Jaromil on Tue, 3 May 2016 17:25:59 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Live Your Models |
On Mon, 02 May 2016, Florian Cramer wrote: > In more recent projects, for example crypto currencies, > Randianism even seems to have taken the upper hand, serving as > trailblazers for panoptical society of control technologies > (blockchain) that are quickly adopted by big enterprises. I believe here you are overlooking the actual usefulness of these tools, which is not the fruit of a conspiracy: in the rusty panopticon of managed flows of information, encrusted around the terror of the next attack, there is no more space for freedom of movement. Having written about years ago I'm bored today by how in all the fuzz of "blockchain cultural studies" fanfare nothing is there about migration as an issue. I really hope I overlooked it. Think of this: it is extremely hard to have a nomadic life right now. By life I mean sustaining yourself, meaning being able to perceive reward for work, move on to the next, pay your taxes, but not being limited in your liberties. Today all labor is bound to national regulations and taxations that do not contemplate nomadism, while nomadism is more and more of a life-style for the next generations. One can well argue this is being exploited now, sure, little by little, by neolib enterprises and inculator clusterfuck of taxevading panama clowns, but do not overlook the dynamics at the bottom, because they are extremely important for the future institutions to understand and speak to new generations... which brings me to the next point: > Too few people question prophecies like the "Singularity", too > few activists ever got their hands dirty with hardware and > software development - and manufacturing - to really grasp their > complications. This also doesn't computes for me. There are many today who understood that trans-humanism is just a plain new declination of fascism, but we have other channels and even the most kosher of all cultural funded EU events can't catch anymore such crowds. What I'm very worried about is the future of critical thinking: even of the most brilliant minds and even this very fine circle of nettimers here, because visions produced are more and more top-down. Natural: every human starting to look around him/herself starts doing so from his/her own condition. And academia is right now more than ever on top and detached. With the exception of a few olistic curricula, there are no meditation courses, which is a pity, because it takes a lot of meditation for the I and I to be crossing the boundary of contingent reality. When analysing the new, rather complex and shifting forms of liberation that are manifest today, I recommend to consider first and foremost the conditions, desires, fears and problems of people at the at the bottom and at the boundaries. These are many people, for instance the huge amounts of migrating youth across Europe. Or the huge amount of migrants which Europe has to learn to live with, who are perfectly capable of working, but cannot. You may consider it a detail, but Bitcoin today is catering to the needs I depict, which are in fact the backbone of the phenomenon. To liquidate a communication technology that provides such liberatory opportunities, considering it something as shabby as a Randyan device of sociopathic implosion, it is self defeating. We should be looking at the conditions which made such a technology so successful - and necessary - without forgetting nor feeling superior to the point of view of those who appropriated it. ciao # 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: