illegal 
> ‘quarantine’ of Cuban ports was."
> NATO’s eastward expansion is driven by the Pax Americana project: a global 
> peace underpinned by global economic, political, and military dominance of 
> the US. This project is validated by Western governments by the argument that 
> “we are the good guys”, the ones supporting the quest for a rule-based 
> international order that has been the aspiration after World War II. This 
> validation is supported by Western mainstream media, and largely accepted by 
> the Western public.
> This “we are the good guys” perception is not one that is shared by most 
> other parts of the world, which sees the US as one of the major violators of 
> the rule-based International order. Some examples are the invasion of Iraq in 
> the Second Gulf War, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, support to Israel’s 
> ruthless annexation of Palestinian territory, interventions affecting regime 
> change in many parts of Latin America, long-standing economic sanctions 
> against Cuba; and there are many more. 
> The Pax Americana project is perceived by most of the world as nothing more 
> than a US quest for global hegemony. This would be felt with greater acuity 
> by Russia.
> We have now returned to the value-free and rules-free international 
> environment that existed before World War II, with the addition of a game 
> changing element of nuclear armed nations.
> Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal under International law, a violation 
> of the assurances that Russia gave Ukraine as part of the 1994 Budapest 
> Memorandum, and must be condemned and resisted. But a way out of the conflict 
> depends on a stronger assurance of a rule-based Internati

Re: Well, so long, "California Ideology"

[Prem Chandavarkar]

The problem, as Edward O. Wilson said, is that we have a combination of 
“Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.”


> On 07-Jan-2022, at 1:02 AM, Jon Lebkowsky  wrote:
> 
> I did a lot of web consulting and project management for years, and that 
> definitely became boring work. But I suppose when things become truly useful 
> they also become boring - Bruce once gave a talk where he said that we'd know 
> solar tech had arrived when it became really boring to consider.
> 
> On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 12:30 PM carl guderian  > wrote:
> And speaking of flashbacks, doesn’t Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, a catalog of 
> online activities imagined long ago by others but now to be mediated by 
> not-Facebook, sound awfully like Bill Gates’ vision of the Internet as a 
> collection of 1970s- and 1980s-era electronic services channeled through 
> Microsoft, in “The Road Ahead”?
> 
> But I can live with boring. I’ve had a 25-year run (probably wrapping up) in 
> “the cyber” working as the equivalant of an industrial plumber. The pay was 
> very good, the hours agreeable, and the hype minimal. In good times and bad, 
> toilets gotta flush.
> 
> Carl
> 
> 
>> On 6 jan. 2022, at 18:46, Jon Lebkowsky > > wrote:
>> 
>> What does it say about me that I find that boring?
>> 
>> On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 10:45 AM Bruce Sterling > > wrote:
>> *It's a recent screed from the current editor of WIRED magazine.
>> 
>> *If you're enough of a greybeard nettime OG to remember nettime's vague feud 
>> with WIRED and its techno-libertarian principles, this is likely to be one 
>> of the funniest things you've read in quite a while.
>> 
>> *If you've never heard of the "California Ideology," that prescient work of 
>> distant 1995, well, I happened to archive it, because, as the guy who was on 
>> the cover of the first issue of WIRED, why wouldn't I.
>> 
>> https://bruces.medium.com/the-californian-ideology-by-richard-barbrook-and-andy-cameron-1995-c50014fcdbce
>>  
>> 
>> 
>> Bruce S
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> In the next few decades, virtually every financial, social, and governmental 
>> institution in the world is going to be radically upended by one small but 
>> enormously powerful invention: the blockchain.
>> 
>> Do you believe that? Or are you one of those people who think the blockchain 
>> and crypto boom is just a massive, decade-long fraud—the bastard child of 
>> the Dutch tulip bubble, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and the wackier 
>> reaches of the libertarian internet? More likely, you—like me—are at neither 
>> of these extremes. Rather, you’re longing for someone to just show you how 
>> to think about the issue intelligently and with nuance instead of always 
>> falling into the binary trap.
>> 
>> Binaries have been on my mind a lot since I took over the editor’s chair at 
>> WIRED last March. That’s because we’re at what feels like an inflection 
>> point in the recent history of technology, when various binaries that have 
>> long been taken for granted are being called into question.
>> 
>> When WIRED was founded in 1993, it was the bible of techno-utopianism. We 
>> chronicled and championed inventions that we thought would remake the world; 
>> all they needed was to be unleashed. Our covers featured the brilliant, 
>> renegade, visionary—and mostly wealthy, white, and male—geeks who were 
>> shaping the future, reshaping human nature, and making everyone’s life more 
>> efficient and fun. They were more daring, more creative, richer and cooler 
>> than you; in fact, they already lived in the future. By reading WIRED, we 
>> hinted, you could join them there!
>> 
>> If that optimism was binary 0, since then the mood has switched to binary 1. 
>> Today, a great deal of media coverage focuses on the damage wrought by a 
>> tech industry run amok. It’s given us Tahrir Square, but also Xinjiang; the 
>> blogosphere, but also the manosphere; the boundless opportunities of the 
>> Long Tail, but also the unremitting precariousness of the gig economy; mRNA 
>> vaccines, but also Crispr babies. WIRED hasn’t shied away from covering 
>> these problems. But they’ve forced us—and me in particular, as an incoming 
>> editor—to ponder the question: What does it mean to be WIRED, a publication 
>> born to celebrate technology, in an age when tech is often demonized?
>> 
>> To me, the answer begins with rejecting the binary. Both the optimist and 
>> pessimist views of tech miss the point. The lesson of the last 30-odd years 
>> is not that we were wrong to think tech could make the world a better place. 
>> Rather, it’s that we were wrong to think tech itself was the solution—and 
>> that we’d now be equally wrong to treat tech as the problem. It’s not only 
>> possible, but normal, for a technology to do both good and 

Re: Spamming the Data Space – CLIP, GPT and synthetic data

[Prem Chandavarkar]

The true question is how we recognise the other, and perhaps the fault lies in 
our assuming we do it through intelligence. As neuroscientist, Anil Seth, 
observes, we hear a lot of talk on artificial intelligence but never hear 
anyone speak of artificial consciousness. And that is because consciousness is 
tied to being a living, breathing, embodied being, whereas intelligence, 
because it lends itself to abstraction, does not suffer this constraint to the 
same degree.

In his book “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of 
the Western World,” Ian McGilchrist refers to the popular myth that we have a 
brain divided into two hemispheres because each hemisphere performs a 
specialist function, with the left brain tackling the logical subjects of math 
and language and the right brain tackling creative subjects like art. While 
neuroscience has rejected this myth decades ago, it still survives in the 
popular imagination. Both hemispheres tackle the same subjects, but in 
different ways: the left brain is detail oriented and the right brain is 
context oriented. McGilchrist argues that this is a primal quality springing 
from our evolution: when we were hunter-gatherers we needed a detailed 
attention to the world to capture prey or gather food, while at the same time 
we needed a contextual awareness of the world to watch out for predators. As 
per McGilchrist, our notion of modernity has been shaped by Western 
civilisation, with the Enlightenment privileging instrumental reason as the 
foundation for democracy, given that everyone, irrespective of their birth, has 
the capacity to reason. The institutions of modernity operate on protocols 
predicated on reason and discourse, and therefore we neglect our consciousness 
that contextualises us within the world.

Alison Gopnik, in her book “The Philosophical Baby,” comes up with a nice term 
for these two types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness (focus on 
details) and lantern consciousness (contextual awareness). Spotlight 
consciousness privileges our own agency, seeking to manipulate the world. 
Whereas lantern consciousness reverses agency, granting it to the world and 
according recognition to its capacity to act on us. Empathy, compassion, care, 
wonder, and so many qualities that make life worthwhile, are primarily handled 
and shaped by lantern consciousness. Spotlight consciousness pushes us to 
detach from the world, lantern consciousness pushes us toward immersion in it.

More significantly, the two modes of consciousness place different emphasis in 
the methodologies for developing and refining them. Spotlight consciousness 
emphasises abstraction, intelligence and reason, whereas lantern consciousness 
depends more on embodied and experiential practice. Perhaps Seth’s discussion 
on the limits to artificial consciousness apply more to lantern consciousness.

Modern education schools us in spotlight consciousness, but in everyday life we 
intuitively rely so much on lantern consciousness. Take the example of 
friendship. If we sought to find friends through a philosophy or 
rationalisation of friendship, we would have few or no friends. We find friends 
through shared embodied experiences investing in time that opens up our lantern 
consciousness to them, acknowledging their agency, revelling in the mutual 
resonances we discover through serendipity; and soon friendship, that was 
absent in our first meeting, emerges to form the fundamental core of our shared 
experience. Lantern consciousness privileges harmony to embrace serendipity, 
complexity, and emergence. Spotlight consciousness privileges understanding to 
enforce simplicity on a complex world, consequently tending toward violence.

Lantern consciousness also grants recognition and agency to nature and things, 
not just to people. Jane Bennett, in “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of 
Things,” starts with Bruno Latour’s critique that the fundamental error of 
modernity, as defined in the Enlightenment, lies in assuming that we are the 
only sentient beings in a largely insentient world, and argues that the 
sentience of nature and things is revealed in a recalcitrance that becomes 
evident on considering longer time scales. We need to pivot away from the 
Enlightenment model and recast our politics accordingly.

The limits to AI can be recognised only by acknowledging the limits to 
intelligence itself. We must incorporate in our practices what consciousness, 
especially lantern consciousness, has to offer us. Without this check, 
intelligence can, and has, exponentially spin off into territories of violent 
distortion, even more so once the data space becomes contaminated with the 
products of AI to the degree where we can no longer differentiate the human.

Lantern consciousness resists intelligence’s obsession with rationalisation and 
definition. Its reliance on embodied practice recognises that there is no 
stepping away from our primordial roots