Re: <nettime> social media critique: next steps?

[Jonathan Marshall <Jonathan.Marshall@uts.edu.au>]

There is also a sense in which no one is in control. Technologies and actions always have the possibility of unintended effects, unexpected consequences and so on. It is also likely that hard attempts at control will eventually be undermined by the disorders that the attempts generate.

Even if someone pulled the plug because it was unprofitable they can't guarantee the exact results of this action. Sure they would not be profiting anymore or loosing money on that investment, but what will happen is uncertain. Will alternates be set up, will improvements be made elsewhere, will the 'owning company' collapse because they no longer have investor confidence, or people boycott them?

Even if the people (whoever they are) manage to articulate a collective will (whatever that is) then they still won't be able to control things completely.

Maybe the God you mention designed the world so it was unpredictable....

jon
________________________________________
From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 17 January 2018 10:45 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> social media critique: next steps?



On 2018-01-17 03:22, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control
> machines and machines that control humans.

Machines are never in control. Even if you believe that the liberal CEO
FB has somewhat lost control of his creation, it still does what it's
supposed to do ever since the first angel (Peter Thiel) touched it: make
investors rich. The moment it would stop doing this, the plug would be
pulled, no matter how much each of us depends on it.

Therefore, I would phrase the dilemma differently. The struggle is
whether an oligarchy controls the mass of people through machines, and
the mass of people using the machines to articulate and enact their
collective will.

In may ways, machines -- deep-learning, big data -- are god. The seat of
knowledge on a scale that mere mortals cannot comprehend it and the
source of action that, for all its arbitrary surface appearance, can
always claim an underlying justification that remains hidden to all but
a few.

A combination of ancient egypt and feudal europe.


Felix






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