Re: <nettime> Live Your Models

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Molly Hankwitz wrote:

> I am interested in this idea of yours of the "flexible self" as I
> wrote much about "flexibility" in my critique of wireless imagination
> in my dissertation but did not know, at the time about your work

Molly, when I was a kid in the 70s I went to the SNACK concert: 
"Students Need Athletics, Culture and Kicks," a benefit for defunded 
public schools. The great San Francisco bands showed up at Kezar 
Stadium, the Dead, Jefferson Starship, Neil Young (with special guest 
Bob Dylan). At some point Joan Baez came out with her acoustic guitar 
and said, "Everyone's playing their hits, so I guess I'll play mine." 
Which was unforgettable. Well, it's quite a comedown after that, but if 
you like, you can still play mine:

http://threecrises.org/flexible-personality

I guess that text was just an echo of Barbrook and Cameron's 
"Californian Ideology" -- same general conclusions, but I was after 
something different. A dialectics of social theory and of grassroots 
aspirations. I didn't want to just criticize silicon hippiedom, but to 
see how a real revolt in a complex society gave rise to vital new 
problems. How a negation, a Great Refusal, was by itself negated, 
producing a new positive, an unbearable norm. Real cultural critique is 
always an autobiography, an inquiry into how one has been made -- but 
not only. In "Live Your Models" I try to twist the rearview mirror 
forward and ask what future compromises *we* could create today, if only 
the present political generations had the strength and the courage to do 
for the future what others already have done for the past that still 
haunts us so powerfully.

Florian Cramer wrote:

>     There is hardly a system that is more dependent on
>     efficiency-optimized global supply chains, high investments into
>     manufacturing capacities, economics of scale and, well, the neoliberal
>     economic system as computer electronics. So far, their mainstream story
>     is that of Hegelian progress. We lack informed critical cultural
>     analysis of how frail these systems are, how quick technologies
>     collapse, along with their associated research and know-how, when only
>     one of their critical components (sucn as: mass market demand, or
>     natural resource supply, or cheap manufacturing) is removed.

Florian, this is spot on and ruined Detroit is living testimony that 
such failures happen at the very center of capitalist accumulation. As 
climate change hits we're gonna see a lot more of those breakdowns. I 
hope that in the process, people will be able to regain some use of 
tools, which may indeed be less "efficient" than a big centralized 
factory (at least, less efficient when it comes to the production of the 
obsolescent trash that factories currently spit out). As machines of 
active solidarity, however, the tools of community production could be 
immensely more significant and directly useful than any alienating 
global supply chain is today. Can we imagine a "folk culture" that 
knowingly choses immediacy over the abstract forms of domination, and 
deploys science in the tragic context of its many undesired 
consequences? It's a highly cultivated ethos, in my view.

Jaromil wrote:

> 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 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.

Jaromil, did you ever read Keith Hart's book "The Memory Bank"? At the 
time of its publication, around the turn of the millennium, I think it 
was almost impossible for people to understand Keith's idea that money 
was not a colorless odorless abstract universal equivalent, but rather a 
tabulating language for the preservation of human memory. It seems to me 
that unbound from its parasitical relation to finance, the block chain 
could be that memory bank, that's the pragmatic real horizon. At HKW a 
couple weeks ago we heard another Keith, Breckenridge this time, talking 
about the unbanked 40% of Africans - a proportion he seemed to think was 
characteristic of the entire so-called "global south." He showed various 
biometric identity schemes aiming to get people hooked up to either 
microcredit or, more likely according to him, a universal basic income, 
the dole in short -- and he scandalized the public by saying this 
surveillance you're so afraid of is the vital minimum. Pressing further, 
more audaciously, what about an expansion of capital that is also a 
radical hybridization of what money can do and be? A vital maximum, in 
short? That's what you're getting at, no?

All I want to say with "Live Your Models" is, the future is foreclosed 
and radically open. The grist of capitalism's mill has always been its 
discontents, its saboteurs, its sworn enemies, and in that struggle, the 
winners lose, the losers win, and vice-versa. The wierd thing about 
civilization's mortality is that all kinds of people grow up young in 
that deadly embrace -- and it's their moment, plus by extension, 
everyone's. Nobody could have predicted that the archest neoliberal 
technology of all, the networked computer, would also be the vector of 
emancipation for all of us on this list and a few billion others, which 
does not just come down to a Californian Ideology or anything that I 
wrote about either. But we who lived through that, can't we see it 
coming again, despite everything? What gets invented right now is the 
grist of a future struggle. "It was one hell of a ride" said my father 
of his own life, and that story isn't over.

love and revolution to you all, BH

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