dear Tjebbe,
as young squatters in Amsterdam in recent times both me and hellekin did benefit from your early practices of phone alarm lists. Considering your presence in this discussion now I feel that the grounds for this dialogue are extremely interesting and fertile. It certainly won't hurt nettime to have a piece of living flesh in the slow process of pseudo-institutional advertising usage that the majority does of it. On Tue, 14 Feb 2012, Tjebbe van Tijen wrote: > The message I am reacting on seems to me very romantic and very > naive and also untrue in the sense that when you are against a > global big firm communication system and want to construct something > of an order order, an outsider system, the last thing you should do > is announce it here, on the dwindling list, that once was full of > discussion and now mostly contains one way announcement (I also use > it for that I confess).. > > The quest for purity in community and with that in its communication > systems, sounds like the manifestos for setting up 'intentional > communities' of the sixties and seventies of last century, with > their attempt to isolate themselves from society as it was. > > One can deny a try to nobody, but I doubt that such an attitude will > have the wished effect. Paranoia is a bad basis for producing any > social change. Ultimately I agree with you here. Knowing him, I believe hellekin's reasoning is tainted by the uncomfortable feeling of having a metal detector at the entrance of a "social" space. This is something we got used in our 9/11 decade, but it still inspires an healthy disgust in some "romantic" types which won't trade their freedom for security and, in this very case, not even privacy. On the wave of such feelings, isolation is a widespread reaction: the desire of acting on a limited, peaceful, "liberated" domain which can become sustainable for our family, with the sidekick idea of federating affine realities. These are often the first reactions to paranoid, unsatisfying forms of societies where western individualist mindsets like ours can find themselves living. I'm still not entirely sure what an Asian mindset would really think about such reactions. I believe what you point out here, the dicotomy between "intentional communities" and "open societies" is a crucial point of discussion, thanks for bringing it up. Ultimately liberism has won the masses to socialism by constructing the dream (American) and means (Capitalism) for an open society purely based on quantitative, axiomatic relationships. Capitalism has been so far a viable system of governance because has been able to embed this dicotomy while still providing a rationality to its existance. I agree that the challenge now should be to imagine new forms for open societies rather than regressimg to the idea of walled gardens. Still it holds true that the instinct of planning a walled garden and to share the information on how to do it can be the pre-condition for the creation of new territories, the experimentation of new rationalities. In so far there are no open spaces that offer such conditions (nor it looks like the industrial reconfiguration of culture will facilitate their creation and existance), but I love your indefatigable attempts to imagine them. ciao -- jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
