Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism - (...always) look on the bright (regenerative) side...?

[Brian Holmes]

This text on regenerative agriculture is beautiful! and powerful!

Whoah, the rising tide of the biologically inclined has even swept nettime,
the times are changing in so many ways.


On Mon, Sep 6, 2021 at 4:42 AM martin  wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> Interesting conversation...
>
> On 05/09/2021 18:31, John Hopkins wrote:
>
> I am very sorry to hear about your ailments and wish you all the best.
>
> Then,
> -- though I admittedly can sometimes also be caught in a moment of
> weakness and despair where I forget myself and utter statements with a
> dim, negative view of humanity
>
>  -- this, to my mind:
>
> > Humans have always had an oversized impact on local energy flows around
> > them (i.e., Pleistocene megafauna destruction)
>
>
>  is a dangerous fallacy of thought.
>
> It expresses a sad, self-defeating view (see footnote 1 and 2; and with
> regards to the speculative hypothesis of megafauna extinction see
> footnote 3).
>
> Importantly there are historical examples as well as contemporary
> movements, praxis and data testifying to quite the opposite: Complex
> human societies have had / can have a positive impact on the
> environment, enrich their habitat and increase biodiversity (see
> footnote 4).
>
> Whether in the form of Amazonian Dark Earths, regenerative agriculture,
> permaculture or other expressions of the human imagination from 'the
> other side of the anthropocene', human beings have the capacity to leave
> the world in 'a nicer state' tomorrow than it was yesterday. Not through
> quick technofixes nor dirty hacks, but through building cultural
> alliances with all the other beings in the complex web of life that
> sustains us - from soil ecologies and their microbes, insects and other
> beasts, through plants, trees and rivers to other mammals and everything
> in between.
>
> Indeed, transformative agroecology (see footnote 5) combined with
> regenerative agriculture possibly constitute the only reasonable,
> significant set of carbon sequestration (carbon negative) techniques
> available (see footnote 6) and has the useful side-effect of feeding
> humanity, regenerating immune systems and, all in all, delivering a
> healthy planet.
>
> It has been done, it can be done. It will be done if we all work towards
> it. War is over if you want it, extractive/dominator culture can end.
>
> It is, imho, worse than a waste of time to go on about all the examples
> of destructive human behaviour, rather than focusing on the hope- and
> joy-providing opposite.
>
> Shifting the discourse to the endless possibilities of
> more-than-sustainable social organisation will feed grassroots power
> structures and undermine totalitarian attitudes.
>
> The future is ours, because this land is ours in common.
>
> sincerely/martin
>
> ---
>
> Footnote 1: Sad because it sounds like depression projected, and sad
> because it feeds the power and agency of those who are into population
> control and the concomitant necessity of global rule from above; and of
> course it also helps push the corporate, hi-tech progress myth-based
> geoengineering fantasies that perpetuate the causes of the effects they
> purport to solve (/as Kolbert notes in 'Under a White Sky' on that
> issue, this is “..a book about people trying to solve problems created
> by people trying to solve problems”-
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/06/it-is-the-question-of-the-century-will-tech-solve-the-climate-crisis-or-make-it-worse
> ).
>
> Extractor/dominator culture probably needs this "bad humans" assumption
> to remain in place as a baseline of reality to justify their elitist
> model of society.
>
> --
>
> Footnote 2: On the population number "argument": the total fertility
> rate has peaked and the next challenge is likely how to manage
> increasingly smaller and older populations suffering from auto-immune
> conditions and cancer, resulting from poor diet, lack of movement, and
> the ubiquity of toxic air and drinking water. Please don't feed the
> Malthusian trolls.
> --
>
> Footnote 3: Invoking the speculative megafauna human-driven extinction
> hypothesis rests on just that: speculation, and it also has potential
> overtones of human self-aggrandisement and belittling of the large
> beasts; see for instance Brook and Bowman (2002) and Hocknull et al.
> (2020):
>
> Brook and Bowman (2002): "...Understanding of the Pleistocene megafaunal
> extinctions has been advanced recently by the application of simulation
> models and new developments in geochronological dating. Together these
> have been used to posit a rapid demise of megafauna due to over-hunting
> by invading humans. However, we demonstrate that the results of these
> extinction models are highly sensitive to implicit assumptions
> concerning the degree of prey naivety to human hunters. In addition, we
> show that in Greater Australia, where the extinctions occurred well
> before the end of the last Ice Age (unlike the North American
> 

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism - (...always) look on the bright (regenerative) side...?

[jan hendrik brueggemeier]

hi everyone

interesting conversation indeed, apologies for being late to the party.
thanks, martin, for sharing these references.

On the note of bright regenerative side I just thought share David
Holmgren's latest post, who is one of Australia's leading perma culture
guru or "permis".

It is a rather long essay (11 pages or so) but I found it highly
fascinating as it on one hand recaps core principles but still ends up
in his personal conclusion to be anti vaccine (which from a sub-cultural
perspective may not be surprising)...

If there would be an archetype for the "free thinker" David would be
meet that to a t, but it does make me wonder about necessary framing of
such "free critical enquiry" due social obligations or not ...

https://holmgren.com.au/writing/pandemic-brooding/ 

It would be great to hear other people's thoughts on this.

I also intrigued by martin's point of projecting depression, but I
suppose that's maybe better reserved for another thread ...

