Felix Stalder on Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:31:34 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Zittrain's Foundational Myth of the Open Internet |
On Thursday, 16. October 2008, Brian Holmes wrote: > Yes, to my mind, it was the intellectual atmosphere of a period. But > that period was very much infused with the economic and scientific > liberalism. It is no accident that Popper's book "The Open Society and > its Enemies" was published in 1945! Of course, it's not an accident. Popper saw the book as his personal "war effort" (though it was published only after the war was over). And, yes, it's about defending a liberal tradition against totalitarianism, but beyond that I cannot see any connection to cybernetics. Certainly, there are no biographical ones. He was in New Zealand, pretty much isolated, and, for all I know, never met any of the people involved in early cybernetics nor referred to their ideas, at least at the time. He was not interested in governance questions and he was not a technocrat. Popper's approach was truly old-fashioned -- in the sense that he wanted to convince, to crush his opponents by virtue of what he saw his superior intellect. Popper solved many of the central questions of the 19th century (i.e. what is science? What is a liberal democracy?). Here lies -- if I understand Brian correctly -- the biggest "innovation" that cybernetics brought to the theory of governance and the reason why it turned out to be so extremely popular among practitioners. It seemed to offer a short-cut. Instead of going through the trouble of having to convince people of the merits of your politics, one would simply implement a system of "incentives" and let people "choose freely" how to react to those incentives. There was no need to reach agreement on anything. Nobody would be "forced" to follow any kind of party line, but the incentive structure (a.k.a. feedback mechanisms) where constructed in a way that made sure that the "rational" options where pretty constrained. That system allowed the political discourse to deteriorate completely, because instead of having to talk about substantive policy issues (which were outsourced into each reacting individually to seemingly objective incentives) one could focus on emotionally charged issues which had no real consequences for the accumulation of capital (and other central concerns of the economic-political system). The primary example -- of course -- is the politicization of abortion. My main point -- which really is a side point to this discussion -- is that one should not see this as the a logical or direct consequence of liberalism and lump the entire liberal tradition into that. The shift from "arguing" to "steering" as a mode of politics is too far reaching for that -- even if it probably has destroyed that tradition, by falsely claiming its mantle, beyond repair. Maybe it's a pity that the 18th century is over. But, certainly, it's a fact. Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now: *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # 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://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org