David garcia on Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:51:09 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Cybernetics and the Control Society |
Brian?s fascinating essay reminded me of the voice of the excellent Wendy Chun to , just by way of nuance. In her book, Control and Freedom. Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, she takes a few paragraphs in the introduction to warn against the danger of inadvertently aiding the agencies of control by ascribing a power to them that may be potential but are not yet actual. She describes this tendency of hinting at an all powerful cybernetic eye as perpetuating a myth and so ?uninitentionally fulfills the aims of control by imaginatively ascribing to control power that it does not have by erasing its many failures.? (including Weiner's early gunnery systems). The implication is that a meaningful part of our resistance must insist on the *failures*. She argues that ?The enormous ever increasing amounts of unanalyzed data belies the computer?s analytic promise and demarcates the constituative boundaries of an ?information society?? and later ?Further more the myth contradicts people?s everyday experience with computers by concealing the ephemerality of information (computer memory is an oxymoron) and the regular importance of software and local conditions. Computer?s crash on a regular basis, portable storage devices become unreadable, and e-mail messages dissapear into a netherworld of the global network, and yet many people believe in a worldwide surveillance network in which no piece of data is ever lost.? Ms Chun argues that ?in order to understand control-freedom we need to insist on the failures and the actual operations of technology.? Best Davidg # 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: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org