Re: Technopolitics of the future
Felix Stalder wrote about David Harvey's idea of separate but interrelated "activity spheres": "One cannot understand the shape and dynamics of the state without its relation to capital and vice-versa, or, increasingly, without eco-system pressures. While these domains are related, they also follow their own dynamics, but in that movement, they transform the others as well, or are held back by them. [...] The task, it seems, is to bring these bits and pieces, the cultural, the technocratic and segments of the economy, in such a relationship they can pull the rest into a different direction, and phasing out those sectors, particularly of the economy, that cannot or do not want to adapt." Felix, I agree that David Harvey's idea of distinct but interacting 'activity spheres' is the best way to track and understand change in capitalist democracies. I haven't listened to the recent lecture, but Harvey developed the idea at least a decade ago, in both The Enigma of Capital (the chapter "Capital Evolves") and A Companion to Marx's Capital (the chapter "What Technology Reveals"). I often used the image of coevolving spheres to introduce the Three Crises seminars, because it's close to the cybernetic concept of circular causality within complex adaptive systems. Harvey writes that "Uneven development between and among the elements produces contingency in human evolution (in much the same way that unpredictable mutations produce contingency in Darwinian theory)." And he adds: "The danger for social theory is to see one of the elements as determinant of all the others." Of course when you get close to it there are difficulties. First, how do you define the broad categories, and how do you sift through actual phenomena to fill each category with relevant content (i.e. particular technologies, production processes, organizational forms, regulatory systems, consumption norms, political ideologies, cultural trends, etc.)? And then how do you then interrelate these actual phenomena, in order to track and predict changes in the entire system? Sociologists typically do it by setting up tables where specific and seemingly disparate contents are presented as the elements of a system, which in time gives way to another system, with a different arrangement of contents, after some kind of break or crisis (cf Freeman and Louca's table from The Economics of Industrial Innovation, excerpt here: https://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/1st_session.pdf, p. 8). The approach is a bit clunky, but I learned a lot from it. Since the 1990s, computers have opened up the possibility for agent-based modeling of change in social-ecological systems (https://sci-hub.se/10.1002/wcc.647). In these models, the production processes of certain environmental phenomena, like CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, are categorized and quantified as rigorously as possible; and then, specific policy choices or cultural trends affecting one or more human populations are fed into the system, to see how the environmental outputs change. It's extremely interesting and rhetorically effective too, as recent IPCC reports have shown. However I have not yet seen an agent-based model that can represent the dynamics of what Felix calls a "total social crisis." Something like Adam Tooze's seriously wonky Chartbook, dedicated to analyzing specific elements of what he calls "the polycrisis," is still a better way to grasp technopolitical dynamics (https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-165-polycrisis-thinking ). The lack of an intuitive representation is the biggest problem. Can the citizens of capitalist democracies even see what's going on? Biden inaugurated the current administration by talking about "cascading crises," and has gone on to perform a number of coordinated interventions on system dynamics, all of which constitute an attempt to deliberately set up the next technopolitical paradigm. One of these is to spur the electrification of transportation by means of research funding (especially batteries), the construction of supporting infrastructure (transmission lines, charging stations) and tax incentives for both producers and consumers. These production policies are correlated with ideological and cultural outreach to minority groups, elements of the white working classes and highly educated progressives, all of which have to be added to the urban middle class vote in order to retain political power. Finally, in an attempt to reshape the international environment, the administration has pursued the economic decoupling from China that was started by Trump, and it has used the Ukraine war to rebuild the Nato alliance system in view, not only of the current proxy war with Russia, but also as a way to push back against Chinese expansionism. If we could see all this as a comprehensive policy in the face of a total social-ecological crisis, then it would be possible to ask questions and demand reorientations - that is, actually engage in the political p
Re: Technopolitics of the future
On 07/11/2022 18:59, Felix Stalder wrote: In the 20th century, in the West, there have been, as far as I can see, three ways of reacting to such 'total crises'. Fascism, Keynesian and 'war efforts'. For 6-7000 years the same approach to the basic social metabolism (i.e. food systems) has been in place in what is generally called states: extractivism instantiated on simple principles: Central command and control of territories for the production of grain, based on the most destructive technology ever invented, the plough, and enslavement (increasingly combined with wage slavery or human resources, if you want), as well as taxation and debt. When the soil communities finally fully collapse, as a consequence erosion and loss of structural complexity, then the human societies collapse. It has taken about 250 years, more or less, every time, as David Montgomery has shown. So, for argument's sake, let's say modern European state-based civilisation began with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Add to that 250 years and you get to 1898. It would all have been over by then, if not petrochemical fertilizers had been invented and, more or less, perfected by the end of that period. In other words, oil saved modernity from collapse. It has been petrochemically borrowed time since. With extractivism at the heart of operations, the rest is incidental: class society, colonialism and so on. Discussing the finer details within any given civilisation is merely a distraction, a brain candy look on specificities, which hides the logic at play - although it might pay for a career as an intellectual, expounding sophisticated views on the colours and cuts of the emperor's clothes. Plough produced grains are at the heart of it all: relatively non-perishable, countable and therefore easily taxable and functional as a currency. The original currency. Money is merely virtual grain. Which can be taken to further levels of abstraction in financial systems. ... .. . Yes, a broken record. --- -- - # 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: Technopolitics of the future
On 27.10.22 20:50, Brian Holmes wrote: Indeed. The point is now to think those politics, and make their possibilities recognizable. I think it's pretty obvious that we are living in a period that is characterized by what one could call, with a nod to Durkheim, "total social crises". Meaning, they are not longer restricted to a single sphere -- so neatly separated in the modern liberal thinking -- but play out across the full-range of social domains. Thus any analysis needs to able to understand their interplay. But what are these domains? David Harvey's recent talk on "Marx’s Historical Materialism" http://davidharvey.org/2022/01/new-podcast-david-harveys-anti-capitalist-chronicles summarizes that very clearly, differentiating among seven sets of relations (though there is more than one way to slice the pie): - technology - nature - relations of (re)production (waged and unwaged labor) - mental conceptions - relations of everyday life - political (class) relations - and systems of governance. All these sets have what Marx calls a "metabolic relation" to each other, meaning they are dependent on one another and their concrete form can only be understood to through their interdependence. One cannot understand the shape and dynamics of the state without its relation to capital and vice-versa, or, increasingly, without eco-system pressures. While these domains are related, they also follow their own dynamics, but in that movement, they transform the others as well, or are held back by them. Geo-egineering, for example, is a technological response to eco-system pressures in order to preserve relations of productions and class relations. Black Lives Matter aims to transform mental conceptions in order to dismantal racist/colonialist systems of governance. Take, for example, the pandemic. It's zoonotic origin indicates a deep problem with our relations to nature. In response, massive technological development (mRNA vaccines, deepening of digitization etc) was coordinated by the government. At the same time, changes in everyday life (lockdown, masking, 'distancing', etc) were introduced, and mental conceptions started to shift. Of course, a massive economic crisis could only be averted by government intervention and the boundaries between productive and reproductive labor shifted. While you could say the feedback loop built into the "metabolic relations to nature" triggered the pandemic, it's actual dynamics can only be understood by taking into account the dynamic relations between the different domains. The relation between the state and capital was evident both in the state's willingness to finance the vaccines, and in it's commitment to enforce patent monopolies. The importance of mental conceptions became evident in the public reactions to the vaccines. The point is, one cannot reduce on sphere to the other. There is no structure - superstructure relationship. Neoliberalism (or liberalism more generally) is ideologically unable to address such total phenomena, because of its constitutive commitment to separating the domains. In the 20th century, in the West, there have been, as far as I can see, three ways of reacting to such 'total crises'. Fascism, Keynesian and 'war efforts'. At the moment, all three approaches to 'total politics' are bein persued at the same time. The fascist writing is on the wall, it's, at the core, an us-vs-them zero sum game. "We" prosper because "they" suffer. The green new deal is a modernized form of Keynesianism, but more holistic (or 'total') by focussing on the interrelation between all the domains. What Europe is trying to do is a kind of 'war economy', in relation to the actual war but also as a way to speed up the energy transition. While I agree with the direction, I doubt that a technocratic approach can work, not the least because it cannot shape many of the domains that are actively involved shaping the problem. If people freaked out because of a vaccine that was perceived being forced top-down, just wait for the energy restrictions imposed. But then again, the transformation of the mental conceptions, the understanding of a transformed relationship to nature, are also quite far developed. The task, it seems, is to bring these bit and pieces, the cultural, the technocratic and segments of the economy, in such a relationship they can pull the rest into a different direction, and phasing out these sectors, particularly of the economy, that cannot or do not want to adapt. -- | http://felix.openflows.com | | for secure communication, please use signal | # 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 ma
Re: Technopolitics of the future
Hi all, Re: Technopolitics of the future ( in the "possible follow-ups" category ... haha ! ) thx for the comments... and just to clarify... The XLterrestrials' analysis of *Guineapigdom* is an attempt to analyze ALL technological environments in the throes and whims and viciousness and machinations of predatory corporate krapitalism. Perhaps we can call it *The Big Technosphere*, as the idiotic + elitist escapist route, which is almost sure to collapse in on itself, b/c it has no real plan for dealing with the ecological crises. And much less all the ethical crises which comes along with them. A tunnel to nowhere, a distraction... like a Mars Tourism Industry. There are absolutely important and urgent things to address in terms of pandemic politics, Big Pharma and the directions of product-oriented health industries, and very much look forward to the Covid Reader which will come out of the Utrecht work. And others' work on these topics. And mp's questions also raise some huge unavoidable questions ! But for us, we are currently working on a new edition of our CiTiZEN KiNO on a theme of "organisms vs. automatons - revisited"... to take a step back and try and look at the bigger picture of our relationships to technology. Sociological, anthropological views and perhaps with a bit of art + social sci-fi elements... in the hopes that we can have some import on public understanding and possible responses to precisely a "technopolitics" and "anthropocene" that is brought up here in this thread... But which in our view has some serious omissions. For us, Anthropocene narratives very much relate to a large part of the Guineapigdom. A major factor in "The Great Social Adjustment" ( taking a term from the anti-globalization movements ) behavioral patterns and agendas, missteps and/or horrific acts with criminal + genocidal implications. Romain Felli's work points out ... >How capitalism wants us to adapt to climate change rather than stop it /The Great Adaptation/ ( 2021 ) tells the story of how scientists, governments and corporations have tried to deal with the challenge that climate change poses to capitalism by promoting adaptation to its consequences, rather than combating its causes. Since the 1970s, neoliberal economists and ideologues have used climate change as an argument for creating more “flexibility” in society, for promoting more market-based solutions to environmental and social questions. This book unveils the political economy of this potent movement, showing how some powerful actors are thriving in the face of dangerous climate change and even making a profit out of it. < https://www.versobooks.com/books/3797-the-great-adaptation ... Thus Anthropocene narratives could be said to have switched from WARNINGS (Crutzen) to the new irreversible + Inevitable TECHNOSPHERE DESTINY of MANkind, which should be translated to The Inhuman Unkind... and/or... perpetrators of mass extinction. Or the Anthrop directions were actually aligned with industry agendas from the very beginning ! ( "Welcome to the Anthropocene" was our first media encounter w/ the theme in c. 2012?, a slick NGO clip from Planet Under Pressure, which was essentially terrible analysis attributing it all to WE HUMANS, rather than malignant industries and treacherous operating systems. ) ... Institutionally-funded conferences of the Anthrop topics rarely keep pace with these kinds of ( outsider ) critical investigations. Another book we picked up in our research for this project: Ending the Anthropocene - Essays on Activism in the age of collapse from Lieven De Cautier ... Won't have time atm to absorb or reflect on Brian's latest addition to the conversation. Sure there's plenty of fascinating + important things in that. ... all the best, podinski p.s. a small cinematic anecdotal addendum one of the films we use in our latest C-KINO is Boots Riley's SURREALIST BLACK COMEDY ... which was pre-pandemic... from 2018. great art has a way of being way ahead of the actual technodystopias on the ground ! :) plot excerpt: Cassius "Cash" Green is invited to a party with ( Silicon-Valley-esque ) WorryFree CEO Steve Lift, where he is goaded into rapping for the predominantly white guests. In a private meeting, Lift offers Cash a powdered substance which Cash snorts, believing it is cocaine. Looking for the bathroom, Cash discovers ( a backroom ) where shackled half-horse, half-human hybrids beg him for help. Lift explains that WorryFree plans to make their workers stronger, more obedient, and thus more profitable by transforming them into hybrid "Equisapiens" through snorting a gene-modifying powder. On 25/10/22 12:00, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote: > Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to > nettime-l@mail.kein.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the
Re: Technopolitics of the future
On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 4:03 AM Felix Stalder wrote: > > there is now a collective awareness of the reality of the Anthropocene. > And this is a massive shift on collective awareness over a very short > period. It makes a wide-range of previously unthinkable politics possible. > > Indeed. The point is now to think those politics, and make their possibilities recognizable. Here's the key: Economic turmoil amidst global political and military crisis sets the stage for a reorganization of technological society. The political and military crisis results from structural inequalities accumulated over the last forty years. The economic upheaval was brought on by the pandemic, then intensified by the Ukraine war. The reorganization of society has begun, and various bids for its fulfillment are on the table. But recognizing the current state of affairs is crucial, because there's no certainty which bid will triumph, or by which dramatic reversals a few of the early, shot-in-the-dark ideas will unfold into daylight. In particular there is no certainty that the world will avoid an all-out conflict, or that individual national societies will avoid fascist regression. Most people on this list saw something vaguely similar happen before, in the 1990s when the Internet emerged onto the stock markets and a rapid reorganization of global social relations began. However that period was relatively benign, even utopian. This one is violent and definitive. It's destroying the current order. Before its economic capacities have been spent, the network paradigm of the Nineties is running into every one of the contradictions that its market valuation suppressed for decades. So forget your mantras of disruption. Politics has taken over from Silicon Valley, to become the major driver of change in the twenty-first century. The global economic context is one of strong but threatened growth under new rules. French economist Cederic Durand is right to trace the new rulesets back back to the massive central-bank recapitalization of private financial institutions after 2008 (1). These unprecedented injections of freshly created money gave the state a degree of control over the economy that had not been available since the 1960s. To be sure, the newfound power remained sterile until 2021, because all the capital created by the central banks was delivered only to the financial sector. The pandemic bailouts broke that pattern. They raised the possibility that state-funded investment in particular industries could be used to reconfigure the international balance of power, jump-start the energy transition, and experiment with direct support for struggling families, classes, economic sectors and regions. Having taken over neoliberal finance and placed it on life-support in the post-2008 period, governments now made bold to direct particular sectors of the economy. In this way the pandemic bailouts betrayed the return of economic management, with even greater tasks awaiting once the virus was under control. The return of the state is difficult for people to see, so accustomed are we to the reality and ideology of a neoliberal world largely directed by corporate CEOs and even individual financiers. What's more, over the past century the social classes traditionally represented by the left - industrial workers, public servants and racial minorities - have been deeply transformed by education and social mobility, constituting a new urban cognitariat that has reaped the benefits of the net economy, as well as a precariat that has gained broad cultural freedoms and even some wage concessions. This has set up the conditions for a lot of confusion on the left. For example, contemporary anarchy has always shared something fundamental with neoliberalism: namely, the denial of large-scale collective agency through formal organization. Collective agency is massively denied at the exact moment when clearly identifiable actors are in the process of deploying it. This is really a frogs-in-the-boiling-pot scenario, and there is some doubt as to whether people will even realize what's happening before they're already cooked. Intellectuals should get their act together and analyze the present situation, before it's over and a new order sets in. Here I'll list the larger bids to reshape world order, basically in order of appearance since 2008: -- The Chinese Belt-and-Road infrastructure program, which is a bid to escape capital overaccumulation, stagnation and popular revolt through a material expansion of the productive network. -- Russia's Crimea invasion and current Ukraine war: an attempt to create a Eurasian political-economic sphere based on a Moscow-Beijing alliance, with a corresponding reduction of Western monetary, military and commercial power. -- Orban's consolidation of power in Hungary since 2010: a classically fascist attempt to use religion and nationalism as justifications for interest-group profiteering, with a larger strategic aim of r
Re: Technopolitics of the future
> As such as we can theorise that we are now all colonial subjects - whoever, > wherever - and that in fact pharma-capital now primarily experiments on > subjects in the home countries, such as the Pfizer-styled argument about > vaccine apartheid entails: testing and trying was tested and tried on > subjects in poor countries, now testing and trying is universal and it has > become understood and perceived to be a privilege to be allowed to donate > your body to clinical experiments. Yes - and this what I also tried to communicate with a pandemic politics call for papers last year, remember - for which I got shot down by most of you? Nice to see this list is finally somewhat getting back to its critical senses. Cheers, Ingrid. -Original Message- From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org On Behalf Of mp Sent: maandag 24 oktober 2022 15:16 To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org Subject: Re: Technopolitics of the future On 24/10/2022 12:56, podinski wrote: > re: mRNA developments > > One really shouldn't be surprised by these dismal achievements to " > hack the body" and " under the skin surveillance" Was/is mRNA a scientific achievement or a political measure, bypassing already/anyway rather weak (read: corrupt) approval procedures of medicine? Anyone saw or read Dopesick? -- "Double the dose" sounds an awful lot like "booster campaigns". Here's a Cambridge University science outreach programme writing in 2018: "...There is still a lot of work to be done before mRNA vaccines can become standard treatments, in the meantime, we need a better understanding of their potential side effects, and more evidence of their long term efficacy..". https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna-vaccines How do you build "long term evidence" in less than three years? Is the scientific breakthrough a time machine? Here's Adam Fejerskov's angle on paradigmatic changes, in: 'The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and the New Experimental Movement', Oxford University Press 2022 https://www.diis.dk/en/experts/adam-moe-fejerskov Page 2: "...Throughout the book, we will meet at least four main protagonists, together making up the core of the movement: philanthropists, economists, pharmas, and humanitarians. Private foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation experiment with new technologies and radical change as they test innovative toilets or condoms or attempt to alter social norms in poor communities, basing their actions on what they see as objective models of change emerging from experiments, reducing the messy real world to formulae. Pharmaceutical companies have moved their experiments with new drugs to ‘emerging markets’ that provide abundant human subjects ready to partake in clinical trials to overcome diseases for which they often cannot afford treatment, pushing both experimental methodologies and stabilizing experimental practices as everyday care. The randomista economists likewise conduct randomized controlled trials and similar methodologies brought in from the natural sciences to experiment with solutions for social problems, driven by similar scientific desires of reducing complex realities to a set of logical causal chains. Finally, humanitarian actors, including private charities and United Nations (UN) organizations, pursue what they see as radical and innovative approaches to saving lives in disasters and emergencies through new technologies, from testing cargo drones and big data, to the registration and ordering of refugees through biometric data, iris scans, and blockchains- this is an introduction of emerging technologies that essentially functions as experimentation...". The book was written before and during the pandemic, where of course "the lab" grew much bigger and the number of experimental subjects is now rather large: "...68% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. 12.76 billion doses have been administered globally, and 3.26 million are now administered each day. 22.7% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose...". https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations As such as we can theorise that we are now all colonial subjects - whoever, wherever - and that in fact pharma-capital now primarily experiments on subjects in the home countries, such as the Pfizer-styled argument about vaccine apartheid entails: testing and trying was tested and tried on subjects in poor countries, now testing and trying is universal and it has become understood and perceived to be a privilege to be allowed to donate your body to clinical experiments. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
Re: Technopolitics of the future
On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 11:00:44AM +0200, Felix Stalder wrote: apps etc are more or less the same than five years ago. In response, lots of VC-capital is funding blockchain technologies, which, so far, have proven completely useless. A real dead-end. They're very good for scamming people, though. Someone must have though "Ponzi schemes are really ripe for disruption", and here we are. It sounds really sophisticated, and no one wants to say that it's difficult to understand because they don't want to appear stupid. Cue all the articles in the mainstream press peddling this nonsense. It can't go to 0 quick enough. Cheers, -- José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.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:
Re: Technopolitics of the future
On 24/10/2022 12:56, podinski wrote: re: mRNA developments One really shouldn't be surprised by these dismal achievements to " hack the body" and " under the skin surveillance" Was/is mRNA a scientific achievement or a political measure, bypassing already/anyway rather weak (read: corrupt) approval procedures of medicine? Anyone saw or read Dopesick? -- "Double the dose" sounds an awful lot like "booster campaigns". Here's a Cambridge University science outreach programme writing in 2018: "...There is still a lot of work to be done before mRNA vaccines can become standard treatments, in the meantime, we need a better understanding of their potential side effects, and more evidence of their long term efficacy..". https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna-vaccines How do you build "long term evidence" in less than three years? Is the scientific breakthrough a time machine? Here's Adam Fejerskov's angle on paradigmatic changes, in: 'The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and the New Experimental Movement', Oxford University Press 2022 https://www.diis.dk/en/experts/adam-moe-fejerskov Page 2: "...Throughout the book, we will meet at least four main protagonists, together making up the core of the movement: philanthropists, economists, pharmas, and humanitarians. Private foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation experiment with new technologies and radical change as they test innovative toilets or condoms or attempt to alter social norms in poor communities, basing their actions on what they see as objective models of change emerging from experiments, reducing the messy real world to formulae. Pharmaceutical companies have moved their experiments with new drugs to ‘emerging markets’ that provide abundant human subjects ready to partake in clinical trials to overcome diseases for which they often cannot afford treatment, pushing both experimental methodologies and stabilizing experimental practices as everyday care. The randomista economists likewise conduct randomized controlled trials and similar methodologies brought in from the natural sciences to experiment with solutions for social problems, driven by similar scientific desires of reducing complex realities to a set of logical causal chains. Finally, humanitarian actors, including private charities and United Nations (UN) organizations, pursue what they see as radical and innovative approaches to saving lives in disasters and emergencies through new technologies, from testing cargo drones and big data, to the registration and ordering of refugees through biometric data, iris scans, and blockchains- this is an introduction of emerging technologies that essentially functions as experimentation...". The book was written before and during the pandemic, where of course "the lab" grew much bigger and the number of experimental subjects is now rather large: "...68% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. 12.76 billion doses have been administered globally, and 3.26 million are now administered each day. 22.7% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose...". https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations As such as we can theorise that we are now all colonial subjects - whoever, wherever - and that in fact pharma-capital now primarily experiments on subjects in the home countries, such as the Pfizer-styled argument about vaccine apartheid entails: testing and trying was tested and tried on subjects in poor countries, now testing and trying is universal and it has become understood and perceived to be a privilege to be allowed to donate your body to clinical experiments. # 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: Technopolitics of the future
Hi all, Another very interesting thread indeed... But the language is perhaps a little ( or highly ? ) inadequate to grapple with the severity of our monstrous present and our dangerously unstable futures. Perhaps if we try to get a little jump on all the speculative nastiness, the toxic, racist and demented visions for the hyper-industrialized mess being invested in, we might get better analysis and paths for the emergency exits if we illuminate this unwholesome merger of the Anthropocene and Technopolitics and The Grand Guignol Lab of Living Subjects and call it: Unicorn Moonshot Guineapigdom Or to keep it simple, as the XLterrestrials have tried numerous times: Techno-fascism Or somewhat less dramaticly as Lewis Mumford called it: Authoritarian technics* ... re: mRNA developments One really shouldn't be surprised by these dismal achievements to " hack the body" and " under the skin surveillance" as neoliberal pet and technology soothsayer Yuval Harari calls it. A bit of a futurist (strip)tease that Yuval ! Definitely a significant mega-corp invention in that it appears to open up huge new markets and techno-colonialist territories on the bio-molecular front. We can probably expect all sorts of unpredicted mayhem to come from these profiteering and proprietary agendas + directions... quite similar to the horrors achieved by the previous corporate age of petro-chemical global dumpster fires. One of the new elements that Brian raised is that A.I. was a big part of mRNA developments. That would be interesting to know more about how those industries have merged and what sort of kind of trajectories they have planned for an increasingly privatized and commodities-reoriented and globalized Health Care now in the mangling grip of the Data Gold Rush ... What abominations will be in store without reigning in, regulating or abolishing all the corporate tech madness + social experimentation ! In a quick search... A major percentage of Google/Alphabet's venture capital flows went into Health Industries... Deep Mind Health, Calico, Editas, Verily, etc. https://research.aimultiple.com/alphabet-ai/ If we wanna know what attempted storms and disruptions may be coming, might be a good idea to follow how the vulture krapital flies. Perhaps it is important to know there is hardly anything even remotely Green New Deal-like ahead without confronting the new Guineapigdom game ( and its financialization. See Romain Felli's "The Great Adaptation" on Verso. ) that has now become acceptable to the general public ... even among an intellectual left ? ... b/c apparently the wealth-shovelling corporate techno-fix model was so successful at handling the planet's most lethal health crises ;) respex ! Podinski p.s. And extra thanks for Eveline's post... it does seem that love will be required and central for re-orienting ourselves back into ecological balance, humanity, justice and habitat for all ! “Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life." - Lewis Mumford ( 1895-1990 ) > Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2022 11:00:44 +0200 > From: Felix Stalder > To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org > Subject: Re: Technopolitics of the future > Message-ID: <94640de4-3b95-ef3a-18dc-7e0a10310...@openflows.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed > > On 20.10.22 23:18, Brian Holmes wrote: > >> I recall speculation on the list about whether a new technopolitical >> paradigm would ever take form. Would there be economic growth again? >> Would innovation return? Could global capitalism really develop new >> forms of self-regulation? Or is it stalked by entro
Re: Technopolitics of the future
On 20.10.22 23:18, Brian Holmes wrote: I recall speculation on the list about whether a new technopolitical paradigm would ever take form. Would there be economic growth again? Would innovation return? Could global capitalism really develop new forms of self-regulation? Or is it stalked by entropy and decline? I think the discussion suffered from too much emphasis on computers and finance as the drivers of change - leading to the conclusion that, if Silicon Valley has already done its thing, if Meta is no more than The Matrix Reloaded, then history must be over. I don't think the conclusion was that 'history is over'. Rather the venture-capital, consumer-facing, attention-economy model which organized an important part of the innovative capacity over the last 40+ years, had exhausted itself. Indeed, innovation in in Silicon Valley has almost come to a stand still. Our phones, laptops, social media apps etc are more or less the same than five years ago. In response, lots of VC-capital is funding blockchain technologies, which, so far, have proven completely useless. A real dead-end. It seems that the computing infrastructure that has been built out over the last 30 years -- global connectivity and data centers -- is turning into commodity services for other enterprises. Much like manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s. On a global scale, it kept growing, yet it turned into a flexible, on-demand infrastructure. In this line, Google is moving closer to the model of Foxconn, as a commodity provider of AI and data analytic services. Hugely profitable, but the social direction of the use of its capacities is determined by others. The pandemic showed that quite clearly. Silicon Valley firms profited substantially by providing commodity infrastructure but little innovation. Zoom, which saw its stock price rise 5-fold during the pandemic, is now back to pre-pandemic levels. The innovation that would have embodied the logic of consumer-data focused Silicon Valley the most, contact tracing via smart phones, failed completely, due to poor data and modelling (turns out, epidemiological-relevant proximity is hard to measure and model) and popular resistance (surveillance!). On the other hand, as Brian notes, the most significant techno-political event was the development of the mRNA vaccines. First, because it provided the single-most effective social response to the pandemic (e.g. compared to China's Zero-Covid approach). Second, because it embodied a new techno-political model (large-scale, publicly-funded, basic research, public investment and coordination, extremely profitable private enterprises), and a new set of conflicts, both within the countries at the center of the development (anti-vaxxers in the US and Europe) and geopolitically (neo-colonial distribution based on patents & manufacturing/logistical capacity). Does this provide a blue-print for a somewhat social-democratic Green capitalism, as Brian seems to suggest? I'm not so sure. Mainly for four reasons. First, so far, all of this has been debt-financed, which works obviously better in a low-interest environment. Unless a Piketty-style taxation of wealth can be instituted, a key component of a new technopolitical paradigm is missing (I think the US Democrats know this, but can implement only the tiniest of steps, the European social-democrats (outside Spain) don't even try it). Second, the vaccines provide a somewhat unusual case of technopolitical innovation, because there were no incumbents that had already sunk trillions into soon-to-be outdated infrastructures that they wanted to profit from a few decades longer. There is a war in Europe disrupting energy supplies, and Germany does not even manage to institute a speed limit on its Autobahn (despite popular support). Thus, the question is, to what degree are democratic institutions still capable of expressing "the will of the people"? Third, there is this point that Amitav Gosh raised in the interview I posted earlier: The Left – and here I’m also talking about the Greens – made the decision some time ago to move towards a technocratic centre. They started doing all this wonkery and addressing policy to establish their credentials as serious politicians and administrators. Of course, it’s necessary to be serious about administration and governance. But the problem appears when you leave out the political impulse. The danger of technocracy is that you cannot tap into the general discontent with the political class because you are completely identified with the political class. https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-colonial-roots-of-present-crises/ I think this helps to explain the anti-vaxxers. If vaccines -- a simple, drop-in, no-need-to-make-any-changes-in-your-personal-life solution provided for free -- cannot be sold on a technocratic argument, then what can? On a larger scale, in Italy, as Alex Foti noted, after every technocratic government, the far right won the
Re: Technopolitics of the future
Dear Brian, > Thoughts about it? there is no doubt that we indeed have the chance to observe interesting developments. Maybe inflation should be added to the list. And the current crises might really be the expression of a paradigm shift. Since you referred to Marx: Wasn't it to be expected that this is exactly what would happen? As I recall, he argued that capitalism will always lead to crises. From this point of view, the current crises shows (again) that the argument has empirical substance. In this respect I would like to rise one question: Isn't it is necessary to discuss the ownership issue to understand the crises and to develop suggestions? -- Liebe Grüße, Christian Swertz https://www.swertz.at # 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: Technopolitics of the future
Maybe it's interesting to add this interview to get another perspektive On The Radical Possibilities of Leading With Love: An Interview with Dr. Margo Okazawa-Rey https://aaww.org/on-the-radical-possibilities-of-leading-with-love-an-interview-with-dr-margo-okazawa-rey/ She spoke yesterday at the University in Vienna, and said, what kind of chances would have institutions when lead with Love. Kind regards, Evelin Quoting Brian Holmes : Dear Frederic, I admire the wager on utopia, it's resonant for me. What's more, the George Floyd uprising finally made me understand how many people want to go through a social breakdown, to emerge on the other side, somewhere else. For them, the bad accident is good. It's not my desire because I actually feel part of what would thus be destroyed. I see immense possibilities for change. What is, could be different. Maybe it already is and we didn't notice. Maybe it could be immensely worse and we'll notice that immediately. Pragmatics interests me more for this reason, along with perception/expression. Find out what's happening, as concretely as possible, and talk about it. I am touched by your letter because my wager is also Pascalian, I am swept away by it. I'm probably a bit schizophrenic though, because I'm acutely aware of the line that you're taking, and increasingly, of Black history and colonial critique. I have been carrying out a project in Louisiana that involves Angola prison, the plantation system, Cancer Alley. Those things are strong medicine, they sap your belief in anything called "justice." And you may have noted that in my previous text I do not describe anything called "justice." What I ultimately look for, in Louisiana and elsewhere, are the facts of a disaster and the transcendence of a cosmology. I'd say all pragmatics is guided by cosmology, in the Latin American sense of 'cosmovision'. Each one renders something different. In my schizophrenic case - which is probably not that unusual - the godhead is embodied by biogeochemical cycles whose effects I can see everywhere, and the concept/practice of solidarity is made more profound by the understanding of symbiosis. All that is material, metabolic, and I'm afraid, linked to lots of future suffering. The suffering is bound up with specific things, machines, organizational routines, symbolic systems... The end result for me is to wonder, pragmatically, how the entire world could be totally different. And to act on that when I can. best, Brian On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 8:16 PM Frédéric Neyrat wrote: Dear Brian, It's always a gift to read your analysis, your posts, they really feed my attempts to understand what's going on. Just a thought: what happens when we reverse the order of things in your analysis: instead of a) the technopolitical paradigmatic shift (what appears as a sort of historical necessity) b) "IF in fact it does emerge, IF we don't just sink into entropic conflict and collapse" (the bad accident), we have: a) entropic conflict and collapse (the necessity) and b) a possible (i.e. almost impossible really, contingent) technopolitical paradigmatic shift. My goal is not to be overly pessimistic, but if war and the ecological situation - as you argue, right? - drive where we are at, then the understanding of the global situation is that nations/classes don't care that much about technological shifts, nowadays they care about local survival (their survival), and it generates survivalist nationalism, eco-fascism (ecological measures driven by authoritarianism), the rise of the far right (Sweden, Italy, France, the USA, Russia, India, etc. etc. etc.), war of predation, and so on. If it’s true, it’s time - at last - to be, really, and without any restriction, utopian, i.e. it's time to insert in reality what could de-program it. Without the wind of utopia, the world will go down, without geo-engineering or because of it. Codicil: it does not mean that technology should be neglected, refused, but one thing for me is sure: without a radical re-orientation of technology (not only the production of a new tool, i.e., as Virilio explained pretty well, a new accident), there will be no shift, but the continuing of disaster with the same means, even in a new form. Addendum: and if we think it’s too late to be utopian and to invent a new praxis, then it means that everything is lost. However, “Il faut parier; cela n’est point volontaire; vous êtes embarqués"(Pascal)! Frédéric __ On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 4:19 PM Brian Holmes wrote: For years on nettime, the much-regretted Armin Medosch, myself, Felix Stalder and a number of others developed a theory of technopolitical paradigm shifts: a grand narrative to explain social change in industrial societies. Well, even if you don't like grand narratives, you may have noticed that a tremendous shift is indeed now taking place, real time, global scale, involving every level of entrepreneu
Re: Technopolitics of the future
Dear Frederic, I admire the wager on utopia, it's resonant for me. What's more, the George Floyd uprising finally made me understand how many people want to go through a social breakdown, to emerge on the other side, somewhere else. For them, the bad accident is good. It's not my desire because I actually feel part of what would thus be destroyed. I see immense possibilities for change. What is, could be different. Maybe it already is and we didn't notice. Maybe it could be immensely worse and we'll notice that immediately. Pragmatics interests me more for this reason, along with perception/expression. Find out what's happening, as concretely as possible, and talk about it. I am touched by your letter because my wager is also Pascalian, I am swept away by it. I'm probably a bit schizophrenic though, because I'm acutely aware of the line that you're taking, and increasingly, of Black history and colonial critique. I have been carrying out a project in Louisiana that involves Angola prison, the plantation system, Cancer Alley. Those things are strong medicine, they sap your belief in anything called "justice." And you may have noted that in my previous text I do not describe anything called "justice." What I ultimately look for, in Louisiana and elsewhere, are the facts of a disaster and the transcendence of a cosmology. I'd say all pragmatics is guided by cosmology, in the Latin American sense of 'cosmovision'. Each one renders something different. In my schizophrenic case - which is probably not that unusual - the godhead is embodied by biogeochemical cycles whose effects I can see everywhere, and the concept/practice of solidarity is made more profound by the understanding of symbiosis. All that is material, metabolic, and I'm afraid, linked to lots of future suffering. The suffering is bound up with specific things, machines, organizational routines, symbolic systems... The end result for me is to wonder, pragmatically, how the entire world could be totally different. And to act on that when I can. best, Brian On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 8:16 PM Frédéric Neyrat wrote: > Dear Brian, > > It's always a gift to read your analysis, your posts, they really feed my > attempts to understand what's going on. > > Just a thought: what happens when we reverse the order of things in your > analysis: instead of a) the technopolitical paradigmatic shift (what > appears as a sort of historical necessity) b) "IF in fact it does emerge, > IF we don't just sink into entropic conflict and collapse" (the bad > accident), we have: a) entropic conflict and collapse (the necessity) and > b) a possible (i.e. almost impossible really, contingent) technopolitical > paradigmatic shift. > My goal is not to be overly pessimistic, but if war and the ecological > situation - as you argue, right? - drive where we are at, then the > understanding of the global situation is that nations/classes don't care > that much about technological shifts, nowadays they care about local > survival (their survival), and it generates survivalist nationalism, > eco-fascism (ecological measures driven by authoritarianism), the rise of > the far right (Sweden, Italy, France, the USA, Russia, India, etc. etc. > etc.), war of predation, and so on. > If it’s true, it’s time - at last - to be, really, and without any > restriction, utopian, i.e. it's time to insert in reality what could > de-program it. Without the wind of utopia, the world will go down, without > geo-engineering or because of it. > > Codicil: it does not mean that technology should be neglected, refused, > but one thing for me is sure: without a radical re-orientation of > technology (not only the production of a new tool, i.e., as Virilio > explained pretty well, a new accident), there will be no shift, but the > continuing of disaster with the same means, even in a new form. > > Addendum: and if we think it’s too late to be utopian and to invent a new > praxis, then it means that everything is lost. However, “Il faut parier; > cela n’est point volontaire; vous êtes embarqués"(Pascal)! > > Frédéric > __ > > > > On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 4:19 PM Brian Holmes > wrote: > >> For years on nettime, the much-regretted Armin Medosch, myself, Felix >> Stalder and a number of others developed a theory of technopolitical >> paradigm shifts: a grand narrative to explain social change in industrial >> societies. Well, even if you don't like grand narratives, you may have >> noticed that a tremendous shift is indeed now taking place, real time, >> global scale, involving every level of entrepreneurial and governmental >> organization and every aspect of social reproduction. It's sudden, it's >> violent and it obviously has consequences. Shall we talk about it? >> >> I recall speculation on the list about whether a new technopolitical >> paradigm would ever take form. Would there be economic growth again? Would >> innovation return? Could global capitali
Re: Technopolitics of the future
Dear Brian, It's always a gift to read your analysis, your posts, they really feed my attempts to understand what's going on. Just a thought: what happens when we reverse the order of things in your analysis: instead of a) the technopolitical paradigmatic shift (what appears as a sort of historical necessity) b) "IF in fact it does emerge, IF we don't just sink into entropic conflict and collapse" (the bad accident), we have: a) entropic conflict and collapse (the necessity) and b) a possible (i.e. almost impossible really, contingent) technopolitical paradigmatic shift. My goal is not to be overly pessimistic, but if war and the ecological situation - as you argue, right? - drive where we are at, then the understanding of the global situation is that nations/classes don't care that much about technological shifts, nowadays they care about local survival (their survival), and it generates survivalist nationalism, eco-fascism (ecological measures driven by authoritarianism), the rise of the far right (Sweden, Italy, France, the USA, Russia, India, etc. etc. etc.), war of predation, and so on. If it’s true, it’s time - at last - to be, really, and without any restriction, utopian, i.e. it's time to insert in reality what could de-program it. Without the wind of utopia, the world will go down, without geo-engineering or because of it. Codicil: it does not mean that technology should be neglected, refused, but one thing for me is sure: without a radical re-orientation of technology (not only the production of a new tool, i.e., as Virilio explained pretty well, a new accident), there will be no shift, but the continuing of disaster with the same means, even in a new form. Addendum: and if we think it’s too late to be utopian and to invent a new praxis, then it means that everything is lost. However, “Il faut parier; cela n’est point volontaire; vous êtes embarqués"(Pascal)! Frédéric __ On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 4:19 PM Brian Holmes wrote: > For years on nettime, the much-regretted Armin Medosch, myself, Felix > Stalder and a number of others developed a theory of technopolitical > paradigm shifts: a grand narrative to explain social change in industrial > societies. Well, even if you don't like grand narratives, you may have > noticed that a tremendous shift is indeed now taking place, real time, > global scale, involving every level of entrepreneurial and governmental > organization and every aspect of social reproduction. It's sudden, it's > violent and it obviously has consequences. Shall we talk about it? > > I recall speculation on the list about whether a new technopolitical > paradigm would ever take form. Would there be economic growth again? Would > innovation return? Could global capitalism really develop new forms of > self-regulation? Or is it stalked by entropy and decline? I think the > discussion suffered from too much emphasis on computers and finance as the > drivers of change - leading to the conclusion that, if Silicon Valley has > already done its thing, if Meta is no more than The Matrix Reloaded, then > history must be over. But it turns out that the decisive factors in > technopolitical paradigm shifts are neither economic, nor even > technological. The decisive factors are instead political, in the broad > sense of politics that runs from individual agency, through collectivities > of all kinds, into national and international relations. Political conflict > is what brings societies into crisis. When the overarching > cultural/economic/military order - what the international relations > theorists call world order - is shaken by an integral crisis, then, and > only then, can a paradigmatic figure of capitalism begin to transform at > all levels, including institutions and ideologies as well as money, > machines and relations of production. > > Does anyone else think a major crisis - what Gramsci would call an > "organic crisis" - has taken hold since the outset of the pandemic? > Leftists have often cried wolf over financial crises, but with climate > change, plague, ideological upheaval, industrial restructuring and war, > what we are living through today looks a lot like the turning-point crises > of the 19th and 20th centuries. Turning points entail both institutional > breakdown and renewal. On the breakdown side, take for example the > abandonment of two former pillars of neoliberal international relations, > namely the German "Wandel durch Handel" policy of cheap resource extraction > from Russia, and the American just-in-time strategy of outsourced > production from China. Both these began as opportunistic statecraft during > the major crisis of the early Seventies, and both subsequently became > foundational components of the neoliberal world order. It took the attack > on Ukraine to expose Europe's gas hypocrisy, while in the US, it took > Trumpian populism to state the bitterly obvious: The outsourcing of labor > is a socia
Re: Technopolitics of the future
As a first reaction to these mind boggling questions, I would say, let’s make a disorganized inventory of people, intentions, projects and see if it all points in any particular direction. Brian already spoke of the Covid vaccines. Here’s a start, quickly and messily, because it’s time for bed: - Bill Gates believes in helping people with viable business plans for innovative projects to start companies. He believes that entrepreneurs with good ideas and technological skills are the best bet for solving problems and earning money in the process; - Emmanuel Macron wants to help French citizens buy electrical cars, hopefully manufactured by local companies, and build large and small nuclear power plants to keep them on the road; - Namibia, a country at the forefront of global warming, which currently mines uranium and sells the right to hunt elephants to rich Americans in order to provide for poor rural communities, wants to power the world by building solar farms to extract hydrogen from seawater; - people like Peter Thiel intend to singularise their brains with AI entities and live on farms in New Zealand, but one wonders whether this should be taken seriously; - mega geo-engineering projects have been suggested for years (dumping carbon in the ocean, sucking carbon out of the air, making the atmosphere more reflexive), but one wonders whether this should be taken sufficiently seriously to start panicking; - the Chinese mock liberal societies that eschew authoritarianism as the best way to run the world. In the meantime, brute Russian authoritarianism is losing the war against agile Ukrainian forces who who find precious succor in fighting for their freedom; - and so on. Best - Joe. > > Le 20 oct. 2022 à 23:19, Brian