Konrad Becker on Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:26:20 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Cybernetics and the Control Society |
Boris Beauregard wrote: > But what is it with surveillance' inherent hilarious failures that >comforts people? Isn't it simply mirroring people being consoled by its >operative capabilities? Both the ridiculous blunders the very real >achievements are perfectly at the service of powers that have become occult >in hidden flows and rhizomatic assemblages. Fake CCTV cameras are good >examples for influence over distance. Later in the day, after the bright and optimistic side and the dark and satirical shadowland, Global Security Alliance focused on Psycho-Cybernetic Tales from the Crypt.... below an excerpt from "Strategic Reality Dictionary" which informed the presentation... ->K *** Buried Alive The capacity of digital networks for producing and distributing copies offers amazing possibilities of a virtual unlimited exchange of cultural content and circulation of knowledge for human empowerment. The same technology allows new feudal elites of the information age to create scarcity and turn the tables against the public. Alarmed by ideas, images and sounds taking on a life by themselves instead of being deadlocked in mass graves of intellectual monopolies, new tools for sharing are used as weapons of exclusion. Exploiting the command and control structure of technologies emerging from military backgrounds, knowledge is frozen in the dark vaults of corporate portfolios. Hegemonic control of fear and longing in knowledge based societies depends on technologies of containment against the autonomy of memory. Rather than on the impermeability of boundaries restrictions management is built on patterning of exits and entries across thresholds. What passes and why, what rate to what effect, are the variables defining regimes of exclusion. Beyond the task of making believe, as in the spectacle of representation, power is increasingly about imposed silence. Ritualized belonging developed into representation, which is about making believe by shaping what people hear and see. New systems of control are based on media abstractions that produce silence, preventing response and eliminating processes of exchange. By now social control is based on, shutting up instead of deploying persuasive representation, silencing not just voices but minds. Instead of inducing neurotic mindsets these Tales from the Crypt evoke patterns of depression. Cultural Peacekeeping enforces the silence of the graves in the unspoken wars of public paranoia where every noise conjures an image of subversion. Zombies never speak when the dead stand up and walk. Buried alive by cultural technologies and systems of symbolic domination silence means defeat. During the 18th and 19th centuries large numbers of security coffin designs were patented. Mechanisms to prevent premature burial allowed signalling that the occupant has been buried alive. More contemporary models offer a beeper and intercom system. In the "The Premature Burial" Edgar Allan Poe writes in 1850, "I saw that a vast number had changed, in a greater or less degree, the rigid and uneasy position in which they had originally been entombed. And the voice again said to me as I gazed: "Is it not - oh! Is it not a pitiful sight?"" *** G.S.A. Global-Security-Alliance.Com \ The Power to Influence Results / # 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