Felix Stalder on Sat, 13 Feb 2016 12:19:42 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> notes from the DIEM25 launch |
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 I was also there at the Volksbühne (though not like Geert during the day). I completely agree with DiEM25's general analysis that the current crisis in Europe is a crisis of democracy and not one of money. Europe still is one of the richest, best resourced regions on the globe. Consequently, this crisis must be countered with more, not less democracy, and that this more of democracy has to find expressions additional to occasional votes. These, in many ways, are uncontroversial, procedural points. The only element that distinguishes this from demands for more democracy coming from the right (inspired, I'm afraid, by far right victories in Swiss initiatives and referenda), is DiEM25's insistence that this needs to happened on a European, rather than a national level and that the retreat into the nation state is one of the drivers of the crisis. On 2016-02-12 16:12, Nina Temp wrote: > - It's interesting to see that all men I know are totally fond of > it, while all women I know are highly unimpressed and couldn't > help themselves breaking into stunned laughters given the populism > and emptiness of a lot of the speeches - which were leaving parts > of the audience behind with the feeling of being taken for dumb, > uninformed, easily manipulable and therefore to be patronized, > whereas this movement pretends to intend the opposite goals. Perhaps it's because I'm male, but I found the top-down element not so problematic, after all, this was the closing event in theater and much debates, as Geert has pointed out, had taken place during the day. At some point, it's good to come out on the stage and state what it is that you want, that this requires someone to represent the multitude, I can live with. But the problem was, to me, that even in this conventional format, there was very little in terms of demands, short or medium term goals or proposals, or even ideas, what next steps would be. There was lots of empty sloganeering, often not even particularly passionate. In fact it was a dull evening and by the end of it, the theater was considerably less crowded and at the beginning. The only concrete demand, or action goal, was to increase transparency in the ECB and the Eurogroup. This seems very pragmatic, actually doable, so I would have expected some sense of how to do it: to collect signatures, to call the all the MPs, block the ECB, march on Brussels, or what not. It was surprising, at least to me, that one of the best speeches of the evening came from Zizek (delivered in a short video) who said something like: Stick to a every simple demand, but pursue it vigorously and to end and see how destabilizing this can be! Given that the only concrete idea was to increase transparency, this sounded really sensible strategy, something that a diverse coalition could form around and then formulate more ambitious goals. But there was no sense at all, how this even this relatively simple and non-controversial demand could be energized, articulated and executed beyond being voiced at talk shows. > I do agree with Jacob Applebaum's call for secure communication, > but must remind that this will make the bottom-up process yet more > difficult. Here, I really totally disagree. Repressive orders crumble when people start to loose their fear and act in large numbers, despite being monitored not because they found ways to evade it. Security, in this case, comes from social solidarity and collective action, not from technology. I'm not against encryption as such, of course, there are many instances where it is vital, but this is not one of them (unless one follows a kind of Leninist approach). In this case, to focus on encryption seems more like a form of political procrastination. Felix ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJWvwVtAAoJEAu7W5UMn/Ksx7QIAOlME8s51E8LlsbGDb/u6xus bmnpjdYP5liHdNoyGV6i369XfMMt7JH6bCeMLsQ+bzDnmcFVJouOpnuTaq/SxW/q J4pVt+2V+M3M0fkBnEEay+IXXWMEOXlFKsyz2V3K4qEqvJWkKoOj1qhzJ5xTf+cW ByYlKCoqgWVa/sRou9j41AT8EluyuzeH1vCAuzWy0Me4WhpjeP8eOJRnG8ij1x1v KIRB9wBKIzhNDrtQmcaUG9cQ1tEQfLHipwB9PlzjUQgraAN8YBf0uyNl57+HLfez HAPbxj0uflFsX/p0NS80YoTiNpK79w71slw62B9AOFRLnFc72j0QzUklD0y/vBs= =2HZ7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: