Dear Brian, Would I be correct if I say that I see in the last paragraphs of your email a form of fatalism! Not because you try to think - very well - the future, but because of the alternative frame that you propose: either the defense of the "autonomous individual" or the cybernetic being-in-common.
Let's be honest: I'm totally hopeless, so in this sense I'm even more than fatalist. Yet when I try to imagine how the spirit - let's use an old, old fashion concept! - can breathe, I see the spirit, that is to say the possibility to think and not to calculate, the possibility of absolute metaphors, of unknown affects, of "dialectic images," on a threshold, on the line that divides your alternative. I see a being-in-common on the side of the Great Refusal and the individual on the side of the cybernetic society, that is to say a chiasma that recombines your alternative. I see a second-order cybernetics that insists on the void around which negative loops spiral, not the first-order one that helps the police. I see a complete opposition between being-in-common and first-order cybernetics, that is to say the annihilation of the common. And I see the possibility to participate in the elaboration of a society in which technology will be used for the common, not against it. I see, I see... But I'm blind of course. Take care, Frederic __________________________________ ________________ On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 6:31 AM Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com> wrote: > There is an interview in today's Corriere della Sera describing the > contact-tracing app that three Italian firms are developing for the > Department of Civil Protection: # 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: