I have not read Castells, but your paraphrase brings an interesting memory to mind. The day after Brezhnev’s death, I found on the street in NYC, near the Mission of the USSR to the United Nations, a number of 16mm films, including B’s massive biopic, “Life Story of a Communist.” More interesting in this context was a short film called “Machine Construction in the Soviet Union.” In it, the latest achievements in computerization and applied robotics were extolled. The configuration of devices depicted was symptomatic of a certain kind of “oversight” in both senses: it was a computer controlled-robot which assembled with great precision mechanical wrist watches. Further East, the first Casio watches were soon to appear.
Keith Sanborn > On Mar 30, 2019, at 4:19 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > The idea that the current global disorder results from a failure to manage > complexity is an elegant formulation. It offers a concise guide through a > welter of contradictions, ranging from domestic political squabbles all the > way to inter-state disputes, declines in corporate profit rates and > ecological breakdowns. Plus, where could one find a more striking observation > than that of Manuel Castells, when he says that the Soviet Union fell into > terminal stagnation due to its inability to produce a personal computer > industry? After all, computers bring order to large amounts of data, and > personal computers extend that ordering capacity to ever larger amounts of > people. Maybe a better computer (AI) could solve our present problems? > > However, the surging sense of intellectual mastery brought by the phrase, > "managing complexity," declines percipitously when you try to define either > "management" or "complexity." The latter is vexing because the disorder > comes from so many sources: faulty airplane equipment, disgruntled voters in > the north of England, the harvesting of behavioral data by Internet > companies, persistent trade imbalances between Germany and Southern Europe, > the volatile relations of US and North Korean leaders, etc. When exactly does > complexity get bloody complicated, and for whom? > > Management looks easier to define, since it's just about resolving problems. > But how do we even know what counts as resolution? Is Kim Jong Un his own > self-contained problem or is he inseparable from nuclear proliferation, the > rearmement of Japan, Iranian centrifuges, the emergence of a Chinese > blue-water navy and the US "pivot to Asia"? Is all that international > complexity even an issue, or is it just a distraction from the more urgent > conundrums of feminism and race relations? Who decides and why does their > decision matter? Is it a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty situation where a > clear definition of resolution makes a full enumeration of complexity > impossible, and vice versa? > > Felix, I am totally curious about how one could redo, for the present > conjuncture, Castells' fascinating observations about the Western countries' > long search for new ways to manage complexity in the 70s and 80s. Does one > first need to define a systemic order in which certain phenomena become too > complex? Does one need to develop categories allowing for the identification > of significant perturbations? Do the complexities also have to be sorted as > to scale? Are there functional or normative criteria that could help one > decide when complexity is sufficiently well managed? How could one create an > anticipatory image of a new (meta)stable state? How to develop a practical > approach to the spiraling chaos of the present? > > best, Brian > > # distributed via <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 > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
