<nettime> Adrian Lucas: Microsoft & GE

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

(posted with permission of the author /geert)

From: <adrian.lucas@gmx.net>
Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 1:38 AM

Someone has calculated that the combined market capitalisation of Microsoft
and General Electric is now greater than the combined market capitalisation
of the top 100 stocks of the German DAX 100 index; no wonder the US-German
relationship is at the brink. One is reminded of that moment when part of
Tokyo was worth more than the entire California or USA, or whatever. Europe is 
not in such a bad way; economic growth is slow, but as Bataille saw, the other
side of the coin of productivity growth is excess of consumption as
destruction.

Thanks for the articles. Community-building, and commons-constuction, maybe
it can only really happen sitting at the edge of an abyss, an abyss which
maybe later becomes a mainstream central plateau (Frankfurt spontis becoming
Greens, and one of them foreign minister..), or funnels into a dead-end
(Frankfurt spontis who formed RAF). Of all the political activities
happening in the 60's, maybe the only truly successful movement until 1989 was 
the hard slog footwork of Willy Brandt, it may take until after 2010/2020 
before we have in Europe a Sponti/Green President of the 'United Europe' (have 
you heard, they want to rebrand Europe again !), everything takes much much 
longer than we think.

Boris Groys has written touchingly (Schnitt film magazine, Autumn 2002) that
11.9 is the beginning of a love relationship between the West and the
Islamists, for the first time the media stars are Islamists, and like
paranoic lovers, we ask ourselves, as we recall the images (long beards, caves, 
guns) in our brain, and try to imagine those images not on any camera, where 
will this conjuncture lead to, this annihilative penetration of the one with 
the Other? The media stars today are no longer the dot.com executives, 
investment bankers, Young British Artists, also not the digiterati generation 
of critical intellectuals, instead we must accept that the media stars today are
Islamist suicide-bombers, security experts, nerve gas and WMD specialists, all 
those people who we assumed, implicitly, had made themselves obsolescent by not
going along with a digital flowering of the bohemian 60's.

DIAL Now
With 'D-I-A-L History' we thought we could finally let a certain history
rest in peace as irony, we smiled in Linz when that earnest Russian security
specialist (Info War symposium) suggested that the US would eventually fall
apart into 2-4 nation-states, even with the full awareness of the
perversions of Bosnia/Kosovo/Rwanda, did we ever imagine how soon our media 
would soon only invite to their columns and talk-shows the specialists on the 
science of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons ? We keep on asking 
ourselves, is this repetition of the cold war a farce, as Lenin would have us 
believe, or is this a beginning of something new, maybe we should call it the 
'hot war'. Is the West so sad that it never had the chance to dead the red 
(and the East so sad that it never blasted the West), are we all (US and Russia)
so sad that we spent so much on cold war defence, what a waste, and now someone 
is provoking us, what the hell, they may have WMD weapons, but only about 
100-200 (Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, N. Korea), surely we can start a war against 
that kind of adversary, to justify all that potlatch economy of weapons-making 
back in the 40's to 90's. Does not North Korea, in an extreme form, epitomise 
what has happened in both the West and the East since WW2 ? That in both 
societies, liberal and socialist, cultural advancement of the masses was 
ignored, there was only ever a potlatch economy that made riches available to a 
minority, along with the production of weapons to blackmail any power that 
might threaten the oligarchy ?

Bye, Adrian

--
Adrian Lucas
Mobile: +41 .78. 636 1812


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