cheers,
jan

On 6/9/21 7:40 pm, martin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Interesting conversation...
>
> On 05/09/2021 18:31, John Hopkins wrote:
>
> I am very sorry to hear about your ailments and wish you all the best.
>
> Then,
> -- though I admittedly can sometimes also be caught in a moment of
> weakness and despair where I forget myself and utter statements with a
> dim, negative view of humanity
>
>  -- this, to my mind:
>
>> Humans have always had an oversized impact on local energy flows around
>> them (i.e., Pleistocene megafauna destruction)
>
>  is a dangerous fallacy of thought.
>
> It expresses a sad, self-defeating view (see footnote 1 and 2; and with
> regards to the speculative hypothesis of megafauna extinction see
> footnote 3).
>
> Importantly there are historical examples as well as contemporary
> movements, praxis and data testifying to quite the opposite: Complex
> human societies have had / can have a positive impact on the
> environment, enrich their habitat and increase biodiversity (see
> footnote 4).
>
> Whether in the form of Amazonian Dark Earths, regenerative agriculture,
> permaculture or other expressions of the human imagination from 'the
> other side of the anthropocene', human beings have the capacity to leave
> the world in 'a nicer state' tomorrow than it was yesterday. Not through
> quick technofixes nor dirty hacks, but through building cultural
> alliances with all the other beings in the complex web of life that
> sustains us - from soil ecologies and their microbes, insects and other
> beasts, through plants, trees and rivers to other mammals and everything
> in between.
>
> Indeed, transformative agroecology (see footnote 5) combined with
> regenerative agriculture possibly constitute the only reasonable,
> significant set of carbon sequestration (carbon negative) techniques
> available (see footnote 6) and has the useful side-effect of feeding
> humanity, regenerating immune systems and, all in all, delivering a
> healthy planet.
>
> It has been done, it can be done. It will be done if we all work towards
> it. War is over if you want it, extractive/dominator culture can end.
>
> It is, imho, worse than a waste of time to go on about all the examples
> of destructive human behaviour, rather than focusing on the hope- and
> joy-providing opposite.
>
> Shifting the discourse to the endless possibilities of
> more-than-sustainable social organisation will feed grassroots power
> structures and undermine totalitarian attitudes.
>
> The future is ours, because this land is ours in common.
>
> sincerely/martin
>
> ---
>
> Footnote 1: Sad because it sounds like depression projected, and sad
> because it feeds the power and agency of those who are into population
> control and the concomitant necessity of global rule from above; and of
> course it also helps push the corporate, hi-tech progress myth-based
> geoengineering fantasies that perpetuate the causes of the effects they
> purport to solve (/as Kolbert notes in 'Under a White Sky' on that
> issue, this is “..a book about people trying to solve problems created
> by people trying to solve problems”-
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/06/it-is-the-question-of-the-century-will-tech-solve-the-climate-crisis-or-make-it-worse
> ).
>
> Extractor/dominator culture probably needs this "bad humans" assumption
> to remain in place as a baseline of reality to justify their elitist
> model of society.
>
> --
>
> Footnote 2: On the population number "argument": the total fertility
> rate has peaked and the next challenge is likely how to manage
> increasingly smaller and older populations suffering from auto-immune
> conditions and cancer, resulting from poor diet, lack of movement, and
> the ubiquity of toxic air and drinking water. Please don't feed the
> Malthusian trolls.
> --
>
> Footnote 3: Invoking the speculative megafauna human-driven extinction
> hypothesis rests on just that: speculation, and it also has potential
> ove

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Joseph Rabie]

In “Face à Gaïa”, Bruno Latour states that we have to identify the 
irreconcilable enemy against whom we are at war. The enemy all point to here is 
capitalism, capitalists and the ravages that they cause.

Wars have been waged and lost against capitalism before. The USSR ultimately 
lost their’s, though according to Guy Debord in “La Société du Spectacle”, the 
Soviet regime simply proceeded to replace it with state capitalism - which has 
made it easy for the oligarchs to absorb. In China, communism and capitalism 
“coexist” in a delightful yin-yang, in which it is clear which of the two has 
the upper hand. In Israel, the kibbutzim have been privatised.

Peaceful, theatralized protests by ecological groups have limited effect, as 
Brian pointed out recently. More direct forms of action, such as the 
destruction of property, (like Richard Powers fictionalised in “The Overstory”) 
have generally been stamped out by repression, dismissed as “terrorism” to 
boot. There have been victories: projects have been stopped by public protest, 
but this has not put a dent in the thrust of capitalist “progress”.

One might argue that capitalism’s war has been going on for more than five 
centuries, though for many of the people writing on this list - who in all 
likelihood live comfortably and cannot really consider ourselves among the 
exploited - this is an abstract reality.

In capitalism’s war against the planet, capitalism can, ultimately, only lose. 
Though strictly speaking, calling it “war” is a misnomer, since as a metaphor 
for rapacious exploitation, the term is limited. Capitalism doesn’t intend to 
destroy anything, that’s just misfortunate collateral damage. One can imagine 
that the capitalists have a contingency plan - knowing the likely outcome - a 
plan that it is far more sophisticated than hunkering down in bunkers.

Beyond naming the enemy, planning for war raises a series of issues. What is 
the objective? Saving the planet seems a “reasonable” goal. What is the balance 
of forces between capitalism and its opponents? For the moment, the answer is 
measured in laughter or tears. What strategy might one bring, to what 
battlefield? If one is planning to win, this has to be better than hope…

Joe.



#  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: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism - (...always) look on the bright (regenerative) side...?

[martin]

Hello,

Interesting conversation...

On 05/09/2021 18:31, John Hopkins wrote:

I am very sorry to hear about your ailments and wish you all the best.

Then,
-- though I admittedly can sometimes also be caught in a moment of
weakness and despair where I forget myself and utter statements with a
dim, negative view of humanity

 -- this, to my mind:

> Humans have always had an oversized impact on local energy flows around
> them (i.e., Pleistocene megafauna destruction)


 is a dangerous fallacy of thought.

It expresses a sad, self-defeating view (see footnote 1 and 2; and with
regards to the speculative hypothesis of megafauna extinction see
footnote 3).

Importantly there are historical examples as well as contemporary
movements, praxis and data testifying to quite the opposite: Complex
human societies have had / can have a positive impact on the
environment, enrich their habitat and increase biodiversity (see
footnote 4).

Whether in the form of Amazonian Dark Earths, regenerative agriculture,
permaculture or other expressions of the human imagination from 'the
other side of the anthropocene', human beings have the capacity to leave
the world in 'a nicer state' tomorrow than it was yesterday. Not through
quick technofixes nor dirty hacks, but through building cultural
alliances with all the other beings in the complex web of life that
sustains us - from soil ecologies and their microbes, insects and other
beasts, through plants, trees and rivers to other mammals and everything
in between.

Indeed, transformative agroecology (see footnote 5) combined with
regenerative agriculture possibly constitute the only reasonable,
significant set of carbon sequestration (carbon negative) techniques
available (see footnote 6) and has the useful side-effect of feeding
humanity, regenerating immune systems and, all in all, delivering a
healthy planet.

It has been done, it can be done. It will be done if we all work towards
it. War is over if you want it, extractive/dominator culture can end.

It is, imho, worse than a waste of time to go on about all the examples
of destructive human behaviour, rather than focusing on the hope- and
joy-providing opposite.

Shifting the discourse to the endless possibilities of
more-than-sustainable social organisation will feed grassroots power
structures and undermine totalitarian attitudes.

The future is ours, because this land is ours in common.

sincerely/martin

---

Footnote 1: Sad because it sounds like depression projected, and sad
because it feeds the power and agency of those who are into population
control and the concomitant necessity of global rule from above; and of
course it also helps push the corporate, hi-tech progress myth-based
geoengineering fantasies that perpetuate the causes of the effects they
purport to solve (/as Kolbert notes in 'Under a White Sky' on that
issue, this is “..a book about people trying to solve problems created
by people trying to solve problems”-
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/06/it-is-the-question-of-the-century-will-tech-solve-the-climate-crisis-or-make-it-worse
).

Extractor/dominator culture probably needs this "bad humans" assumption
to remain in place as a baseline of reality to justify their elitist
model of society.

--

Footnote 2: On the population number "argument": the total fertility
rate has peaked and the next challenge is likely how to manage
increasingly smaller and older populations suffering from auto-immune
conditions and cancer, resulting from poor diet, lack of movement, and
the ubiquity of toxic air and drinking water. Please don't feed the
Malthusian trolls.
--

Footnote 3: Invoking the speculative megafauna human-driven extinction
hypothesis rests on just that: speculation, and it also has potential
overtones of human self-aggrandisement and belittling of the large
beasts; see for instance Brook and Bowman (2002) and Hocknull et al. (2020):

Brook and Bowman (2002): "...Understanding of the Pleistocene megafaunal
extinctions has been advanced recently by the application of simulation
models and new developments in geochronological dating. Together these
have been used to posit a rapid demise of megafauna due to over-hunting
by invading humans. However, we demonstrate that the results of these
extinction models are highly sensitive to implicit assumptions
concerning the degree of prey naivety to human hunters. In addition, we
show that in Greater Australia, where the extinctions occurred well
before the end of the last Ice Age (unlike the North American
situation), estimates of the duration of coexistence between humans and
megafauna remain imprecise. Contrary to recent claims, the existing data
do not prove the “blitzkrieg” model of overkill..." - from:

https://www.pnas.org/content/99/23/14624

Hocknull et al. (2020): "...Explanations for the Upper Pleistocene
extinction of megafauna from Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) remain
unresolved. Extinction hypotheses have 

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Sean Cubitt]

sorry to hear about the wrist injury John: hope the gardening's good.
On population: 1. if you're right, abandoning the one-child family policy may 
be the most significant political decision of the first part of the century - 
both the policy and its termination might appear autocratic?  2. is the problem 
the whole population or the fact that a tiny percentage have accumulated all 
the wealth and use it to launch rockets and otherwise consume resources at 
scales far beyond most people? The food problem could be sorted simply: eat the 
rich.

Gary: thanks - using socialism as shorthand for not-individualist was sloppy: 
de Sousa Santos is a good corrective: 'The hopeless fear of the powerless 
majorities stems from the fearless hope of the powerful minorities' he writes, 
and might be describing any tech trillionaire, whose optimism is warranted by 
their wealth. There's a maybe over-detailed argument to make whether this 
tech-optimism is hope or just planning - Bloch wrote the 'hope would not be 
hope if it could not be disappointed, the obverse of which is that hope is 
always for something utterly different but utterly unknowable -- which is part 
of de Sousa Santos' argument when he adds in his final lines the necessity 'for 
the future to become possible again'

Hope is the sense that a future other than this is possible: the politics of 
hope is making the conditions for its possibility - not, and I think this is 
the core of his critique of revolution and reform, a project, a projection, 
projecting present ideas and practices onto the future.

Mouffe and Rancière both argue that politics really occurs only when some part 
of the world that has been administered but never allowed to speak demands a 
voice. Today, migrants are not thinkable in the same terms as citizens: if we 
rebuild our systems to allow them to speak (vote, whatever) we have to rebuild 
fundamentally. If we begin to think that places, bioregions, reefs and oceans 
can no longer be administered without a voice, the challenge is even more 
profound (and takes us far beyond democracy/autocracy as the sole polarity in 
politics)

It's certainly true we also have to unveil the lie of discourses of freedom: we 
are ontologically ecological beings; and historically obliged to work in order 
to eat; as Galtung wrote 50 years ago, structural violence is measurable in the 
distance between potential and actuality: the structural racism of climate 
change, to return to John's point, not to mention the structural racism of 
pandemic vaccine politics, proxy wars, extraction industries, waste dumping and 
if Jon Beller's right of the entire computational network and its economy all 
demonstrate that freedom is at best the privilege of a tiny minority. That each 
of them, as Vincent indicates, is also prisoner of debt - the emblematic 
machinery for controlling the future under finance capital - shows how deeply 
the harness of consumer choice has worn in

making possible by conviviality, to make possible a commons (not to return to 
Eden): disappoinment would not be disappointment if it could not retain a germ 
of hope


Seán



From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
Sent: Monday, 6 September 2021 4:27 AM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 8

Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
nettime-l@mail.kein.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."


Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism (John Hopkins)
   2. Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism (Vincent Gaulin)


--

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2021 11:31:47 -0600
From: John Hopkins 


I would suggest that the starting point (contrary to your 'first step') is an
examination of the problem of human population numbers. Life consumes energy to
maintain itself. This fact cannot avoided. That consumption can be optimized and
minimized, but humans, in the process of engineering optimization, have
optimized some localized populations' consumption of energy to maximize their
viability, which ends up maximizing energy consumption.


*
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2021 11:08:17 +0100
From: Gary Hall 

Can socialism accommodate such a
nondualist, nonseperablist ontological framing? Or does it require
transforming socialism almost out of all recognition by imagining it
very differently? Which

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Michael H. Goldhaber]

More probably the shirt wearer was expressing himself ironically. But  maybe he 
couldn’t press it because he lacked an ironing board. Does everyone here lack 
one too?


Best,

Michael via iPhone, so please ecuse misteaks.

> On Sep 5, 2021, at 11:27 AM, Vincent Gaulin  
> wrote:
> 
> 
> --I literally saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear 
> you -- over the sound of my freedom." 
> 
> I think it's important to keep in mind that "speech acts" of this kind are 
> mimetic and consumption oriented, rather than arising from some kind of 
> self-made ethic. Just like on social media, shares, likes and retweets are 
> often purposefully obscured from their points of production. We have to ask 
> what type of life are these speakers wishing to defend? Is it material, as in 
> sitting on the couch watching internet streamed TV, or aspirational, as in 
> freedom from differing lifestyles and opinions?
> 
> The "new critique" beyond freedom and democracy needs a basis in something 
> other than speech acts, especially those arising out of the current consumer 
> market practices. The dominant mode of status quo consumerism, means 
> collective provisioning is driven by GIS market mapping and algorithmically 
> enhanced logistics. Suppliers, producers, and their financial backers, have 
> outsized power in shaping the wares and slogans of the (not so free) 
> marketplace of things and ideas. Where is the point of production of ideology 
> if not inside computer-supercharged corporate planning and social media 
> celebrity "influencer" cultures working in zig-zags to "renew" the same old, 
> otherwise stale, beyond washed up, state sponsored consumerism. Market 
> analytics is just a shiny new Divine Right of Kings for the corporate and 
> financial elite and their enablers in the new media and flash/rash political 
> landscape. 
> 
> I find it ironic that the same crowds that were so fearful of autocracy in 
> the Trump era (which we are arguably still in) are now questioning the 
> viability of the idea of democracy. Maybe I'm strawmanning here, but to me 
> this line of thinking smacks of class elitism and isn't non-human in the 
> cool, mystical academic way, but de-human in the sense that it discredits 
> other humans' faculties to discern future interests. 
> 
> What are the institutions through which more authentic and rooted means of 
> persuasion and collective decision making (especially provisioning) can be 
> built? How can we decouple ourselves from the computer enabled organizers of 
> the current market without leaving the reservation alienated and bitter?
> 
> To me it goes back to asking that man in the t-shirt about what couch he is 
> sitting on. What house he is in. Who he wishes he could be. Why does he want 
> the TV programming he wants? What is the root of his sense of loss? Then 
> asking his sister the same sort of things. How do we offer direct relief, 
> rather than shooting down folks' stamped-cotton memes and calling it poor 
> judgement? Most would say this is idealistic, but I think staking out 
> organizational aspirations that go beyond what is sayable to look at what is 
> immediately workable offer much more hope to humans and non-humans alike. 
> 
>> On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 12:15 PM Brian Holmes  
>> wrote:
>> I agree that the "absolute failure of the West" is rhetorical vagary. But 
>> the idea that central societal tenets concerning "freedom" and "democracy" 
>> must be subjected to theoretical and practical critique is not.
>> 
>> Currently one is free to extract fossil fuels, and also free to die in a 
>> flood or a forest fire. Yet the one who extracts (maybe a deep-sea drilling 
>> company registered in the Caymans) and the one who dies (maybe an immigrant 
>> in a basement apartment in New York) are not the same. If our theory of 
>> democracy worked, the extracting and the dying would both be legitimate 
>> because we "all" (or at least a majority of us) elected the lawmakers who 
>> set the conditions under which the fuels would be extracted (and the rains, 
>> rained, and the forests, scorched). So it would be our own damn fault. But 
>> in North America and Britain and Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere 
>> (not to say "the West"), for decades there has been no chance to subject 
>> this legitimacy to a theoretical and practical critique, because even if 
>> people with such intentions are elevated to power by elections, others 
>> immediately show up yelling about their freedom.
>> 
>> In the backwoods of Oregon, which is having a brief respite from the fires 
>> in order to become the worst site of the coronavirus epidemic, I literally 
>> saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over the 
>> sound of my freedom." That tee-shirt was the triumphant expression of 
>> decades and billions of dollars worth of corporate manipulation, including 
>> money direct from the Caymans. The same collective forces helped send a

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Vincent Gaulin]

--I literally saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear
you -- over the sound of my freedom."

I think it's important to keep in mind that "speech acts" of this kind are
mimetic and consumption oriented, rather than arising from some kind of
self-made ethic. Just like on social media, shares, likes and retweets are
often purposefully obscured from their points of production. We have to ask
what type of life are these speakers wishing to defend? Is it material, as
in sitting on the couch watching internet streamed TV, or aspirational, as
in freedom from differing lifestyles and opinions?

The "new critique" beyond freedom and democracy needs a basis in something
other than speech acts, especially those arising out of the current
consumer market practices. The dominant mode of status quo consumerism,
means collective provisioning is driven by GIS market mapping and
algorithmically enhanced logistics. Suppliers, producers, and their
financial backers, have outsized power in shaping the wares and slogans of
the (not so free) marketplace of things and ideas. Where is the point of
production of ideology if not inside computer-supercharged corporate
planning and social media celebrity "influencer" cultures working in
zig-zags to "renew" the same old, otherwise stale, beyond washed up, state
sponsored consumerism. Market analytics is just a shiny new Divine Right of
Kings for the corporate and financial elite and their enablers in the new
media and flash/rash political landscape.

I find it ironic that the same crowds that were so fearful of autocracy in
the Trump era (which we are arguably still in) are now questioning the
viability of the idea of democracy. Maybe I'm strawmanning here, but to me
this line of thinking smacks of class elitism and isn't non-human in the
cool, mystical academic way, but de-human in the sense that it discredits
other humans' faculties to discern future interests.

What are the institutions through which more authentic and rooted means of
persuasion and collective decision making (especially provisioning) can be
built? How can we decouple ourselves from the computer enabled organizers
of the current market without leaving the reservation alienated and bitter?

To me it goes back to asking that man in the t-shirt about what couch he is
sitting on. What house he is in. Who he wishes he could be. Why does he
want the TV programming he wants? What is the root of his sense of loss?
Then asking his sister the same sort of things. How do we offer direct
relief, rather than shooting down folks' stamped-cotton memes and calling
it poor judgement? Most would say this is idealistic, but I think staking
out organizational aspirations that go beyond what is sayable to look at
what is immediately workable offer much more hope to humans and non-humans
alike.

On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 12:15 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> I agree that the "absolute failure of the West" is rhetorical vagary. But
> the idea that central societal tenets concerning "freedom" and "democracy"
> must be subjected to theoretical and practical critique is not.
>
> Currently one is free to extract fossil fuels, and also free to die in a
> flood or a forest fire. Yet the one who extracts (maybe a deep-sea drilling
> company registered in the Caymans) and the one who dies (maybe an immigrant
> in a basement apartment in New York) are not the same. If our theory of
> democracy worked, the extracting and the dying would both be legitimate
> because we "all" (or at least a majority of us) elected the lawmakers who
> set the conditions under which the fuels would be extracted (and the rains,
> rained, and the forests, scorched). So it would be our own damn fault. But
> in North America and Britain and Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere
> (not to say "the West"), for decades there has been no chance to subject
> this legitimacy to a theoretical and practical critique, because even if
> people with such intentions are elevated to power by elections, others
> immediately show up yelling about their freedom.
>
> In the backwoods of Oregon, which is having a brief respite from the fires
> in order to become the worst site of the coronavirus epidemic, I literally
> saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over
> the sound of my freedom." That tee-shirt was the triumphant expression of
> decades and billions of dollars worth of corporate manipulation, including
> money direct from the Caymans. The same collective forces helped send a
> bunch of wing nuts to the US Capitol to rant about their individual freedom
> last January 6.
>
> The theoretical critique of freedom and democracy has not been adequately
> done, but the practical critique is moving ahead fast. When New York and
> environs suffer more damage and death from a hurricane than Louisiana does,
> you can expect an infrastructural response. But here's the rub: in the
> absence of a theoretical/practical critique of capitalist democracy

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[John Hopkins]

I tend to agree with you, Sean, about the huge problems caused by some threads 
of systems thinking and engineering that arose in the bowels of the 
Military-academic-industrial complex. However, there are other threads 
(i.e.,James Miller, Howard Odum) that have taken a far-wider view that 
acknowledges the primacy of observing and understanding the world around us, 
*before* any kind of action, as well as a deep understanding of *how* our 
species is affecting our surrounds.


I would suggest that the starting point (contrary to your 'first step') is an 
examination of the problem of human population numbers. Life consumes energy to 
maintain itself. This fact cannot avoided. That consumption can be optimized and 
minimized, but humans, in the process of engineering optimization, have 
optimized some localized populations' consumption of energy to maximize their 
viability, which ends up maximizing energy consumption.


Humans have always had an oversized impact on local energy flows around them 
(i.e., Pleistocene megafauna destruction). With the global human population 
pushing eight billion engineering can only fine-tune a local solution to a 
single issue *when the energy/resources are available*. If more is needed (it 
surely is!), there simply aren't the energy resources to solve all these 
engineering problems, period. (Not to mention that many of the solutions are 
firmly and necessarily rooted in the global petroleum infrastructure.)


As a faculty member of a hard-core engineering university, I hear solutions 
including the absurdity of asteroid-mining (for the resources to solve our 
climate change problems). These, along with most 'engineering' solutions are 
imho all ludicrous approaches when the elephant in the room is population. I do 
not expect that (global or even local) human institutions will ever address this 
issue in any meaningful way. This is, in part, because trying to *minimize* 
viability goes against all Life instincts, forces that are far deeper than any 
symbolic-idea-driven desires to 'help the planet'.


I think Gaia will eventually solve the human population issue, regardless of any 
actions we do or do not take, and that deep (geologic) time will note our 
presence in certain passing ways that will gradually fade within the crustal 
recycling of tectonics. Consider, for example, that the generation cycle of the 
hydrocarbons that we are so merrily burning is around 400 million years, there 
will be time for many more of those cycles in the overall planetary life.


What this says about individual, local processes defined by human life-spans is 
incomprehensible. I am in the initial process of re-wilding 13 acres of land 
that has seen 150 years of brutal agricultural exploitation in a region that has 
entered a megadrought. I have a large composting system going, but I also have 
an old house on the property that needs new siding and windows which are 
manufactured at great hydrocarbon cost. There are masses of invasive plant 
species on the property, and almost no native vegetation. My neighbors have 
large numbers of hydrocarbon-driven toys for leisure and for exploiting the 
environment. And there are many medium-sized (family) organic and non-organic 
farms and vineyards in the area. All the water for all the agriculture comes 
from snowfall on the surrounding mountains. That water is exploited by a complex 
physical infrastructure that requires burning substantial hydrocarbons to 
maintain. Not to mention that I am getting old and have limited embodied energy 
left.


Added to this are the layers and layers of complexity of the legal, economic, 
social, political, cultural symbolic systems driving most of the local human 
actions. These are the things that get symbolically addressed here w/in nettime, 
but it would seem that addressing (and reducing drastically) the population of 
humans would be the starting point for any effective action. I suspect that Gaia 
will address this as we can't seem to.


I think I am resigned to deep time at this point.

Sunday morning reflections. Now, out to work in a friend's vegetable garden, 
wincing from a torn rotator cuff, and hoping that cancer will not return too 
soon to see the next few seasons.


Cheers,
John

On 2021/09/04 16:40, Sean Cubitt wrote:
I'm a little nervous of earth-system science which has all the marks of the 
technological solution road that has become a major tool to replace climate 
change denial with the promise of technological solutions (and jam) tomorrow:

 Crutzen and Stoermer ended their paper introducing the term Anthropocene had
a similar call: 'An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead
of the global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards
global, sustainable, environmental management' - and it is management that is
the real outcome of claims of freedom - engineering as management is what got
us into this mess, and with the profit motive so much in the ascen

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Lichty, Patrick M]

I am in agreement with:
“that this accident must become our necessity, a necessity whose impure 
technological, but also social, economic and political conditions are alone 
what make possible the exercise of collective intelligence, belief, wisdom and 
decision. The temptation is always to say that freedom and democracy are the 
fundamental requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet the 
absolute failure of the West over the past two years means that these ideas 
must absolutely be subjected to critique, where the latter is never a 
denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’ limits"

 

I think is built from the post-WWII/post-Cold War mythology in which the 
Democratic Capitalist Neoliberal Military-Industrial complex and its excess of 
wealth borne from those conflicts became dogma for the future.  But that 
unchecked neoliberalism, along with a similarly unchecked Californian Ideology 
in creating a technocratic hyperplutocracy that created a faux algodemocracy 
through social media call ideology back into question. 

 

This may sound like a reductive questioning Western Democracy as if 1:  it has 
not had a morphology over history, and 2: it is homogenous throughout the West. 
Conversely, I have wound up in Facebook conversations that have devolved into 
epithets with personages like Baruch Gottleib who almost uncritically state 
China is the future, with its glittering cities, while I have met the Dungan 
and Uighyr who fled to Eastern Kyrgyzstan. From my standpoint, Stiegler’s 
observation of (American especially) democratic failure was seen clearly from 
my standpoint in Arabia, as Trump was deftly manipulated by much of Asia (which 
America does not comprehend, let alone understand) from MBS to Kim Joon Il, and 
the UK’s suicidal move towards Brexit. 

What has resulted is a dark molecule umbrella-ing much of Asia under Russia and 
China, with the latter engaging in financial colonialism in Cen tral Asia and 
Africa, such as the usurpation of the port of Djbouti and the new Silk Road 
initiative, signalling that America’s strong-arming against nations like Iran. 
Will work fiercely against its own interests.

 

What this screed attempts to illustrates the truth of the above, but then not 
being quick to castigate the West in favor of far more restrictive system(s). 
Social Media, in its necessity for more attention-capital, privileges the 
lunatic fringe under the framework of faux populism shaped by plutogratic 
Algorithmic manipulation.


What are the indices out of the predicament? Leadership, yes. Consensus – this 
assumes privilege and status for those with enough information to make a 
“saving” decision, which, of course, “seems” like the rational, logical dec 
ision, ignoring the age of disinformation.  

This comes back to leadership and vision and the ability to steer/command the 
resources of nearly 8 billion people, including a developing world that feels 
it has not gotten its spoils yet.  On the other hand, the result in not 
achieving this is the realm of the necropolitical, or merely moreso, as 
humanity may be in the position of a necessary decrease in order to survive. 

In the end, I agree that while democracy in its current forms have to be 
re-examined, the automatic alternative is NOT authoritarianism.  Perhaps the 
Dutch model, which assumes a certain sensibility not held throughout the world, 
or new paradigms, which will emerge in the coming decades. I agree what the 
Western paradigm must be questioned in its unsustainability, but at this time, 
it seems like no major paradigm is sustainable. 

 

I muse back again on Deleuze and Foucault and mechanisms orf power to 
critically interrogate the West without throwing the proverbial baby out with 
the democracy.

