Keith Hart on Tue, 27 Jun 2017 19:09:37 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> How Tinder helped to beat May & could win the White |
That's very well put, Felix. Ephemeral networks do not by themselves launch new versions of society. We need a richer toolkit for that. In "Kinship, contract and trust", a 1988 study of the economic life of migrants in Accra, Ghana, I located trust on a continuum of belief between blind faith and open-eyed confidence. These migrants lived in the stateless society of a slum separated from the bulk of kin at home. They lacked formal employment or were very poorly paid. They were reduced to relying on social networks ("friends" in the loosest sense) of contingent deals that rarely added up to a stable or substantial income. Trust in essence is acceptance of the risk of default in personal dealings. It is not a rock on which to stand. There is no more pathetic complaint, imo, than "But I trusted you (or it)". Longer-term social activities, especially involving production rather than just exchange, do require somewhere to stand. Hence the value of families for business and of legal guaranteed for contracts. I later extended this analysis to religious, ethnic, criminal and local organization. Trust has lost its exclusively personal referent for us, largely because business corporations won the human rights of individual citizens in law while retaining their special privileges such as limited liability for debt. Jefferson tried to get into the constitutions safeguards against the three main threats to democracy -- big government, organized religion and commercial monopolies (pseudo-aristocrats whose aim was to restore monarchy). The Federalists kept the last one out. In size, wealth, power, reach and longevity the corporations will beat the rest of us every time, unless we build political institutions adequate to containing them. As a result of their success in blurring how we think, a typical dictionary definition of trust is "belief in a person, thing or idea". If we want to win back control of the world for humanity, we must clear up this confusion of political language. We are human and the corporations are not. Trusting Felix, the dollar and Vodacom are not the same thing. Yet so much of contemporary discourse insists that humanism of this sort is an obstacle to intellectual and political progress. This does the work of the corporations for them. Contemplating the precarious lives of those marginal migrants in the informal economy might help us to clarify how to distinguish personal from impersonal social relations, as well as how to combine them. Tocqueville's book on the early American democracy had two parts, the first dealing with formal politics, the second with informal social institutions. He considered racism to be the deadliest threat to the democracy's future, but after that majority rule. The constitution provided some of this, but he put his money on free association. Taken together, he envisaged public institutions that supported private self-expression, rather than opposed them as in bourgeois ideology (also mainstream ideology today). It is depressing that so much discussion in forums like this one, abstract social networks from the highly particular historical arrangements that make for political life in a given place. Surely we haven't forgotten the excitement generated by Tahrir Square, allegedly the birth of Twitter as a political tool, and it will live on in unpredictable ways. But the army controlled the economy as well as the means of violence and now Sisi is helping the Saudis to close down Al Jazeera. Building on hype about Tinder is guaranteed to end in tears. I have a friend who says that what Labour needs next is big data a la Cambridge Analysis. In the immortal words of Charlie Brown, "Good grief!" Keith On Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 6:05 AM, Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote: > I think what social media are really good at is to produce "bursts" > of activity. Things flair up, reach a lot of people, and then die > out quite quickly. The idea that these bursts would, over time, > consolidate into something more structurally coherent (other than > companies that provide the infrastructure) has been wrong, at least so > far. This is probably not a co-incidence. > <...> # 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: