Re: kaligram: Re: Why Isn't There Men's Studies? [2x6]
Why Isn't There Men's Studies? As a male who (at times) reflects upon feminism - I find it interesting to contextualise this question within the argument in Dorothy Dinnerstein's book "The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise". Dinnerstein's thesis is that the condition that both men and women are subject to is that they are both born to and generally nurtured at first by the female mother on whom they are completely dependent. She writes "The initial experience of dependence on a largely uncontrollable outside source of good is focused on a woman, and so is the earliest experience of vulnerability to disappointment and pain". The fact that we are bonded to this condition - the inescapability of pain - is associated with feminity, and women are therefore made scapegoats to the human condition. In contrast, the male who can claim detachment (an option not available to women) thereby claims a description of liberation - the achievement of a higher plane. This bias towards detachment has driven intellectualism and philosophy, and has created a consequent tendency to construct conceptual paradigms that are blind to fundamental aspects of ground realities. While Dinnerstein has been criticised for rooting all problems into a single simple cause - rather than debating on whether her analysis is right or not, it seems more worthwhile to reflect on a potential implication. The feminist movement has two directions it can choose from. It can embrace the methodology of self-assertion and throught this seek the kind of liberation that men have achieved. But this tends to invite a response from the male ranks saying "We will give you power, but only if you agree to be like us". To ask a feminist "Why isn't there a Men's Studies?" seems to be this kind of response. The alternative direction for feminism is not to depend solely on using detachment as a model, but to also seek empowerment from a position of attachment - through networks and lateral connections. While one can see women doing this on a daily basis, this does not tend to be the popularly held perception of feminism, and most men push the definition towards the former option. What is rarely perceived is that a feminist perspective of attachment can not only provide the impetus for the empowerment of women, it can also provide an extremely valuable perspective for viewing the human condition itself. So the question is not whether feminism is balanced by men's studies. It is not a competitive balance that is the issue. As Mary Wollstonecraft said (so many years ago) "What we seek is not women's power over men. What we seek is women's power over themselves". The question is not "Am I allowing other histories?". While this may be a valid question, one must first face a question that is much more fundamental, proximate and personal - it is "Do I have the power to write my own history?" And on this question, the options available to men and women are starkly different. On 11/10/06, Kali Tal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [digested @ nettime -- mod (tb)] > > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > > From: Kali Tal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: kaligram: Re: Why Isn't There Men's Studies? [2x6] > Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 04:09:18 -0700 > > Dear Benjamin, > > Thank you for your response. I'll address some points you make in my > answer, but first I want to point out an example of the gendered > dynamic of online discourse. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
UN Broadcasting Treaty May Restrict Speech
[from slashdot.org] A UN treaty under proposal could lead to unprecedented restrictions on free speech and fair use rights around the world. Ars Technica pulls together what you need to know from multiple sources." From the article: "The proposed broadcasting treaty would create entirely new global rights for broadcasting companies who have neither created nor own the programming. What's even more alarming is the proposal from the United States that the treaty regulate the Internet transmission of audio and video entertainment. It is dangerous and inappropriate for an unelected international treaty body to undertake the task of creating entirely new rights, which currently exist in no national law, such as webcasting rights and anti-circumvention laws related to broadcasting." read Ars Technica article at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060503-6742.html slashdot discussion at http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/06/05/04/1558212.shtml ___ s-asia-it mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.apnic.net/mailman/listinfo/s-asia-it # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Network, Swarm, Microstructure
> I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental > factors that help to explain the consistency of > self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of > a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or > metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up > over time, and which gives the members of a group the > capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same > referential universe, even when they are dispersed and > mobile. You can think of this as "making worlds." Recently, I have been very interested in this question. Being an architect, my interest has been in how collective decisions are made regarding aesthetic objects - traditional cities, traditional crafts, etc. - all decision making systems that are far removed from the way designers and artists are currently trained in a model predicated on avant-garde individual introspective genius. Some speculation on the subject is in: Crafting the Public Realm: Speculations on the Role of Open Source Methodologies in Development by Design http://www.thinkcycle.org/tc-filesystem/?folder_id=37457 I draw attention to a reference in the paper regarding a distinction drawn by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (The Social Life of Information) where they distinguish between "networks of practice" and "communities of practice" (although both are forms of networks). Members of a network of practice have functional or occupational links constituted by electronic and other networks that bring them together. They come together within the narrow horizons of these links and otherwise lead lives that are separate from the network. Communities of practice are more tied to geographical place, depend more on face to face encounters, and collectively carry out practices that are beyond functional or occupational concerns. The members of the community depend on the network a great deal to construct their everyday lives. I would emphasise the importance of this distinction, particularly in reference to the word "commune" that was brought in earlier in this discussion. Although it has not been explicitly stated so far, I suspect a great deal of interest in networks expressed in such forums is to tackle a fundamental contradiction in the concept of democracy (and someone did express interest in the links between 'networks' and 'governance'). The premise of democracy is to provide power to the people, through mechanisms such as universal adult franchise. However for its day to day functioning, democracy has to resort to top-down control structures of governance. This is further complicated by the fact that decision making swirls around sporadic events called "elections", and elections tend to be dominated by the successes achieved in the mobilisation of single cause constituencies. Network theory can then lend itself to the development of forms of organisation which are more egalitarian, and handle complexity and nuances without trying to artificially force issues into single unitised descriptions or concepts. The first issue to be tackled is that networks are not inherently egalitarian and tend to function according to power laws (as pointed out by Barabasi in "Linked"), where a large percentage of the traffic tends to always move through a small percentage of nodes. This by itself is not a problem - it all depends on how the hubs behave with reference to transparency of information - do they immediately pass it on to the public domain of the network, or are they selective in what they pass on - retaining something for personal gain.It appears that two fields of study need to come together on this: network theory (especially power laws and how hubs form) on the one hand and legal and ethical theory on property rights on the other hand. If anyone knows of any study where this intersection has been explored, please do let me know. The second issue I am concerned with is linked to emergence theory, which explores how bottom up development constructs macro-intelligence in complex organisations. Since I do not possess any expertise on this, I can only speculate (based on some readings oriented towards the layperson), and I list below some speculations on characteristics that an emergent network needs to possess: - close grained high-synchrony neighbour interaction - a major percentage of the interactions are characterised by high levels of information symmetry - random interaction - a high potential for serendipity - indirect control - low level of concern for explicit definitions of the macro picture at the level of the individual unit (as Steven Johnson says in his book on emergence - you would not want one of the neurons in your brain becoming individually sentient) - an impulse towards pattern recognition where patterns are collectively rather than individually owned. - pattern recognition is based on systems of tacit knowledge rather than explicit knowledge (as
Re: publication of "Jyllands-Posten" cartoons is not "freedom of thepress"
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." - 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
> Democracy is already over > > By its very nature the western democracies have become a playground for > lobbyists, industry interests and conspiracies that have absolutely no > interest in real democracy. Was it ever there? If we believe that democracy is some system that allows majority public opinion to prevail over special interests, then we never had such a system. See the book by John Allen Paolos "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper". Paolos gives the example of gun control in America (and I stress the point that gun control can be treated here as a hypothetical example - I have quoted this argument elsewhere and got sidetracked into debating the rights and wrongs of gun control, which is totally besides the point being made here). He mentions that many opinion polls show that 80% of the American public favours some form of gun control. But despite such an overwhelming majority opinion no politician will touch it. He points out that it is not a question of a majority opinion compared to a minority opinion that determines how decisions get taken in democratic politics. Rather it is how that majority and minority respectively break down within themselves. Of the 20% that oppose gun control (NRA members, etc.), 75% of them are so fanatical about it that they will make a voting decision solely on this basis. This decision is easy to make because the issue to them is black or white. 75% of 20% comprises 15% of the electorate. Of the 80% who favour gun control, they support it amongst a wide range of other ethical issues. Morever, there are many shades of grey here, as they are not unified on the level of control they desire. Only 5% of this group will make a voting decision on this issue alone (perhaps because they have been victims of a gun related crime). 