Florian Cramer on Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:40:41 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Zittrain's Foundational Myth of the Open Internet |
On Friday, October 17 2008, 10:27 (+0200), Felix Stalder wrote: > 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. But major schools and affiliations of cybernetics, general systems theory in particular, were exactly about defending liberalism against totalitarianism on the grounds of scientific models. Ludwig van Bertalanffy's theory of "open systems", begun in the 1930s and developed into a universal model in 1949, stated that closed systems - in a biological, but also political sense - were not sustainable because they would die of entropy. Conversely, Popper had modeled the structure of his theory of the "open society" after his own "Logic of Scientific Discovery" (a book he had first published in 1934 as "Logik der Forschung"), scientific discovery as based on falsification. Historically, F.A. Hayek provides a link between Popper and Bertalanffy; they all three were associated to what is often referred to as the "Austrian School" of liberal economics; and, to fuel the economical and financial discussion here, Hayek went on to Chicago where he was involved with the well-known Chicago School of Keynes and Milton Friedman. Again, if we were to look into the foundations of the equation of "open technology = open society", Popper and Bertalanffy provide strong clues, within a larger field of post-WWII cold war techno-political discourse. (Perhaps one should also remind Nettime that its initial meetings were sponsored by George Soros' "Open Society Institute" which very obviously derives its name from Popper?" (To quote Geert Lovink from his 1997 contribution to the Nettime ZKP4: "The Soros Foundation is the money source for the time being, particularly in the field of culture and media [...] There it became really visible what the NGO was in essence all about: downsized government replacing bureaucracies, typical to the post-ideological times of the digital", http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/11.htm .) > 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 -- Point taken - but in order to map the whole field and discourse of cybernetics, one shouldn't be too narrowly focused on the particular environment and project of the Macy conferences. -F -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc # 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