Holmes a écrit : > > > For years on nettime, the much-regretted Armin Medosch, myself, Felix Stalder > and a number of others developed a theory of technopolitical paradigm shifts: > a grand narrative to explain social change in industrial societies. Well, > even if you don't like grand narratives, you may have noticed that a > tremendous shift is indeed now taking place, real time, global scale, > involving every level of entrepreneurial and governmental organization and > every aspect of social reproduction. It's sudden, it's violent and it > obviously has consequences. Shall we talk about it? > > I recall speculation on the list about whether a new technopolitical paradigm > would ever take form. Would there be economic growth again? Would innovation > return? Could global capitalism really develop new forms of self-regulation? > Or is it stalked by entropy and decline? I think the discussion suffered from > too much emphasis on computers and finance as the drivers of change - leading > to the conclusion that, if Silicon Valley has already done its thing, if Meta > is no more than The Matrix Reloaded, then history must be over. But it turns > out that the decisive factors in technopolitical paradigm shifts are neither > economic, nor even technological. The decisive factors are instead political, > in the broad sense of politics that runs from individual agency, through > collectivities of all kinds, into national and international relations. > Political conflict is what brings societies into crisis. When the overarching > cultural/economic/military order - what the international relations theorists > call world order - is shaken by an integral crisis, then, and only then, can > a paradigmatic figure of capitalism begin to transform at all levels, > including institutions and ideologies as well as money, machines and > relations of production. > > Does anyone else think a major crisis - what Gramsci would call an "organic > crisis" - has taken hold since the outset of the pandemic? Leftists have > often cried wolf over financial crises, but with climate change, plague, > ideological upheaval, industrial restructuring and war, what we are living > through today looks a lot like the turning-point crises of the 19th and 20th > centuries. Turning points entail both institutional breakdown and renewal. On > the breakdown side, take for example the abandonment of two former pillars of > neoliberal international relations, namely the German "Wandel durch Handel" > policy of cheap resource extraction from Russia, and the American > just-in-time strategy of outsourced production from China. Both these began > as opportunistic statecraft during the major crisis of the early Seventies, > and both subsequently became foundational components of the neoliberal world > order. It took the attack on Ukraine to expose Europe's gas hypocrisy, while > in the US, it took Trumpian populism to state the bitterly obvious: The > outsourcing of labor is a social crime, just like the endless oil wars. Of > course US progressives think the same, and have better policies to address > it, but it's a real shame that mainstream Democrats stifled pr
Technopolitics of the future
For years on nettime, the much-regretted Armin Medosch, myself, Felix Stalder and a number of others developed a theory of technopolitical paradigm shifts: a grand narrative to explain social change in industrial societies. Well, even if you don't like grand narratives, you may have noticed that a tremendous shift is indeed now taking place, real time, global scale, involving every level of entrepreneurial and governmental organization and every aspect of social reproduction. It's sudden, it's violent and it obviously has consequences. Shall we talk about it? I recall speculation on the list about whether a new technopolitical paradigm would ever take form. Would there be economic growth again? Would innovation return? Could global capitalism really develop new forms of self-regulation? Or is it stalked by entropy and decline? I think the discussion suffered from too much emphasis on computers and finance as the drivers of change - leading to the conclusion that, if Silicon Valley has already done its thing, if Meta is no more than The Matrix Reloaded, then history must be over. But it turns out that the decisive factors in technopolitical paradigm shifts are neither economic, nor even technological. The decisive factors are instead political, in the broad sense of politics that runs from individual agency, through collectivities of all kinds, into national and international relations. Political conflict is what brings societies into crisis. When the overarching cultural/economic/military order - what the international relations theorists call world order - is shaken by an integral crisis, then, and only then, can a paradigmatic figure of capitalism begin to transform at all levels, including institutions and ideologies as well as money, machines and relations of production. Does anyone else think a major crisis - what Gramsci would call an "organic crisis" - has taken hold since the outset of the pandemic? Leftists have often cried wolf over financial crises, but with climate change, plague, ideological upheaval, industrial restructuring and war, what we are living through today looks a lot like the turning-point crises of the 19th and 20th centuries. Turning points entail both institutional breakdown and renewal. On the breakdown side, take for example the abandonment of two former pillars of neoliberal international relations, namely the German "Wandel durch Handel" policy of cheap resource extraction from Russia, and the American just-in-time strategy of outsourced production from China. Both these began as opportunistic statecraft during the major crisis of the early Seventies, and both subsequently became foundational components of the neoliberal world order. It took the attack on Ukraine to expose Europe's gas hypocrisy, while in the US, it took Trumpian populism to state the bitterly obvious: The outsourcing of labor is a social crime, just like the endless oil wars. Of course US progressives think the same, and have better policies to address it, but it's a real shame that mainstream Democrats stifled progressive populism, so we got the anti-imperial message from the right instead. Doesn't matter. The question now is what to do. How to diagnose and respond to the crisis? This is the renewal side: Social democrats in both the EU and the US are attempting to use the upheaval for transformative ends. Europe is being forced into an energy transition at top speed, and the "Repower EU" project builds on the national Recovery and Resilience plans developed during the pandemic. All those plans drew the consequences of the Anthropocene: they aimed to use deficit funding to rebuild employment by investing in alternative energies. It just took a war in Europe to make them real. Even more surprisingly in the US, the same kind of stalled recovery program is suddenly moving ahead fast, with carefully targeted research, industrial stimulus and federal infrastructure investments. Even though its dollar figures were reduced, the Inflation Reduction Act (aka Build Back Better) is a genuine plan for technological system change. It's interesting that to dramatize the need for this planning in the eyes of the population, the US has had to elevate the threat of war with China (which itself is a bit of a stand-in for the threat of civil war at home). So again, the drivers are war and climate change. The fact is that the US has long experience with this kind of system reset, from the age of the great corporate mergers in the late 1890s, to the consolidation of the corporate state during WWII, and then again, the development of microelectronics and the transition to financially driven globalization in the Reagan era. A decade after that, Clinton, Blair and Schroeder finished the regulation of the last big reset, with terrible consequences for social democracy, because in reality, the current problems are of their creation. Since the Ukraine war broke out, it has finally become clear to the "extreme center" (Tariq Ali's