5% of 80% comprises 4% of the electorate. So you have 15% of the electorate on one side, and 4% on the other. The 11% differential is enough to swing any election and all the politicians know it. Therefore, democracy is not about majorities and minorities. It is determined by how the debate coalesces around single cause issues. It is tempting to believe that resistance can be constructed through articulating our own single cause issues. But could we pick one?? Groups with political ideals as found here on Nettime tend to revolve around complex and nuanced ethical attitudes, together with a propensity to continuously debate and share. This will prevent any crystallisation into a single-cause issue. But more important - single cause issues are inextricably embedded into power politics for they involve constructing generalised representations. People get lumped into homogeneous categories such as 'Islamic terrorist' or 'American imperialist'. What gets glossed over is the fact that categories such as 'Islamic' and 'American' actually cover groups whose complexity and heterogeneity is far too great to collapse into a single label. Ethics can perhaps be discussed at an abstract level, but it comes most alive when the scale of relationships allows people to be named and differentiated? How do we build on such foundations through hierarchies of scale that eventually construct a political system? What potential for this is provided by recent technologies of communication - the emergence of netizens? To end on a (somewhat) optimistic note - while the democratic system we have today is deeply flawed, it is still a vast improvement over the feudal and colonial systems that preceded it. In the late 17th century people would have categorically stated that such a thing as democracy could never exist. But it did come about, and the roots lay in writings of individuals such as Locke and Rousseau. And their writings also must have had roots in some anonymous conversation somewhere. Everything (including major global change) has its roots in obscure anonymity. We may not see the change in our lifetime, but we must keep plugging away (and perhaps take some comfort in the fact that the rate of change has speeded up since the 17th century). PC # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Re- Casa logic
> But whatever the nature of the well-deserved prize the question is into > whose bank account or which mantelpiece will the prize sit? Examining this question, I am reminded of a statement by David Korten that I read years ago where he stated that "the best way to kill a people's movement is to give it lots of money". Ultimately it all comes down to the inner ethical choices that all of us have to make - are we driven by issues such as awards, fame, or sources of funding; or are we driven by the respect that we can earn from the communities within which we are embedded. An orientation towards the former leads us toward seeking the approval of non-local constituencies, even though the apparent rationale of our work may be to serve local interests. In this global networked mediatised world we are continually served with the temptations of the non-local. For many of us who have not yet confronted the local, it is quite difficult to resist this temptation for it gives us the opportunity to avoid the more difficult problems contained within what lies beneath our nose. But for those who have begun with a confrontation with the local, when fame comes our way it is difficult to resist the seductive thought that fame will now lift this local struggle to a new height. We fail to realise that in accepting fame we have now been labeled by something that is outside ourselves. So we do not address the question, where does our identity spring from? Will it spring from this new label that has been applied to us? Or will it continue to spring from the dense network of ethical local connections that had supported it so far? Prem Chandavarkar # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Microsoft to support Linux - !!!???
Does this mark a change in the ways of the world? Has there been coverage on this in other parts of the world? http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1084496.cms Microsoft to support Linux In a marked departure from its earlier stand, Microsoft has promised to add Linux support for the first time in one of its products. Microsoft's Server 2005 product will run on non-Windows machines, including Linux. Microsoft had always rebuffed any requests for interoperability with products it didn't make, particularly Linux, an open-source giant, which it has long considered a threatening alternative. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Pay 5 cents for a song
Looks like alternatives are emerging - this one proposed by someone who knows the music industry well. Likely to be resisted by the powers-that-be who seek to protect earnings of the managers rather than artists. The question is what kind of technology networks can be designed that would produce the kind of support directly to the artists that was earlier provided by the recording industry. http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050309/SONG 09/?query=mcgill WOULD YOU PAY 5 CENTS FOR A SONG? McGill academic has a plan to end file swapping and save the music industry By GUY DIXON Wednesday, March 9, 2005 An academic at McGill University has a simple plan to stop the plague of unauthorized music downloads on the Internet. But it entails changing the entire music industry as we know it, and Apple Computers, which may have the power to make the change, is listening. Peering out from under his de rigueur cap, music-industry veteran Sandy Pearlman, a former producer of the Clash and now a visiting scholar at McGill, spoke with a kind of nervous glee while describing his idea at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto last week. Pearlman proposes putting all recorded music on a robust search engine -- Google would be an ideal choice, but even iTunes might work -- and charging an insignificant fee of, say, five cents a song. In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists. The assumption is that if songs cost only 5 cents, people would download exponentially more music. Daniel Levitin, a McGill professor also associated with the project, said that a simple computer program, such as those already in use on Internet retail sites, could track people's purchases and help them to dig through what would become a massive repository of music on the Web. The extra windfall for musicians and those who own the publishing rights to the songs could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, Pearlman said his study predicts. It may all sound like a pie-in-the-sky idea, academically elegant but impractical. Or is it? The head of the British recording industry, who also spoke at the conference, made much the same point: music companies need to get used to the idea of selling more music to more people more often, but for less money. It was a notion repeated often during the conference. Users of file-sharing services made roughly 25 billion unauthorized downloads last year, dwarfing the legitimate music industry, and it's only getting worse. Some upstart technology companies are trying to figure out ways to profit from file-sharing, but the potential market is limited. Pearlman added that nothing concrete is in the works with Apple beyond talks, and he has not yet spoken with Google. Still, Apple is listening, and this is the company that has already changed the industry by creating, many believe, the best working model for on-line downloading services. Pearlman argued that his plan isn't a revolt against the industry. It's merely a pricing decision. Apple should simply be charging 5 cents instead of 99 cents a song, he said. This would bring in millions upon millions of more customers. And he believes that the best place to test this would be in Canada, which has laws he regards as being more supportive of artists and accommodating to an initiative such as this. Yet, Pearlman went further. He said that since this plan puts the onus on a massive Internet presence to distribute all the music in the world, why not have such computer companies as Apple and such major Internet companies as Yahoo simply buy up the world's four major record labels? Pearlman was careful to add, though, that he doesn't see his plan killing off demand for CDs. The recording industry is against Pearlman's plan. Richard Pfohl, general council for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, refuted Pearlman on numerous points at the conference forum, arguing that the plan would violate every international intellectual property law that Canada has signed in the last 100 years. It would also obliterate musicians' choices on how their music could be sold by conscripting them into a 5-cents-a-song system. And it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts, Pfohl said. Pearlman said that Pfohl misunderstood the idea. Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue? # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Game Theories: The Economics of Virtual Worlds
In this post-modern age where there has been so much debate over the nature of reality (is it really "true" or is it a construct of our imagination), I find this article provokes an eerie echo in its description of how the virtual mimics the real. We have had a lot of thinking on how networks create culture, societies and economies - but that thinking has either focused exclusively either on the 'real' or the 'virtual'. Perhaps it will not be long before the networks between these two worlds demand to be a specialised field of study. Prem http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=04/05/06/1929205&tid=1 GAME THEORIES On-line fantasy games have booming economies and citizens who love their political systems. Are these virtual worlds the best place to study the real one? By Clive Thompson Edward Castronova had hit bottom. Three years ago, the thirty-eight-year-old economist was, by his own account, an academic failure. He had chosen an unpopular field welfare research and published only a handful of papers that, as far as he could tell, "had never influenced anybody." He'd scraped together a professorship at the Fullerton campus of California State University, a school that did not even grant Ph.D.s. He lived in a lunar, vacant suburb. He'd once dreamed of being a major economics thinker, but now faced the grim sense that he might already have hit his plateau. "I'm a schmo at a state school," he thought. And since his wife worked in another city, he was, on top of it all, lonely. To fill his evenings, Castronova did what he'd always done: he played video games. In April, 2001, he paid a $10 monthly fee to a multiplayer on-line game called EverQuest. More than 450,000 players worldwide log into EverQuest's "virtual world." They each pick a medieval character to play, such as a warrior or a blacksmith or a "healer," then band together in errant quests to slay magical beasts; their avatars appear as tiny, inch-tall characters striding across a Tolkienesque land. Soon, Castronova was playing EverQuest several hours a night. Then he noticed something curious: EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play, often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it. The longer they play, the more powerful they get but everyone starts the game at Level 1, barely strong enough to kill rats or bunnies and harvest their fur. Castronova would sell his fur to other characters who'd pay him with "platinum pieces," the artificial currency inside the game. It was a tough slog, so he was always stunned by the opulence of the richest players. EverQuest had been launched in 1999, and some veteran players now owned entire castles filled with treasures from their quests. Things got even more interesting when Castronova learned about the "player auctions." EverQuest players would sometimes tire of the game, and decide to sell off their characters orvirtual possessions at an on-line auction site such as eBay. When Castronova checked the auction sites, he saw that a Belt of the Great Turtle or a Robe of Primordial Waters might fetch forty dollars; powerful characters would go for several hundred or more. And sometimes people would sell off 500,000-fold bags of platinum pieces for as much as $1,000. As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual "platinum pieces"; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest's economy actually had real-world value. He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled. Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist. Castronova sat back in his chair in his cramped home office, and the weird enormity of his findings dawned on him. Many economists define their careers
RE: Help!
