[my thoughts/questions about ‘what’s next’ from a long time lurker] Are we not at war?
While pondering the simulation hypothesis / anticipating the singularity, and comfortable that the warning of Skynet’s self-awareness and Orwell’s Oceana did not come true, have we not yet failed to realize that all of the rhetorical discussions of nettime et.al. have been weaponized and we are at war. An asymmetric war, where even though the battlefield is still replete with kinetics like drone missions and IEDs, the larger frontline is TV character presidents enabled by troll farms, predictive analytics, great firewalls and dictator rap videos. In phase 1 the Californian Ideology was right, technology’s long tail effect liberates us via global color revolutions! ... but wait… the bad guys were reading the technical papers too, and so in phase 2 the first successes of democratic technically facilitated rebellion are now replaced by more effective consent manufactured by tactical and strategic manipulation of social/media monopolies (the industrial military complex). But… leveraging the matrix for control, means the matrix is still available for insurrection. Q - Are we not at (new) war? Q - Is there hope for some sort of Bernie Sanders, Zeynep Tufekci, Marie Kondo-esque inspired insurrection? Q - Where is the best manifesto (or sci-fi elaboration) of that next (post-color-revolution, post-MAGA) phase? Q - Who would make a better president, Sarah Conner or Rey? {apologies for so many media allusions, but hey…] JB # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> 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: