it is the end of history
While looking for something else, I found unrelated interesting stuff (as it usually happens): https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0109/maillist.html This is nettime archive from September 2001, and the good stuff is not just after September 12 (nettime was not particularly impressed by the NYC demolition job.) The number of interesting postings is incredible (and I wasn't even trolling nettime then.) [ Regarding 11092001+ postings, I liked profound predictions - some totally wrong, some on the spot. We should remember who did which: "What I am worried about is massive surveillance of all aspects of life: of our phone calls, of our email, and of our physical movements." ] Things were happening. Things are not happening. It's not just that they migrated out of nettime, they stopped happening. We collectively did something stupid. I'm tempted to analyze nettime archives and plot the decay of the public comment. When did it start? Did it level off? Is it getting worse? It's funny that the ultimate utility of nettime is documenting the demise of the comment. I am not aware of any other medium that provides such good insights into real-time history of commentariat from 17 years ago. If anyone knows about other similar publicly accessible archives, please let me know. # 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: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
To find our way by constructing a vision of an alternative society may be counterproductive. Living systems (and that includes society) are emergent: defining ‘emergence’ as the capacity of a system to display at its core fundamental properties that cannot be found in an earlier state of the system. For emergence to operate the focus should be on the depth, intensity and inclusivity of immediate engagement between components of the system, rather than a desired final state of the system. In fact, the focus on a final state may destabilise immediate engagement. As Steven Johnson observes in his book on emergence, our brains function as emergent systems, and that emergence would collapse if each neuron sought to be individually sentient. Emergence evolves iteratively through an impulse toward pattern recognition in the routines of daily engagement. So we need to think about the spaces where engagement will happen: engagement that drives widespread reflection on who we are as a society and who we want to be, and leave the question of social models rather open. How do we seed these spaces? How do we scale them? The question of where these spaces are is more important than what they will produce. And the ideal of the Enlightenment model of the social contract, which we tend to assume is still valid, is actually not so, and perhaps never was so. Further thoughts at: https://link.medium.com/isnoWnZL3S Best, Prem Sent from my iPad > On 28-Dec-2018, at 12:41 AM, Brian Holmes > wrote: > > Vincent Gaulin wrote: > > "I want to suggest that our "intellectualizing" actually step up to the facts > of existence, i.e. "How do we live vs. how will we live?"" > > Vince, I'm fascinated with your post and I'd like to hear more. You're > thankful for the work done by the New Deal in your grandparents' day. You > speak about a spartan minimalism that pulls away from consumerist excess. You > long for a collectivist discipline whose most obvious model is the army. > These are sweeping and powerful concerns. I can't get behind the army part, > but I admire the risk you took in writing about it, and I see where you're > headed - namely, toward a substantial transformation of the social order, in > order to address inequality and climate chaos. The question is, how to change > life concretely? How to imagine that process at national scale? How to > participate in it? > > Here's the thing: there will not be any full-scale infrastructural response > to climate change until the situation gets considerably worse. It will take > multiple cities getting slammed by hurricane or flood or drought in order for > that to begin. However we can see the road ahead, and it starts with the > issues around inequality. Inequality is already dramatic, and as time goes > by, it will be increasingly clear that the decline of empire and the > breakdown of ecological balances impact people very differently depending on > their income, their race and their location. As the climate crisis > intensifies, economic and environmental justice will become the same issue, > IF the ground has been adequately prepared for that convergence. If there is > no such preparation, then we will get climate solutions for the rich alone, > and failed attempts to cure inequality by rebooting the 1950s industrial > economy. The latter is already underway and you can see what a dead end that > is. > > So what's to be done is to generate new aspirations, new ideas of the good > life, and initial models for putting them into practice at local or regional > scale. Please notice, I am NOT talking about individual models - because as > much good as that can do is already being done. Instead it's about imagining > a transformed government, and a new, more intricate relation between state > and civil society. Inequality will be a big driver for this, especially as AI > starts kicking in and more and more people lose their jobs, or never succeed > in getting one. Flood control, drought response and the relocation of > populations will require major collective investments - and here, collective > means some level of what is called the state. Anthropocene Socialism will > emerge pragmatically, as an increasingly mixed economy, with the state > handling problems on a scale that no individual or corporation can address, > from medical care to clean energy provision to river management, and let's > not forget the geoengineering, because it will be needed at planetary scale. > But it's crucial that this mixed economy be democratic. Otherwise we will > just get repeats of the kind of failure that centrally planned, authoritarian > communist states produced in the twentieth century. > > Are the models of the 1930s useful for moves in this direction? On the one > hand, yes: because the New Deal is still in living memory, it's still > inscribed in contemporary institutions and on the land itself, and it forms a >
Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
On 27.12.18 20:11, Brian Holmes wrote: > So what's to be done is to generate new aspirations, new ideas of the > good life, and initial models for putting them into practice at local or > regional scale. Please notice, I am NOT talking about individual models > - because as much good as that can do is already being done. Instead > it's about imagining a transformed government, and a new, more intricate > relation between state and civil society. Inequality will be a big > driver for this, especially as AI starts kicking in and more and more > people lose their jobs, or never succeed in getting one. Flood control, > drought response and the relocation of populations will require major > collective investments - and here, collective means some level of what > is called the state. Anthropocene Socialism will emerge pragmatically, > as an increasingly mixed economy, with the state handling problems on a > scale that no individual or corporation can address, from medical care > to clean energy provision to river management, and let's not forget the > geoengineering, because it will be needed at planetary scale. There are multiple challenges nestled into one another, and there cannot be a single answer to them. So there are many, and we see them being formulated all around us -- from platform coops, to fair trade, non-corporate information systems, decentralized renewable energy, local currencies, and the revival of non-western ecological thinking, to name but a few. However, what is missing are points of connection, translations, transformation and bridging where one particular local/cultural response to the challenges can be made useful for other ones, somewhere else, and according to a different cultural logic. These kind of bridges from one closed network to another are more urgent than ever, not the least to overcome the the cellular character of machine-mediated communication, as Morlock called it a couple of weeks ago. But to break out of the mold of neoliberal hyper-individuality and the cult of "weak ties", to formulate something like a left perspective, there needs to be a realization of a common fate, of a problem that cannot be solved individually, but demands a collective response. From this, a practice of solidarity can be built. In the industrial society, the common fate (of the working class) was a experience of exploitation in the work place. For a long time, I thought "climate change", the destruction of the ground on which civilization is built, could provide that for the 21st century. But so far, this hasn't happened, and I think it will not, because even while sweating through yet another heat wave, or fleeing from yet another 1-in-100-year hurricane, the issue remains too abstract, too far removed from social agency. And as long as this is the case, the climate change denialists will win, because they at least offer the comfort of ignorance, rather acknowledging a problems but offering no solution (which is politically the worst approach). I now think the mistake was to think that a common problem would provide enough impetus for solidarity, while more likely it is the proposed collective solution to this problem, that can inspire solidarity. So, in terms of industrial society, not the experience of exploitation but practice of unionization was the key (though, lets not forget, also fascism promised an solution to exploitation (at least of the indigenous working class)). From this, we can think of a political map consisting of four groups. One (I) being the denialists who want to continue their very profitable lines of business no matter there are rising costs of externalities, precisely because they treat these as externalities: costs paid by others. I think in terms of institutional power, this group is the majority, but in terms of number of people, this is a minority. The second group (II) knows -- explicitly or intuitively -- that something needs to be done, that industrial civilization is reaching its end point, one way or the other. But they don't know what to do so they do nothing, creating all kinds cognitive stresses to which xenophobes and racists offer relief. This, in terms of number of people, is the majority. The other two groups know that something needs to be done, and are actively doing something. They share a lot of things, but what separates them is whether they see climate change as broad social justice issue (III), even if they have trouble formulating it, and those who see it as a specialized issue that needs to be addressed without major modification of the political economy (IV). I personally think this is impossible and that the later group will drift into authoritarianism as a way to address issues that our current political institutions are not capable of addressing (e.g. which city to save and which is abandon, Miami or New Orleans?). The first phase of the political fight is about group I against group III and IV. At the moment, group I is