w only pure screen, a switching centre for the networks of influence." To me the question is not so much whether it is art or not - I will willingly admit that it is art. But I am inherently troubled by any form of artistic practice that does not consciously admit space for ethics and contemplation. Perhaps the instinctive resistance of your profs springs from such a concern. Regards, Prem Chandavarkar >-Original Message- >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of DOUGLAS LEMAN >Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 4:23 PM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Help! > > hi, > > I have been a great fan of nettime for a number of years but never > contributed. I am currently writing a Masters dissertation on Bob <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: what would be nettime's reading list?
Rather than a definitive list of books (which implies that there is a starting and end point to reading) I would first emphasise the importance of the continuing impulse to read. In the movie 'Shadowlands' which is based on the life of C.S. Lewis, a student of Lewis makes the profound remark "We read in order to know that we are not alone". The act of reading forces us to shift out of our own eyes and adopt the eyes of another, to move out of the comfort zone of our life and step into the unknown space of the book. The step away from our life and the return to it is a cycle of renewal and it its essential that we constantly repeat it. So having said this I will propose a list - not a list that should rank on a scale of importance. I only share a list of books that have influenced me. First to endorse the point made by Alan Sondheim that we must question canon, genre, essentialism - some early influences in my life are: Hayden White: "The Tropics of Discourse" - a collection of essays that shattered my perception of history as a canonical form of truth, and revealed the literary and artistic devices used in the writing of history. Jean-Francois Lyotard: "The PostModern Condition" Jacque Derrida: "Of Grammatology" (although I must confess I found the book rather dense and impenetrable and had to rely on only reading some excerpts together with commentaries on the book by others who used a more accessible language) Some more recent influences in my life: Jeanette Winterson: "Art Objects - Essays in Ecstacy and Effrontery" Italo Calvino: 2 books - "Invisible Cities" and "Six Memos for the New Millenium" Lawrence Lessig: 2 books - "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and "The Future of Ideas". Huston Smith: 2 books - "The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions" and "Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition" Michael Polanyi: 3 books - "The Tacit Dimension", "Personal Knowledge" and/or the last book "Meaning" which summarises his philosophy. Steven Johnson: "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software" Wolfgang Sachs (ed): "The Development Dictionary" John Allen Paulos: "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" Etienne Wenger: "Communities of Practice" Albert Laszlo Barabasi: "Linked: The New Science of Networks". Bernard Lietaer: "The Future of Money" # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Framing the issues: how conservatives use language to dominate politics
> > An insightful interview with George Lakoff about the workings of > framing aka > strategical use of language in rightwing politics. > For a more general discussion on framing, language and politics see George Orwell's essay (written in 1946) "Politics and the English Language" http://eserver.org/langs/politics-english-language.txt Politics and the English Language George Orwell 1946 Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language--so the argument runs--must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written. These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad--I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen--but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary: (1) "I am not, indeed, sure, whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate." - Professor Harold Laski (essay in _Freedom of Expression_) (2) "Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder." - Professor Lancelot Hogben (_Interglossa_) (3) "On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?" - Essay on psychology in _Politics_ (New York) (4) "All the 'best people' from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis." - Communist pamphlet. (5) "If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak cancer and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's
RE: Bruce Schneier on "Homeland Insecurity"
> Security involves a tradeoff: a balance of the costs and benefits. Security measures against terrorism are necessary, but can only handle (at best) short term needs. They are unsustainable and ineffective in the long run - and the recent set of false alarms serves to demonstrate this problem. The only effective long-term strategy to reduce terrorism is to earn the goodwill of the population from which it springs. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: The Dean campaign and the Internet
> > Among the questions Nettime folks might consider: where will the radical > left come in, or down, on all this? > The question that keeps coming up in my mind is "Suppose Howard Dean does succeed in becoming the next President of the United States, then what will happen to the broad-based net-savvy network that his campaign created?" A non-traditional reform-oriented campaign can acquire a certain buzz and energy when it lies outside the mainstream, is not too interlinked with the conventional structures of power and governance, and particularly when it can be placed in opposition to the current power structure which can be critiqued as elitist and without sufficient respect for ethics and human rights. But what would happen if Dean were to become the epicentre of the establishment? Is it possible that the network that has been created can be misused to become an instrument of propaganda and indoctrination? Should the members of the network think of the possibility that their allegiance is really to a reform-oriented concept of open source intelligence, rather than to a single political personality? Is it possible that left leaning reform works better (or perhaps only works) when it is outside the establishment? In a book he wrote some years ago "Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda", David Korten traces the emergence of four generations of voluntary action, personified in NGOs. The first generation was oriented purely towards charity. Realising that this merely created relationships of dependence, a second generation started looking toward empowerment. However empowerment based purely on local practice ran up quickly against bottlenecks and a third generation emerged which had acquired the ability to critique and construct policy. Korten placed his hope on a fourth generation which was beginning to emerge at the end of the 20th century - whose new strength was based on its ability to network. But we also see a fifth generation emerging which is undoing the achievements of the earlier progression - the NGO as contractor. With current philosophy of governance incorporating notions of downsizing, outsourcing and privatisation a new scope emerged where NGOs found an ability to work unhindered in their area of core competence. But this has raised serious concerns about NGOs being co-opted into the systems of power. It has been felt that their traditional dynamism came when they lay outside the establishment with an eye towards gaps in the system, towards critique and repair. Perhaps the future lies in merging two trends - the 3rd and 4th generation NGOs that Korten identifies with the lessons that could be learned from projects such as the Dean campaign. Should we ask whether research in political philosophy should shift its underpinnings in academia and empiricism and move to an evolutionary approach with its foundations in open source intelligence. Prem Chandavarkar # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Governing Hollywood Style
> This raises an interesting question: how does one decide what the > threshold of cre.dibility is for a non-mainstream source of information? -- > By the quality of the writing? By the popularity of the source? By the > degree of intersection with one's own politics? By the quality of the web > design? > > Kurt If one is willing to look at process rather than individual event, then what has just happened does begin to set up filters of credibility. 1. You circulated news from a non-mainstream source, identifying the source of the news. 2. You received feedback on this news from others - the fact that the news was circulated acts as a filter - as Eric Raymond said 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow' 3. You were willing to openly modify your previous assertion in the light of new evidence, and this modification serves notice on the credibility of the original source. While it is important to know the credibility of a source of news, I believe that question has to be simultaneously raised with a set of other questions. Firstly one must ask is it important to consider non-mainstream sources of news? Many of us would say 'definitely' - especially after reading analyses such as that of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman 'Manufacturing Consent' which puts forward not only an explanatory model, but also a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that mainstream media in capitalist democracies tends to serve as a propaganda machine. Therefore, together with your question on judging credibility one could also ask: 1. What are the non-mainstream possibilities for evaluating/accrediting non-mainstream sources of news? What are the communities, technologies, projects and networks necessary for this? 2. In this age of potential interactivity, should the quality of news be debated purely in terms of the news-producing organisation? What is the role of the reader? 3. What are the criteria in terms of which we evaluate the news we receive? For example would we judge international development policy in terms of its impact on economic growth or in terms of human rights, health, poverty reduction, and equity. While it would seem logical to include the latter set, one sees very little news analysis from that point of view, and a predominant tendency to look only at GDP statistics. 4. News tends to homogenise events, seeking to construct grand narratives that are abstracted from their context. How do we foreground suppressed narratives, localised context-bound stories - the type that never makes the 'news'? Since news is abstract then unless its relevance and proximity is verified by other conduits (such as personal experience) it is seen as remote, esoteric or irrelevant. Prem # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
