Konrad Becker on Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:26:20 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Cybernetics and the Control Society


Boris Beauregard wrote:
> But what is it with surveillance' inherent hilarious failures that
>comforts people? Isn't it simply mirroring people being consoled by its
>operative capabilities? Both the ridiculous blunders the very real
>achievements are perfectly at the service of powers that have become occult
>in hidden flows and rhizomatic assemblages. Fake CCTV cameras are good
>examples for influence over distance.

Later in the day, after the bright and optimistic side and the
dark and satirical shadowland, Global Security Alliance focused on
Psycho-Cybernetic Tales from the Crypt.... below an excerpt from
"Strategic Reality Dictionary" which informed the presentation...

->K

***

Buried Alive

The capacity of digital networks for producing and distributing copies
offers amazing possibilities of a virtual unlimited exchange of
cultural content and circulation of knowledge for human empowerment.
The same technology allows new feudal elites of the information age
to create scarcity and turn the tables against the public. Alarmed
by ideas, images and sounds taking on a life by themselves instead
of being deadlocked in mass graves of intellectual monopolies, new
tools for sharing are used as weapons of exclusion. Exploiting the
command and control structure of technologies emerging from military
backgrounds, knowledge is frozen in the dark vaults of corporate
portfolios. Hegemonic control of fear and longing in knowledge
based societies depends on technologies of containment against the
autonomy of memory. Rather than on the impermeability of boundaries
restrictions management is built on patterning of exits and entries
across thresholds. What passes and why, what rate to what effect,
are the variables defining regimes of exclusion. Beyond the task
of making believe, as in the spectacle of representation, power is
increasingly about imposed silence. Ritualized belonging developed
into representation, which is about making believe by shaping what
people hear and see. New systems of control are based on media
abstractions that produce silence, preventing response and eliminating
processes of exchange. By now social control is based on, shutting up
instead of deploying persuasive representation, silencing not just
voices but minds. Instead of inducing neurotic mindsets these Tales
from the Crypt evoke patterns of depression. Cultural Peacekeeping
enforces the silence of the graves in the unspoken wars of public
paranoia where every noise conjures an image of subversion. Zombies
never speak when the dead stand up and walk. Buried alive by cultural
technologies and systems of symbolic domination silence means defeat.
During the 18th and 19th centuries large numbers of security coffin
designs were patented. Mechanisms to prevent premature burial allowed
signalling that the occupant has been buried alive. More contemporary
models offer a beeper and intercom system. In the "The Premature
Burial" Edgar Allan Poe writes in 1850, "I saw that a vast number had
changed, in a greater or less degree, the rigid and uneasy position in
which they had originally been entombed. And the voice again said to
me as I gazed: "Is it not - oh! Is it not a pitiful sight?""


***

G.S.A. Global-Security-Alliance.Com
\ The Power to Influence Results /




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