John Hopkins on Mon, 20 Oct 2014 23:25:10 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism". |
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John (H), I'm not sure how it helps anyone to say that the declining editorial quality of a posh magazine is inexorably linked in some thermodynamicky way with the ultimate fate of the universe. If it is, then so
If that illustration provides some insight to someone, great, if not, okay, who are you to judge that, given the spectrum of readers here (granted, as small and as limited as it may have become). Maybe I am really am a Goldwater Troll, knowing just what tweaks you with that invocation.
is everything else, which doesn't really lead us anywhere but a metaphysical wormhole, does it? So leave us a little bit of indeterminate wiggle room, however transient or delusional. We'll waste the fleeting moments it gives us wondering why universal fate would choose -- out of the entire history of the entire universe -- these few years on this tiny planet to reveal such catastrophic changes.
Well, yes, that's definitely a point -- suggesting that another approach to some of the issues expressed here in a very academic, very 'literate' sense might find more teeth when grounded in a scientific fundamental -- fleeting moments are also governed by your relation to where you focus your attention and the energetic flows of consciousness and action that (sometimes) result -- thermo is not a scalar-limited concept, cosmologically anyway; and if your deep insights into the "correct pathway" to follow only extends to your words here, well, that would be the lizard eating its own tail, wouldn't it. How exactly *do* you live your life on a day-to-day basis in a way that activates what you express here? (Or does that question compromise the hidden 'ad hominem' line drawn by so many academics -- that the word should never really drive lived actions...)
And please don't use nettime as a platform for this "when the shit hits the fan" stuff. I know you aren't one of those virulent rightist preppers and
Are you suggesting that nettime has some *other* use? Of course, you're moderator, so you are empowered to set your usage 'limits'.
that your 'poetess/poet' is preferable to their BOBs and BOLs and BOVs and YOYOs; but that's just a parochial difference. The argument you're making is awfully close to theirs, and their 'argument' is a transparent allegory for postwar white American privilege, both real and imagined. For a lot of people around the world (including in the US), the "shit's been hitting the fan" for decades or even centuries -- which was the basis for American privilege.
That's the point, of course it's been hitting the fan ever since the US rose onthe slippery back of the hydrocarbon tiger (or any other concentration of power rose on the resource inputs available to it) and from that created the ordered system of power and control that has affected, does affect, so many people internally and externally, locally and globally. That's what those systems *do*. It is a feature of the system you and I both arose within, and probably determined the fact that both of us are speaking at each other in this moment, here, in this medium, under these circumstances.
Counter to those systems of control and power are inexorable forces that include the embodied energies of individuals, living in the here and now, those who in their moment-to-moment existence *know* how to de-power those structures and are doing so. I just don't get the sense that you are doing such, though you are eloquent in your framing of the precursor conditions that would lead to an understanding of what such a pathway might look like.
I hear in your words, too, the resonance of that white privilege, and I would be very impressed it you could, get over it, or, better yet, lose it, unstead of using it. I struggle with the legacy of that past, but prefer to look into the now to see what can be done in lived praxis.
But there is a silver lining to bringing up that nonsense in the context of a thread about the third-order politics of second-order cybernetics. Beer embodied
I'll try to remember to use just "t" in the future... how about that... jh -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ # 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org