 

 

Patrick Lichty

website: http:://www.patricklichty.com

email: v...@voyd.com

instagram, twitter: @patlichty

 

 

 

From:  on behalf of Sean Cubitt 

Date: Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 4:45 PM
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org that this accident must become our necessity, a 
necessity whose impure technological, but also social, economic and political 
conditions are alone what make possible the exercise of collective 
intelligence, belief, wisdom and decision. The temptation is always to say that 
freedom and democracy are the fundamental requirements for making good 
collective decisions, and yet the absolute failure of the West over the past 
two years means that these ideas must absolutely be subjected to critique, 
where the latter is never a denunciation, but an interrogation of their 
‘pharmacological’ limits"" 
Subject: Re:  Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

 

thanks for circulating Patrice

 

there's a great piece responding to similar issues by Daniel Ross (aka 
Stiegler’s translator): 

https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened

 

a flavour:

"Anthropogenic climate change and the sy

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Lichty, Patrick M]

Sean wrote.

 engineering as management is what got us into this mess..

Exactly.
Common sense says the world wants to be free as in free beer

Or a free lunch, which doesn’t exist either.

 

Reciprocity is a better term, and the family of concepts around it: the 
commons, the social, a new socialism that embraces the non-human. My mother 
used to tell us to show some consideration - a basic decency that includes a 
way of living right and a principle of conviviality at the scale of 
cosmopolitan politics. 

 

Very good suggestion.

 
Patrick Lichty
website: http:://www.patricklichty.com

email: v...@voyd.com

instagram, twitter: @patlichty

 

 

 

From:  on behalf of Sean Cubitt 

Date: Saturday, September 4, 2021 at 5:41 PM
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

 

thanks for getting to the numb of it Brian

tho personally I'd cry off assembling democracy and freedom into a single 
object: democracy may well need a separate critique but the ideological seizure 
of 'freedom' has made it a dangerous word in need of critique - and better 
still alternatives

and I'm a little nervous of earth-system science which has all the marks of the 
technological solution road that has become a major tool to replace climate 
change denial with the promise of technological solutions (and jam) tomorrow: 
Crutzen and Stoermer ended their paper introducing the term Anthropocene had a 
similar call: 'An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of 
the global research and 

engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, 
environmental management' - and it is management that is the real outcome of 
claims of freedom - engineering as management is what got us into this mess, 
and with the profit motive so much in the ascendant, the chances of a system 
reliant on for-profit corporations – that failed utterly to make Luisiana 
sustainable after Katrina – being able to resolve planetary catastrophe are 
minimal.

Reciprocity is a better term, and the family of concepts around it: the 
commons, the social, a new socialism that embraces the non-human. My mother 
used to tell us to show some consideration - a basic decency that includes a 
way of living right and a principle of conviviality at the scale of 
cosmopolitan politics. 

The first step is to recognise the commonwealth of citizens, a democratic 
principle under attack; the second to recognise migrants as citizens - a step 
that the political parties of the wealthy have weaponised (Fortress Europe, 
trumpty-dumpty's Wall, the 'Pacific solution' which is neither of a solution or 
pacific). 

If - - and it's a big 'if' -- it is possible to actualise the actually existing 
demos politically, then democracy might thrive - but in a very different form. 

If -- and this is the biggest if -- it can become possible to recognise that 
there is a continuum between demos and ecology (to recall that fundamental 
feminist slogan Our Bodies Ourselves) - we may begin to build a demos that is 
truly social, common, like common sense, what Marx called the general 
intellect, but which has obviously been poisoned at the source when there is, 
as reported today, a rush of overdoses of horse-wormer in Oklahoma

The first victim of war is truth; the first victim of Fox-Q totalitarianism is 
common sense

Politics beyond sustainability, beyond maintaining capital at all costs, which 
is to say at the cost of everything requires consideration and the sense of the 
commons, common sense. 

Sitting on a wall, as every child knows, comes before a fall

Releasing common sense of this basic kind will not be easy but may perhaps make 
possible a future other than the perpetuity of debt, pandemic and climate 
fatalism which are the realities underpinning the consumer discipline of free 
will, free choice, free speech defined by the free market. 

Common sense says the world wants to be free as in free beer

 

 

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 

 

scub...@unimelb.edu.au

 

New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#

Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W

 

 

From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
Sent: Saturday, 4 September 2021 8:00 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 3 

 

Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
nettime-l@mail.kein.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit

https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/HwY4CMwvygsqYq8joCwv6Mp?domain=mx.kein.org
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
nettime-l-requ.

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Gary Hall]

andemic and climate fatalism which are the realities underpinning the 
consumer discipline of free will, free choice, free speech defined by 
the free market.

Common sense says the world wants to be free as in free beer


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

scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au# 
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#>


Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W <https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W>




*From:* nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org 
 on behalf of 
nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 

*Sent:* Saturday, 4 September 2021 8:00 PM
*To:* nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
*Subject:* nettime-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 3
Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
    nettime-l@mail.kein.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/HwY4CMwvygsqYq8joCwv6Mp?domain=mx.kein.org 
<http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l>

or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
    nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
    nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."


Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism (Brian Holmes)


--------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2021 11:12:56 -0500
From: Brian Holmes 
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

I agree that the "absolute failure of the West" is rhetorical vagary. But
the idea that central societal tenets concerning "freedom" and "democracy"
must be subjected to theoretical and practical critique is not.

Currently one is free to extract fossil fuels, and also free to die in a
flood or a forest fire. Yet the one who extracts (maybe a deep-sea 
drilling
company registered in the Caymans) and the one who dies (maybe an 
immigrant

in a basement apartment in New York) are not the same. If our theory of
democracy worked, the extracting and the dying would both be legitimate
because we "all" (or at least a majority of us) elected the lawmakers who
set the conditions under which the fuels would be extracted (and the 
rains,

rained, and the forests, scorched). So it would be our own damn fault. But
in North America and Britain and Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere
(not to say "the West"), for decades there has been no chance to subject
this legitimacy to a theoretical and practical critique, because even if
people with such intentions are elevated to power by elections, others
immediately show up yelling about their freedom.

In the backwoods of Oregon, which is having a brief respite from the fires
in order to become the worst site of the coronavirus epidemic, I literally
saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over
the sound of my freedom." That tee-shirt was the triumphant expression of
decades and billions of dollars worth of corporate manipulation, including
money direct from the Caymans. The same collective forces helped send a
bunch of wing nuts to the US Capitol to rant about their individual 
freedom

last January 6.

The theoretical critique of freedom and democracy has not been adequately
done, but the practical critique is moving ahead fast. When New York and
environs suffer more damage and death from a hurricane than Louisiana 
does,

you can expect an infrastructural response. But here's the rub: in the
absence of a theoretical/practical critique of capitalist democracy, the
response will be, not decarbonization, but enhanced protection for the 
most

well-off members of society.

The biological concept of symbiosis, and the integral evolutionary 
analysis

of earth system science that sprang from it, offer a viable theoretical
basis for practice (and a better one than the "accidental" theory of
mutation that Stiegler drew on). Rather than freedom, these ideas point to
interdependency as a necessary condition for continuing evolution. 
Stiegler

was well aware that in order for such a theoretical outlook to become
practical, a better idea of individuality had to be worked out, and space
had to be opened up for individual contributions to collective
transformation, in place of *absolutist* declarations of individual
freedom. There's the arena for cultural innovation today, imho.

Bri

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Sean Cubitt]

thanks for getting to the numb of it Brian
tho personally I'd cry off assembling democracy and freedom into a single 
object: democracy may well need a separate critique but the ideological seizure 
of 'freedom' has made it a dangerous word in need of critique - and better 
still alternatives
and I'm a little nervous of earth-system science which has all the marks of the 
technological solution road that has become a major tool to replace climate 
change denial with the promise of technological solutions (and jam) tomorrow: 
Crutzen and Stoermer ended their paper introducing the term Anthropocene had a 
similar call: 'An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of 
the global research and
engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, 
environmental management' - and it is management that is the real outcome of 
claims of freedom - engineering as management is what got us into this mess, 
and with the profit motive so much in the ascendant, the chances of a system 
reliant on for-profit corporations – that failed utterly to make Luisiana 
sustainable after Katrina – being able to resolve planetary catastrophe are 
minimal.
Reciprocity is a better term, and the family of concepts around it: the 
commons, the social, a new socialism that embraces the non-human. My mother 
used to tell us to show some consideration - a basic decency that includes a 
way of living right and a principle of conviviality at the scale of 
cosmopolitan politics.
The first step is to recognise the commonwealth of citizens, a democratic 
principle under attack; the second to recognise migrants as citizens - a step 
that the political parties of the wealthy have weaponised (Fortress Europe, 
trumpty-dumpty's Wall, the 'Pacific solution' which is neither of a solution or 
pacific).
If - - and it's a big 'if' -- it is possible to actualise the actually existing 
demos politically, then democracy might thrive - but in a very different form.
If -- and this is the biggest if -- it can become possible to recognise that 
there is a continuum between demos and ecology (to recall that fundamental 
feminist slogan Our Bodies Ourselves) - we may begin to build a demos that is 
truly social, common, like common sense, what Marx called the general 
intellect, but which has obviously been poisoned at the source when there is, 
as reported today, a rush of overdoses of horse-wormer in Oklahoma
The first victim of war is truth; the first victim of Fox-Q totalitarianism is 
common sense
Politics beyond sustainability, beyond maintaining capital at all costs, which 
is to say at the cost of everything requires consideration and the sense of the 
commons, common sense.
Sitting on a wall, as every child knows, comes before a fall
Releasing common sense of this basic kind will not be easy but may perhaps make 
possible a future other than the perpetuity of debt, pandemic and climate 
fatalism which are the realities underpinning the consumer discipline of free 
will, free choice, free speech defined by the free market.
Common sense says the world wants to be free as in free beer



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


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#

Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W



From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
Sent: Saturday, 4 September 2021 8:00 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 3

Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
nettime-l@mail.kein.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."


Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism (Brian Holmes)


--

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2021 11:12:56 -0500
From: Brian Holmes 
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

I agree that the "absolute failure of the West" is rhetorical vagary. But
the idea that central societal tenets concerning "freedom" and "democracy"
must be subjected to theoretical and practical critique is not.

Currently one is 

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Brian Holmes]

I agree that the "absolute failure of the West" is rhetorical vagary. But
the idea that central societal tenets concerning "freedom" and "democracy"
must be subjected to theoretical and practical critique is not.

Currently one is free to extract fossil fuels, and also free to die in a
flood or a forest fire. Yet the one who extracts (maybe a deep-sea drilling
company registered in the Caymans) and the one who dies (maybe an immigrant
in a basement apartment in New York) are not the same. If our theory of
democracy worked, the extracting and the dying would both be legitimate
because we "all" (or at least a majority of us) elected the lawmakers who
set the conditions under which the fuels would be extracted (and the rains,
rained, and the forests, scorched). So it would be our own damn fault. But
in North America and Britain and Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere
(not to say "the West"), for decades there has been no chance to subject
this legitimacy to a theoretical and practical critique, because even if
people with such intentions are elevated to power by elections, others
immediately show up yelling about their freedom.

In the backwoods of Oregon, which is having a brief respite from the fires
in order to become the worst site of the coronavirus epidemic, I literally
saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over
the sound of my freedom." That tee-shirt was the triumphant expression of
decades and billions of dollars worth of corporate manipulation, including
money direct from the Caymans. The same collective forces helped send a
bunch of wing nuts to the US Capitol to rant about their individual freedom
last January 6.

The theoretical critique of freedom and democracy has not been adequately
done, but the practical critique is moving ahead fast. When New York and
environs suffer more damage and death from a hurricane than Louisiana does,
you can expect an infrastructural response. But here's the rub: in the
absence of a theoretical/practical critique of capitalist democracy, the
response will be, not decarbonization, but enhanced protection for the most
well-off members of society.

The biological concept of symbiosis, and the integral evolutionary analysis
of earth system science that sprang from it, offer a viable theoretical
basis for practice (and a better one than the "accidental" theory of
mutation that Stiegler drew on). Rather than freedom, these ideas point to
interdependency as a necessary condition for continuing evolution. Stiegler
was well aware that in order for such a theoretical outlook to become
practical, a better idea of individuality had to be worked out, and space
had to be opened up for individual contributions to collective
transformation, in place of *absolutist* declarations of individual
freedom. There's the arena for cultural innovation today, imho.

Brian


On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 12:14 AM Andreas Broeckmann 
wrote:

> please (Daniel Ross), define "absolute failure (of the West)".
>
> -a
>
> ps: i suggest to leave room, in this definition, for failures of yet
> other proportions.
>
> pps: looks like adjectives are generally up for grabs these days and
> might become redundant rubble, if not signifiers of the opposites, like
> "precise(ly)" in many philosophical discourses.
>
>
> Am 02.09.21 um 23:44 schrieb Sean Cubitt:
> > thanks for circulating Patrice
> >
> > there's a great piece responding to similar issues byDaniel Ross (aka
> > Stiegler’s translator):
> >
> >
> https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened
> > <
> https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened
> >
> >
> >
> > a flavour:
> > "Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is
> > associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which
> > we are confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency
> > depends on recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a
> > necessity whose impure technological, but also social, economic and
> > political conditions are alone what make possible the exercise of
> > collective intelligence, belief, wisdom and decision. The temptation is
> > always to say that freedom and democracy are the fundamental
> > requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet the
> > /absolute/ failure of the West over the past two years means that these
> > ideas must /absolutely/ be subjected to critique, where the latter is
> > /never/ a denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’
> > limits"
> >
> > seán
> #  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:
>
#  distributed via : no commer

Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Andreas Broeckmann]

please (Daniel Ross), define "absolute failure (of the West)".

-a

ps: i suggest to leave room, in this definition, for failures of yet 
other proportions.


pps: looks like adjectives are generally up for grabs these days and 
might become redundant rubble, if not signifiers of the opposites, like 
"precise(ly)" in many philosophical discourses.



Am 02.09.21 um 23:44 schrieb Sean Cubitt:

thanks for circulating Patrice

there's a great piece responding to similar issues byDaniel Ross (aka 
Stiegler’s translator):


https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened 




a flavour:
"Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is 
associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which 
we are confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency 
depends on recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a 
necessity whose impure technological, but also social, economic and 
political conditions are alone what make possible the exercise of 
collective intelligence, belief, wisdom and decision. The temptation is 
always to say that freedom and democracy are the fundamental 
requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet the 
/absolute/ failure of the West over the past two years means that these 
ideas must /absolutely/ be subjected to critique, where the latter is 
/never/ a denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’ 
limits"


seán

#  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: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Sean Cubitt]

thanks for circulating Patrice

there's a great piece responding to similar issues by Daniel Ross (aka 
Stiegler’s translator):

https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened

a flavour:
"Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is 
associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which we are 
confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency depends on 
recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a necessity whose 
impure technological, but also social, economic and political conditions are 
alone what make possible the exercise of collective intelligence, belief, 
wisdom and decision. The temptation is always to say that freedom and democracy 
are the fundamental requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet 
the absolute failure of the West over the past two years means that these ideas 
must absolutely be subjected to critique, where the latter is never a 
denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’ limits"

seán


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


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#

Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W





The comprehensive crisis of neoliberalism may have unleashed creative 
intellectual energy even at the once-dead centre of politics. But an 
intellectual crisis does not a new era make. If it is energising to discover 
that we can afford anything we can actually do, it also puts us on the spot. 
What can and should we actually do? Who, in fact, is the we?

As Britain, the US and Brazil demonstrate, democratic politics is taking on 
strange and unfamiliar new forms. Social inequalities are more, not less 
extreme. At least in the rich countries, there is no collective countervailing 
force. Capitalist accumulation continues in channels that continuously multiply 
risks. The principal use to which our newfound financial freedom has been put 
are more and more grotesque efforts at financial stabilisation. The antagonism 
between the west and China divides huge chunks of the world, as not since the 
cold war. And now, in the form of Covid, the monster has arrived. The 
Anthropocene has shown its fangs ? on an as yet modest scale. Covid is far from 
being the worst of what we should expect ? 2020 was not the full alert. If we 
are dusting ourselves off and enjoying the recovery, we should reflect. Around 
the world the dead are unnumbered, but our best guess puts the figure at 10 
million. Thousands are dying every day. And 2020 was a wake-up call.

Adapted from Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World?s Economy by Adam Tooze, 
published by Allen Lane on 7 September

-- next part --
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: 


--

#  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

End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 1
*

#  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:

Adam Tooze: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[patrice riemens]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/02/covid-and-the-crisis-of-neoliberalism


Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

by Adam Tooze https://www.theguardian.com/profile/adam-tooze
The Guardian, Thursday 2 Sep 2021



If one word could sum up the experience of 2020, it would be disbelief. Between 
Xi Jinping’s public acknowledgment of the coronavirus outbreak on 20 January 
2020, and Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States 
precisely a year later, the world was shaken by a disease that in the space of 
12 months killed more than 2.2 million people and rendered tens of millions 
severely ill. Today the official death tolls stands at 4.51 million 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51235105 . The likely figure for excess deaths 
is more than twice that number. The virus disrupted the daily routine of 
virtually everyone on the planet, stopped much of public life, closed schools, 
separated families, interrupted travel and upended the world economy.

To contain the fallout, government support for households, businesses and 
markets took on dimensions not seen outside wartime. It was not just by far the 
sharpest economic recession experienced since the second world war, it was 
qualitatively unique. Never before had there been a collective decision, 
however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down. 
It was, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put it, “a crisis like no 
other 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/we-are-living-through-the-first-economic-crisis-of-the-anthropocene
 ”.

Even before we knew what would hit us, there was every reason to think that 
2020 might be tumultuous. The conflict between China and the US was boiling up. 
A “new cold war” was in the air. Global growth had slowed seriously in 2019. 
The IMF worried about the destabilising effect that geopolitical tension might 
have on a world economy that was already piled high with debt. Economists 
cooked up new statistical indicators to track the uncertainty that was dogging 
investment. The data strongly suggested that the source of the trouble was in 
the White House.
The US’s 45th president, Donald Trump 
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump , had succeeded in turning 
himself into an unhealthy global obsession. He was up for reelection in 
November and seemed bent on discrediting the electoral process even if it 
yielded a win. Not for nothing, the slogan of the 2020 edition of the Munich 
Security Conference – the Davos for national security types – was 
“Westlessness”.

Apart from the worries about Washington, the clock on the Brexit 
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/eu-referendum  negotiations was running 
out. Even more alarming for Europe as 2020 began was the prospect of a new 
refugee crisis. In the background lurked both the threat of a final grisly 
escalation in Syria’s civil war and the chronic problem of underdevelopment. 
The only way to remedy that was to energise investment and growth in the global 
south. The flow of capital, however, was unstable and unequal. At the end of 
2019, half the lowest-income borrowers in sub-Saharan Africa were already 
approaching the point at which they could no longer service their debts.

The pervasive sense of risk and anxiety that hung around the world economy was 
a remarkable reversal. Not so long before, the west’s apparent triumph in the 
cold war, the rise of market finance, the miracles of information technology, 
and the widening orbit of economic growth appeared to cement the capitalist 
economy as the all-conquering driver of modern history. In the 1990s, the 
answer to most political questions had seemed simple: “It’s the economy, 
stupid.” As economic growth transformed the lives of billions, there was, 
Margaret Thatcher liked to say, “no alternative”. That is, there was no 
alternative to an order based on privatisation, light-touch regulation and the 
freedom of movement of capital and goods. As recently as 2005, Britain’s 
centrist prime minister Tony Blair could declare that to argue about 
globalisation 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/14/globalisation-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-idea-that-swept-the-world
  made as much sense as arguing about whether autumn should follow summer.

By 2020, globalisation and the seasons were very much in question. The economy 
had morphed from being the answer to being the question. A series of deep 
crises – beginning in Asia in the late 90s and moving to the Atlantic financial 
system in 2008, the eurozone in 2010 and global commodity producers in 2014 – 
had shaken confidence in market economics. All those crises had been overcome, 
but by government spending and central bank interventions that drove a coach 
and horses through firmly held precepts about “small government” and 
“independent” central banks. The crises had been brought on by speculation, and 
the scale of the interventions necessary to stabilise them had been