Re: Its a Language thing
just a small correction to david's post: "The UK doesn't have a market of hundreds of millions of people," he writes: "it did once but we voted to leave". In fact the vote was over leaving the European Union. Mad King Boris decided that meant also quitting the common market, which wasn't on the ballot, largely because it would have swayed an already narrow majority towards defeat. The method in this madness was entirely internal to the Tory Party; and this may have lessons for all two-party systems where any chance of power has to be fought in faction wars within big parties, unlike European systems that encourage minor parties. (Anglophones describe these systems as 'unstable', despite the notorious instability of large parties like the demented Republicans or the splintered Conservatives) Boris made the extremist call on total Brexit from sympathy with and succumbing to the power of the faction known as the Tory backwoodsmen. Nietzsche punned on the equivalent (Hinterwäldler) when he described metaphysicians as 'backworldsmen', people who believed in an invisible world behind this one that was truly real and permanent. Tory backworldsmen believe in an essential, unchanging 'real' England (rarely the Celtic fringes) which it is their obsession to reveal. It was this cult – a minority which holds some crucial voting power – which demanded the referendum, fuelled the propaganda machine surrounding it, and demanded an extremist interpretation of the result - there was no "we" [in a footnote, I still prefer the email forum for all the excellent reasons debated over the last few days - by all means document on an interactive platform and increase spread etc but do keep this more personal commons] Seán Cubitt | He/Him Professor of Screen Studies School of Culture and Communication W104 John Medley Building University of Melbourne Grattan Street Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA I acknowledge the Boonwurrong and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nation on whose unceded lands I live and work New publications: Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media special issue Visual Cultural Studies (Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale). 2022. https://vcsmimesis.org/ # 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:
ALGORITHMS OF VIOLENCE: Border Management, Migration & Enforced Discrimination
Dear Nettimers, I would like to invite you to follow our online panel on Friday December 2, at 5PM CET. As usual, a chat will be active for questions and sharing. ALGORITHMS OF VIOLENCE: Border Management, Migration & Enforced Discrimination. With Petra Molnar (Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab / Co-creator, Migration and Technology Monitor, CA/US), Martina Tazzioli (Reader in Politics & Technology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, IT/UK), Yasmine Boudiaf (Researcher & Technologist, DZ/UK). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director & Founder, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE). Live: https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays Surveillance and monitoring technologies including cameras, drones, biometrics, and motion sensors have been implemented to increase the use of AI-controlled surveillance and data collection systems in different domains, from migration management, asylum seeking, to borders control. The second Disruptive Fridays of the SMART PRISONS series, leading to the Disruption Network Lab's conference on tracking, monitoring and control in the context of prison and detention systems (March 24-26, 2023), focuses on the topics of technological violence and enforced discrimination towards migrants and minoritised groups. We are witnessing a degeneration of the use of AI in sensitive contexts in Europe and globally. Who gets to ask questions about proposed innovations and why are perspectives from the ground up relegated to the margins? More info & Registration: https://www.disruptionlab.org/event/df32-algorithms-of-violence SPEAKERS Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specialising in technology, migration, and human rights. She is the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and runs the Migration and Technology Monitor (https://www.migrationtechmonitor.com), a multilingual archive of work interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders. Petra is currently working on her first book, Artificial Borders: AI, Surveillance, and Border Tech Experiments, and is a 2022-2023 Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Martina Tazzioli is Reader in Politics & Technology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of The Making of Migration. The biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders (2019), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015) and co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016). Her forthcoming book, "Border abolitionism: migration containment and the genealogies of struggles" (Manchester University Press) will come out in 2023. She is co-editor in chief of Politics Journal and on the editorial board of Political Geography- Open Research and of Radical Philosophy. Yasmine Boudiaf is a researcher and creative technologist focusing on data, epistemology and the absurd. She was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ 2022. She produces art and research projects and consults on project design, strategy and public engagement. She is a fellow at the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Royal Society of Arts and is engaged in research and teaching at universities in the UK and Sweden. https://yasmine-boudiaf.com -- Tatiana Bazzichelli // Artistic Director Disruption Network Lab http://disruptionlab.org E-mail for personal messages: tbazz(at)disruptionlab.org Twitter: @disruptberlin // @t_bazz Fingerprint: A87C 3637 03ED 1D1C E6FE E828 1F55 2B2F F5A5 C9A0 # 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:
The Colonial Roots of Present Crises
I thought to offer a few observations about this post by Felix Stalder, about an interview by the Green European Journal with Amitav Ghosh. My qualification for doing so is working experience with two central ministries, government of India, the ministries being environment and agriculture. For both, I was a consultant based on my work on traditional knowledge. While the work with the agriculture ministry had to do with traditional crop knowledge (in which responding to climate change was a part), the work with the ministry of environment had considerably more to do with climate change (and climate variability, as we formally called it). This experience, from 2005 until 2018, allowed me to witness at first hand what development is, and what it is not. Usually, career administrators stick to an official line that is loaded with political positions. Even when professionally and scientifically competent to formally correct unsound political reasoning (which I know is a tautology, surely there can't be sound political reasoning?) they prefer to stay backstage and issue sensible orders quietly. At times, but rarely, retired administrators have lifted the veil in their published memoirs. Anyway, the point really is what are considered 'climate crises' and what I have seen them as in India and several other places in Asia. It's all very well to use terms like anthropogenic, extraction, disruption, technocratic and so on, but I see these as being both meaningless and irrelevant out there in the rural districts. There, ordinary households, whether they depend mainly on selling some agricultural produce to a small town market or in joining a wage labour industry, are focused on survival from season to season. In so doing, they have perforce to cope with what the state, and 'development', throws their way. All too often in India, 'development' has been a term given a crippled meaning. And that meaning has everything to do with infrastructure in one form or another: a new road, a new or enlarged highway, a new township, a new airport, a new power plant, a new bridge over a river, a bigger railway station, more mobile phone towers, etc. If the 'development' is large enough and politically impressive enough, there will be consequences. The consequences may result in the ordinary rural household having to migrate in order to 'cope' economically, or to suffer in place, and hope for the state to assign them hand-outs. If, because of such 'development', such as being downwind of a new coal burning power plant whose contaminating ash is lifted by the wind and deposited on fields, making them useless for cultivation, the household has to pack its belongings and move out, it will nowadays be called climate refugees. If they stay and through some NGO are represented in a legal pleading, they will be called climate victims. As I see it, what they experience, and what has caused their experience, has nothing whatsoever to do with climate change or climate variability. It has rather everything to do with the willingness of experts, appointed and paid by the state, to justify politically and industrially advantageous investment decisions; the complicity of administrators to frame rules and issue orders that sanction the material manifestation of such investments (in the form of new factories, new special economic zones, new industrial parks, new tech hubs, etc); the distraction by media reporters, whose companies are influenced by the advertising budgets of infrastructure corporations or whose publishers are part of the political status quo, that the consequences can be blamed on climate change rather than abusing nature and environmental flows; and so on. I would say therefore that Ghosh, when replying "In the past, Indian kings and emperors would prepare for and respond to famines with massive state interventions: distributing food, storing supplies, and so on", is not abreast with the actual history because it was and is, not at all so much the kingly state, or the state of (apparently) independent India, that has done the preparing and responding, but social institutions at the village and town level. And also, "The British, literally while famines were unfolding, would refuse to do anything that would interfere with the laws of free trade", while being correct about free trade, Ghosh failed to say (and the interviewer failed to pursue the point) that the British colonial regime engineered those very famines (the most recent and perhaps best documented of them being the 1943 Bengal famine) but that the free and independent Indian state has engineered a much larger number of malnutrition epidemics than the British ever could have, also in the service of free trade. When, some thirty years ago, I supported very actively with participation and my writing, the protest in western India against big dams, and in particular the damming of the river Narmada
Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse
I like nettime for its long-form discourse (long enough and short enough to
read online).
There is also a longitudinal sense that is absent elsewhere. I share
concerns that this might collapse into the aforementioned sphere of
extinction and should perhaps be preserved/conserved in a living sense
rather than only in an archival framing.
What is missing is the dialogic aspect that used to occur in mailing lists
that social media platforms *can* foster but at the expense of deeper
reflection.
I wonder if the point made about boredom or perhaps just exhausted energy
with the same pattern repeating itself ad infinitum lies at the root of
this and if there is or may be a new generation of mods (post-mods) who
might be willing to step in and of course with every change comes another
spectrum.
The repetitive patterns do seem to work against any generative discourse
now taking place -- so yes, an alternative to the present sounds welcome,
but not to throw away the baby, fossilised though it may seem at times or
stagnant until shaken and stirred.
B
On Thu, 1 Dec 2022 at 11:25, Joseph Rabie wrote:
> Beyond the comparison between email and social media lies that between
> computer and telephone. While some forms of social media were created for
> computer web browsing before the arrival of (so-called) smart phones, today
> the latter constitute the favoured medium of delivery for social media.
> Maybe this explains the generational gap between those who entered digital
> culture via computers, and those who entered via both.
>
> One does have the impression that the telephone functions more directly as
> an appendice for the ego than the computer, and perhaps this explains why
> social media tends (but without generalising) towards a greater level of
> posturing and consequent potential for toxicity.
>
> The 2000 character limit proposed for Mastodon implies that it is more
> orientated towards telephone than computer. Maybe such a limit is good
> because it canvasses for brevity, which is a virtue, but it also forces
> simplification or schematisation of complex discourse, for lack of
> sufficient words, which is damaging.
>
> ("Traditional" discussion forum interfaces like the Well were great.)
>
> Joe.
>
>
>
> Le 30 nov. 2022 à 23:50, Jon Lebkowsky a écrit :
>
> There's a discontinuity in social media posts, and quite a bit of
> attention-shifting, so Mastodon might not be the best solution - though
> migration away from email does make sense. I find that I don't follow email
> lists well - that might just be me, but I get so many thousands of pieces
> of email at this point, much of it escapes my attention.
>
> I always thought nettime would better fit a platform like the WELL's
> linear asynchronous conferencing system, and a Discord server could be like
> that. Mastodon, maybe not, especially to the extent that it's integrated
> with the larger Fediverse and fed toots from many sources. That's a good
> substitute for Twitter, I think, but not necessarily a best platform for
> coherent conversation and focused attention.
>
> I've been AWOL from regular nettime participation for years, partly
> because it's one of many email lists that fall into my various inboxes. I
> do hope the list will continue as a list until a substitute technology
> proves to work.
>
> ~ Jon L.
>
>
> # 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:
--
Bronaċ
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# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse
Beyond the comparison between email and social media lies that between computer
and telephone. While some forms of social media were created for computer web
browsing before the arrival of (so-called) smart phones, today the latter
constitute the favoured medium of delivery for social media. Maybe this
explains the generational gap between those who entered digital culture via
computers, and those who entered via both.
One does have the impression that the telephone functions more directly as an
appendice for the ego than the computer, and perhaps this explains why social
media tends (but without generalising) towards a greater level of posturing and
consequent potential for toxicity.
The 2000 character limit proposed for Mastodon implies that it is more
orientated towards telephone than computer. Maybe such a limit is good because
it canvasses for brevity, which is a virtue, but it also forces simplification
or schematisation of complex discourse, for lack of sufficient words, which is
damaging.
("Traditional" discussion forum interfaces like the Well were great.)
Joe.
> Le 30 nov. 2022 à 23:50, Jon Lebkowsky a écrit :
>
> There's a discontinuity in social media posts, and quite a bit of
> attention-shifting, so Mastodon might not be the best solution - though
> migration away from email does make sense. I find that I don't follow email
> lists well - that might just be me, but I get so many thousands of pieces of
> email at this point, much of it escapes my attention.
>
> I always thought nettime would better fit a platform like the WELL's linear
> asynchronous conferencing system, and a Discord server could be like that.
> Mastodon, maybe not, especially to the extent that it's integrated with the
> larger Fediverse and fed toots from many sources. That's a good substitute
> for Twitter, I think, but not necessarily a best platform for coherent
> conversation and focused attention.
>
> I've been AWOL from regular nettime participation for years, partly because
> it's one of many email lists that fall into my various inboxes. I do hope the
> list will continue as a list until a substitute technology proves to work.
>
> ~ Jon L.
>
# 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:
Moving Nettime to the Fediverse
Hello, As the Mod Squad said: "This is a chance to move beyond nettime's shrinking in-group, so feel free to invite others. Our goal is to keep tldr to a size where the local timeline remains a useful tool for an actual, not rhetorical, community; how big that is remains to be seen." Communities are evolving political entities shaped and defined by a diversity of inhabitants with a diversity of ideas and forms of expression; how this new iteration defines itself seems to depend on the aspirations and input of the members of a reconfigured NETTIME community and if it shrinks or expands... best 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:
