Re: On Big Data and Post-Truth
On 28 January 2017 at 13:12, Prem Chandavarkar wrote: https://premckar.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/on-big-data-and-post-truth/ On Big Data and Post-Truth ... If the campaign wishes to mobilise as many of these fanatical groups as possible, it cannot afford to articulate a logically consistent position, and must base itself on a language that centres on the spectre of fear, raising emotions to a pitch where there is little concern for seeking validation in facts. Perhaps, that is why the Oxford Dictionary has had to declare "post-truth" as the word of the year for 2016. Thanks for this clear analysis. One can add that Trump has the psychological profile that complements that analytical approach. He has no notion of logical consistency. And he feels the emotions he evokes in his audience like a performance artist; he is even addicted to it. -- Frederic # 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: 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:
Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?
I wish. The 'left' discourse has been divorced from the reality for almost a decade, since the mixed race president got into the office. This cognitive dissonance was required to imagine the progress. Everything became a meme, a notion, an idea, easy to contain, direct and bend. Instead of propaganda being manufactured by the state, the whole swaths of population willingly took part in it. Many of the loud ones got paid. It's hard to wean off that. Just look at the panic when the reality refused to follow the doctored polls. The real shock, and the end to the cargo cult politics will come when the new masters start laying off the obsolete propaganda machine. Twitter is cheaper. On 1/26/17, 6:34, Alexander Bard wrote: Can we please raise the quality of postings on this forum to at least slightly above the junior high school level? And while I'm at it, may I suggest a pause from the usage of the sloppy demonising term "neo-liberalism"? I can not in all honesty accept that we put a word on some kind of garbage waste bin into which we are all allowed to throw in anything we do not spontaneously like and then refer to it as "neo-liberalism". It is not just sloppy, it is outright idiotic, and it explains why The Left is losing everything as we speak. It has gone lazily bonkers. # 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: 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:
Re: Resistance (was: 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump)
And of course withdrawing leaves those who cannot withdraw to take the full brunt of the oppression. Lately I have found the most hope in standing in support with Black Lives Matter and other resistance groups, but I do share your pessimism. On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:23 PM, Patrice Riemens wrote: On 2017-01-26 16:38, Ian Alan Paul wrote: > "Is you 10th thesis calling for a revolution without using the word. > > If so why not? Why avoid the word? Has it become tarnished by > carrying too much historical baggage ? Or does te word simply > not cover what it is you are trying to say?" (...) > One thing that remains perfectly clear to me is that we lack models > for what successfully resistance looks like in the present, and so now > is the time for what I would call speculative or experimental > resistance. I think we should be striking out in different directions > both as a kind of cartographic activity (as a means of understanding > the current configurations/limits/concentrations/flows of power) and as > a means of perhaps finding ourselves finally able to, as I say in my > text, "make possible that which cannot be under capitalism." At the moment capitalism as we know it (do we? ;-) is in such turmoil/reconfiguration, principally but not only because of the return of (geo)politics, that I am not sure about 'cartographing' it. And with regard to 'resistance', I am even less sure, not to say frankly pessimistic. <...> -- Kim De Vries http://kdevries.net/blog/ # 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: 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:
Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 08:40:28AM +0100, Alexander Bard wrote: >Dear Carlo >My excuses for being rude in my response to you. And please understand >moderators took notice too. In retrospect I am unsure if replying publicly was actually useful from my side as I believe in patient but solemn moderation and do not believe in any attempts of public shaming: chances of injustice are too high. So my apologies for not choosing the path of private mails with the moderators and you. >However, my asking all members of this list to not throw around the >label "neoliberalism" lightly had nothing to do with you or your >posting and neither did I claim that. Allan gave us some eloquent definitions on the subject. I consider the fallacious ideology of radical freedom of the markets rather than that of the people the greatest threat to the survival of humankind on the planet, so I find it more important than the traditional distinction of "left" and "right" politics. While neoconservative can be seen as a kind of "right", neoliberal politics doesn't really qualify as either left or right, so I find it quite adequate that it is to be used as frequently as the other two terms, and therefore occasionally subject to false use. In fact I doubt there is much false use of the term "neoliberal". People just frequently attribute all kinds of consequences of neoliberal politics with the ideology itself. So when you observe the consequences of a ruthless globalization that ideologically refuses any kind of ecologic, ethical or social taxation, then the resulting collapse of climate, labor markets and human rights is correctly to be attributed to neoliberalism. A lot of people thought free markets are a brilliant idea, but so do a lot of people think scientology has a great belief system. In either case it has nothing to do with facts and ethics. So, is global warming neoliberal? of course! Is the exponentially growing gap of inequality neoliberal? Yes. Is desperate migration of entire populations neoliberal? Yip. Is the growth of population in Africa neoliberal? Quite likely. Is polluting the oceans with sulfur from HFO neoliberal? Sure! What about iPhone slavery in Indonesia? No doubt! Is it neoliberal, when people are desperate about what is being done to them, that they put their cross on the ballot in the place that their government expects the least? Sounds legit. How much is left that isn't somehow correlated with this madman ideology of unleashed "free" markets? And now the country that originated some of the worst ideologies on Earth is itself stepping back from neoliberalism. Should we laugh or cry? The nation that has been predicating free market to the world while it was drowning Silicon Valley (Google and Facebook specifically) in governmental subsidies to ensure they achieve a lead over the rest of us, has chosen to undermine the work of decades of Pentagon strategists. Should we laugh or cry? >Trade has rather become a multitude of forces and interests of which >nation-states play an incredibly small if any part. That is a large-scale claim here. Let's imagine Europe, Africa, South America and several Asian countries agree on an "equal trade agreement" rather than insisting on the race to the bottom of free trade, how would that not have a certain impact? And since we already understood that fiscal paradises can no longer be tolerated, why not stop trade with countries that disrespect equal trade requirements? If the UN is in crisis, why not found a second UN of the willing and cut out the unwilling? >This is what I meant with opposing you taking a North Korean approach >to trade. Or a Trumpist-populist approach to trade if you wish. I don't see an alliance of reasonable continents exactly as a kind of North Korea. >Scottish trade barriers had a target and that target was hardly English or >German producers but rather producers in colonised territories whose >industralisation was delayed by some 200 years due to racist trade >barriers in colonial Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries up to >European trade barriers against African cotton and food products to >this very day. Yes, that is why I am not proposing to resort to protectionism or mercantilism. I am suggesting to take a reasonable middle ground between the madman extremes. >Believe it or not, the economy has been >globalised ever since The Silk Route's golden days. It is just the size >of the trade whic has exploded in recen decades. That is a simplification I would not agree upon. If the immense damages to the ecosystem had been factored into today's shipping, then in no way on Earth would it economically make sense to buy Chinese garlic in the U.S.A. Today's globalization is completely over the top from what would actually make sense economically, if we factor common sense, ethics and ecology into the economy. Another aspect is the globalized jurisdiction. Back
Re: Resistance (was: 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump)
On 01/28/2017 08:23 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote: I believe that the real political forces that are behind Trump, and assorted look-alikes in other countries, are eagerly on the watch-out for opposition/resistance, and are mouthwatering at the prospect of 'robustly' dealing with it, in a kind of final countdown bandobust. I agree. As a matter of fact, for some years now I have also believed that the better option, as far as it's possible, is to work on creating alternative structures and networks rather that fighting the surge of the right; in a way, our time is best spent fighing *for* our own values and visions rather than against those of our enemies. Things attempting to create a real collaboration and sharing of strategies and knowledge between indigenous communities and urban activists, to highlight one of "my own" projects.[1] For one thing, doing our own thing may actually bring us forward, while always "fighting against" may see us trolled by ever more outrageous statements and actions from the forces of Trumpist reaction. My hunch would be to withdraw, do 'our own thing', and wait for the storm to pass - something I might even be able to do, at my pre-advanced age. But even on that I am quite pessimistic: if we don't come out of the woods, they will ferret us out of the bushes, by direct repression, but even more, indirectly - mostly thru total digitization/ hi-tech surveillance (e.g. 'cashelss society'). But the even, brute, 'fascist' force is also very much in the(ir) cards ... Yes. Many people, me included, have been heard saying that as disastrous as Trump's election is, it may be good for something in the end, because ... E.g., because it may shake things up in completely new ways; it may mean people will know the right for what it truly is; because his policies are really an explicit version of George W. Bush's hidden agenda; because the backlash may pave the way for a well-meaning and competent Corbynite and Sanders-esque left. And in many ways it's true. Trump is like the classical politician, Democrat or Republican, Clinton or Bush, who will lie and manipulate his way to power. Except he doesn't try to hide it. When asked about his vows to jail Hillary Clinton, were he to be elected, he later declared that "played well" before the election, but now he doesn't care - basically, "so, I lied! What did you expect?[3] And while George W. Bush and his cronies adamantly denied acusations of just wanting to steal Iraq's resources, Trump is candid about it - "let's jsut take the oil to reimburse ourselves".[4] The lies and manipulations and outright cries that all the main professional politicians, definitely including both Clintons and all of the Bush administration, have spent their entire careers hiding, he brings out in the open, just like that. I *do* understand why some people want to see a silver lining getting these things exposed for once, in the hopes that people will start seeing the manipulations of "normal" politicians for what they are. But I don't believe that. Frankly, I believe that Trump's election is an unmitigated disaster that will do great harm to our world. I also believe that if ever there was a time for other politicians to stand up and be counted as someone who will stand up to common decency and all that's good in this world, and not someone who caves and gives in to the impending fascism, this time is now. British prime minister Theresa May is already failing. We should keep our eyes closely on those who don't. [1]: See https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/comments-on-the-ii-international-festival-of-technoshamanism-in-the-aldeia-para-pataxo-village/ for an encounter of such an attempt. [2]: Same text in Portuguese: https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/comentarios-sobre-o-ii-festival-internacional-de-tecnoxamanismo-na-aldeia-para-pataxo/ [3]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/donald-trump-latest-hillary-clinton-lock-her-up-we-dont-care-us-elections-campaign-promise-a7467071.html [4]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-threat-seize-iraq-oil-reserves-cia-middle-east-us-president-petroleum-a7545106.html # 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: 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:
Digital leftism in a globalised world? (Trumpism vs. neoliberalism)
Hello, Trying to catch up with all the various points of view being thrown around here; but Alexander Bard makes an important point about the “sloppy” use of terms and the inevitable consequences’, i.e. loss of meaning and discursive traction… So, I hope this adds some clarity: "Neoliberalism looks forward to a global order contoured by a universalized market rationality in which cultural difference is at most a commodity, and nation-state boundaries are but markers of culinary differences and provincial legal arrangements, while American neoconservatism looks backward to a national and nationalist order contoured by a set of moral and political attachments inflected by the contingent ambition of Empire. More generally, neoliberalism confidently identifies itself with the future, and in producing itself as normal rather than adversarial does not acknowledge any alternative futures. Neoconservatism, on the other hand, identifies itself as the guardian and advocate of a potentially vanishing past and present, and a righteous bulwark against loss, and constitutes itself a warring against serious contenders for an alternative futurity, those it identifies as "liberalism" at home and "barbarism" abroad.” Wendy Brown If the left, and/or other progressive social forces, cannot imagine, define, articulate and build upon something other these two calamitous polarities than the future, indeed. looks very bleak… rebel cities need much more than alternative rhetoric to become the bulwark against nationalist myopias... allan # 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: 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:
Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?
Dear Carlo My excuses for being rude in my response to you. And please understand moderators took notice too. That behaviour was completely unwarranted of me and I ask you to accept my full apologies. However, my asking all members of this list to not throw around the label "neoliberalism" lightly had nothing to do with you or your posting and neither did I claim that. What I did however respond to from your specific posting was the idea that international trade is some kind of an internal affair in between nation-states and little or nothing else. That might have been seen as a valid arguement 300 years ago, but its is hardly what international trade is today. The world is not a competition between national powers. Inter-state tade is rather less than 1% of overall global trade today. Trade has rather become a multitude of forces and interests of which nation-states play an incredibly small if any part. This is what I meant with opposing you taking a North Korean approach to trade. Or a Trumpist-populist approach to trade if you wish. From a Marxist internationalist perspective this makes little or no sense. Such a radical nationalist isolationist approach should frankly rather be described as the utter reactionism that it is. As for the examples from a British professor in Paris you mention they are all taken from a colonial past where the destructive colonialist effects of the measures involved were not taken into picture. Scottish trade barriers had a target and that target was hardly English or German producers but rather producers in colonised territories whose industralisation was delayed by some 200 years due to racist trade barriers in colonial Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries up to European trade barriers against African cotton and food products to this very day. Which reminds me of rule #1 in discussing international trade: it can not be taken seriously unless full global implications of trade rules are taken into perspective. Believe it or not, the economy has been globalised ever since The Silk Route's golden days. It is just the size of the trade whic has exploded in recen decades. To the benefit of hundreds of millions of Indian, Chinese, Indonesian and other people. So my mistake was to act out frustration in a completely unacceptable manner. But my main argument that we must not fall into Trumpist argumentation on trade without very good reasons is still adamant. Trump lied massively to his voters. The real danger now lies in where and when they will turn the disappointment this populism will create. Whatever happened to Marxism and its conditional internationalism and borderless solidarity here? Because if it can be saved we can discuss taxation rather than trade barriers. Distributed wealth is way way more benefitial for an egalitarian society than trade barriers ever could be. And I insist on that stance until I have seen proper arguments for the opposite. Funnily I have searched for those atguments through the last 300 years of economics literature and never found them. But I'm still all ears. Until then I belong to the vast majority of Socialists who are in principle pro free trade. Leftist Trumpism is just not my thing. Best intentions Alexander Bard 2017-01-27 17:40 GMT+01:00 carlo von lynX : On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 03:34:05PM +0100, Alexander Bard wrote: >Excuse me, but what kind of world do you live in? >A world where all property is owned by nation-state governments as if >they were all North Korean dictatorships? And the globe is a >competetion for most evil between these states and nothing else? Have >you even heard of transnational movement? This has not been the topic of conversation in this thread, but you are free to start 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: 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:
On Big Data and Post-Truth
[1] https://premckar.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/on-big-data-and-post-truth/ On Big Data and Post-Truth In his book "A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper", John Allen Paolos writes on how an understanding of mathematics can change your understanding of daily news. One of the examples he offers is to imagine the following (and plausible) scenario on gun control in America. Opinion polls show that up to 80% of the public support some form of gun control. Yet all politicians are reluctant to touch this subject. Why? Paolos argues that that we naively believe that in a democracy the majority opinion carries the day. However, he argues that it is not the question of the comparative numbers in the majority or minority, but how these numbers break down among themselves. In this scenario on gun control, among the 20% who oppose gun control, three-quarters of them (NRA members, etc.) are so fanatical on the issue that they will make a voting decision purely on this one issue. Three-quarters of 20% is 15% of the electorate. Of the 80% who favour gun control, most of them do so among a vast spectrum of ethical or libertarian issues, and only 5% of them (who may have been provoked as victims, or closeness to victims, of gun-related crime) will make a voting decision solely on this issue. 5% of 80% is 4% of the electorate. In terms of single-cause constituencies, you have 15% of the electorate on the minority side and 4% on the majority side. The 11% difference will swing most elections, the politicians realise this, and therefore the reluctance to touch the issue. This means that democratic politics does not like diffuse majorities, and prefers the commitment of fanatical minorities. Campaigns depend on generic promises that aim at attracting a certain mass base, and then courting the swing votes provided by fanatical minorities. There was a time, until a few years ago, when any political campaign had to make a choice on a small number of these single-cause constituencies it wished to court as the swing votes. And given the narrow range of choices, the ideology of the campaigner had to be clear, logically consistent, and perceptible by the general public. Has this changed in this era of big data, especially the sophistication of the analytics that exploits big data? It is significant that a single British firm, Cambridge Analytica, was involved in two of the most globally significant political campaigns of 2016: the Brexit Referendum and the US Presidential Election, and worked for the winning side in both campaigns: the Donald Trump campaign, and [2]leave.eu (one of the major groups in favour of Brexit). For more on this see an article in The Spectator[3], a translation of an earlier German article found on the online journal AntidoteZine[4], and the firm's own website[5]. Significant common features of the Brexit and Trump campaigns were that both produced results that were not predicted by traditional polling techniques, and were criticised for not caring whether their public postulations had any foundation in objective facts or truth. Cambridge Analytica examines large data sets that were not available earlier, such as Google searches and Facebook likes and posts, to construct a personality model described by the acronym OCEAN (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) that predicts with surprising accuracy the choices that a person may make. With enough data, the analytical model can predict choices with greater accuracy than someone very close to the person whose personality is being mapped; or if the data set is large enough, even more accurately than the person himself/herself may be able to comprehend. With these new analytical models, the geography of single-cause constituencies can be mapped with a hitherto unparalleled accuracy, offering a new opportunity for electoral campaigns. The problem is that the richness and fine grain of the data analytics reveals a set constituencies that can be quite diverse, and may have insufficient overlap for the articulation of a consistent ideology. If the campaign wishes to mobilise as many of these fanatical groups as possible, it cannot afford to articulate a logically consistent position, and must base itself on a language that centres on the spectre of fear, raising emotions to a pitch where there is little concern for seeking validation in facts. Perhaps, that is why the Oxford Dictionary has had to declare "post-truth" as the word of the year for 2016.[6] ___ References 1. https://premckar.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/on-big-data-and-post-truth/ 2. http://leave.eu/ 3. http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-crunchers-who-say-they-helped-donald-trump-to-win/ 4.
Re: Resistance (was: 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump)
On 2017-01-26 16:38, Ian Alan Paul wrote: > "Is you 10th thesis calling for a revolution without using the word. > > If so why not? Why avoid the word? Has it become tarnished by > carrying too much historical baggage ? Or does te word simply > not cover what it is you are trying to say?" (...) > One thing that remains perfectly clear to me is that we lack models > for what successfully resistance looks like in the present, and so now > is the time for what I would call speculative or experimental > resistance. I think we should be striking out in different directions > both as a kind of cartographic activity (as a means of understanding > the current configurations/limits/concentrations/flows of power) and as > a means of perhaps finding ourselves finally able to, as I say in my > text, "make possible that which cannot be under capitalism." At the moment capitalism as we know it (do we? ;-) is in such turmoil/reconfiguration, principally but not only because of the return of (geo)politics, that I am not sure about 'cartographing' it. And with regard to 'resistance', I am even less sure, not to say frankly pessimistic. I believe that the real political forces that are behind Trump, and assorted look-alikes in other countries, are eagerly on the watch-out for opposition/resistance, and are mouthwatering at the prospect of 'robustly' dealing with it, in a kind of final countdown bandobust. My hunch would be to withdraw, do 'our own thing', and wait for the storm to pass - something I might even be able to do, at my pre-advanced age. But even on that I am quite pessimistic: if we don't come out of the woods, they will ferret us out of the bushes, by direct repression, but even more, indirectly - mostly thru total digitization/ hi-tech surveillance (e.g. 'cashelss society'). But the even, brute, 'fascist' force is also very much in the(ir) cards ... Of course, as emblazoned in the arms of the City/canton of Geneva: "Post Tenebras Lux", and reformation (!) shall come, but it might get us first into deeps yet unseen. We surely live in 'interesting times' ... Cheers all the same, p+5D! # 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: 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:
