<nettime> two 'meta' notes (was Re: rage against the machine)

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

(1)

On 18 Mar 2019, at 22:24, Brian Holmes wrote:

> Ted, I like how you look at disputes from all sides, both for the 
> intrinsic
> interest of the meta-discussion, and because you put a finger on the 
> very
> existence of the dispute. For me it boils down to the old question 
> about
> critique, what it is, how it works, why anyone would engage in such a 
> thing.
 <...>
> thanks for the meta, Brian

Brian, to put it more bluntly, when it comes to critical discussions of 
aviation forensics, you are — by your own standards — out of your 
depth and in the same boat as the legions of just-add-water experts who 
opine on every subject that's trending on social media. I'm hardly an 
expert, but I have spent years reading widely about how aviation has 
reconstructed humanity at every level, from the cognition of 
instrumentation design, to the history of crash-test dummies, to 
divergent philosophies for building failsafe systems, to debates about 
how aviation is transforming geopolitics and even history. Hence the 
mini annotated bibliography at the end of my mail. So it's funny to read 
that you 'look for something analogous in discursive spaces like this' 
and 'stand for a critique of the relations between capitalism and 
complex systems' — then thank *me* for being 'meta'?! Morlock's 
comparison of Boeing's marketing of critical safety features with luxury 
finishes on cars nailed it. More than that, it's the kind of insight 
that can and should become a rallying cry in efforts to rein in 
megacorps that treat human lives with leather gearshifts as fungible. I 
guess we could say that comparison happens in a 'discursive space,' but 
posh abstractions like that suggest this problem is somehow new and in 
need of vanguardist theorizing. It isn't and doesn't. On the supply 
side, this 737 fiasco is just one more chapter in longstanding labor 
struggles for safe workplaces. Much as the flight attendants' AFA union 
played a pivotal role in ending Trump's government shutdown, I suspect 
that combined statements from the AFA and APFA (the American Airlines FA 
union) that their member won't be forced to fly in 737s sparked the 
Trump admin's sudden turnaround on the 737. On the demand side, the 
tradeoff between safety and 'extra' features was clear enough in 1954 to 
be the punchline of the Daffy Duck cartoon "Design for Leaving": after 
Porky Pig pushes the 'big wed button' marked IN CASE OF TIDAL WAVE in 
his newly <cough>automated</cough> home, elevating it hundreds of feet 
on a retractable pylon, Daffy Duck appears outside his door in a 
helicopter and says, "For a small price I can install this little blue 
button to get you down."

	https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x34az2i

More generally, entire swaths of current 'technology' debates — about 
automation and IoT, 'adversarial' this and that, how advertising is 
subverting democracy, etc, etc – are naive historical reenactments of 
front-page debates from the mid-1950s. Lots of factors enable that 
naivete, and voguish talk about 'complexity' is one of them. It's not an 
accident that complexity became a pop phenomenon starting in the '80s: 
corporations love it because it emphasizes the power of inexorable and 
inevitable  systems rather than our 'simple' power to change them. Sure, 
the rise of computation made the math needed to explore complexity is 
more widely accessible; but the idea that what matters is the secret 
mathematical kinship between the patterns of capillaries in our retinas 
and the structure of whatever we're looking at — tree roots or urban 
spaces or networks — is mostly mystification, barely a step above 
staring at a fractal screensaver. So, when you say you 'stand for a 
critique of the relations between capitalism and complex systems,' I 
agree — just not in the way you intended. Effective critique stands 
*against* that mystification.


(2)

On 23 Mar 2019, at 6:54, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

> friends, call me over-sensitive, but i think that nobody should be 
> burned at the stake for anything in any country; i say this also 
> because this flippant kind of rhetoric poisons the reasonable debate 
> that is so urgently needed on the matters at issue here. (to the 
> contrary, i am glad that some civilised countries find forms of 
> punishment other than that for actual wrongdoing.) - unfortunately, in 
> a world where people get imprisoned and killed for all sorts of 
> things, there is little room for such dark humour... when all the 
> stakes have been taken down everywhere, we'll be able to laugh about 
> this joke again, perhaps.

Andreas, you're over-sensitive. Much as Brian's flight into abstraction 
misdirected discussion away from concrete facts and struggles, your 
focus on the brutality of Morlock's remark — which I'm pretty sure was 
a figure of speech, not a specific advocacy for burning at the stake 
over drawing and quartering or crucifixion — misdirects it away from 
what matters most: penetrating the corporate veils that limit liability. 
If multinational corporate sovereignty is to be a key part of the new 
global regime, we need concrete strategies for isolating and punishing 
corporate criminality. Boeing's reputation has suffered: another 
airline, Garuda, canceled a $6B order for ~50 737s, and more are likely 
to follow. But minimizing shareholder value isn't enough. We need 
regulatory systems with teeth as sharp as those used in war-crimes 
tribunals. Polite anti-corporate rhetoric won't change anything, but 
identifying specific culprits within corporations and making them pay 
dearly for their crimes will change everything. Best of all, it can be 
applied to other imponderables like massive-scale fraud, environmental 
degradation, arms manufacture, abuses of privacy, and all the rest. For 
that reason, it *will* have broad-base popular support, sooner or later. 
The first question is what will finally trigger it, and the second 
question is whether we've laid solid groundwork for effective 
progressive responses.

And that begs an important question that leftoids aren't prepared to 
answer because, in a nutshell, they're allergic to power: what *would* 
be appropriate punishments for people who, under color of corporate 
activity, engage in indiscriminate abuses of public trust.

Cheers,
Ted
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