| Felix Stalder via Nettime-tmp on Wed, 2 Aug 2023 12:13:10 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Imagine |
That's a great intellectual challenge. And the TRUMP is a pretty good answer, not the least because Trump is a not an isolated phenomenon, but the culmination of a lot of longer-term developments.
Let's say the internet became socially relevant during the 1990s and let's look at the "great acceleration" charts, arguably the most relevant summary of socio-physical trends over the 250 years. Surprisingly, there seems to be no connection. We cannot see an impact of the internet on these charts.
I made the argument elsewhere [1] that the bend in all the indicators around 1950 can be explained by computerization and the new more intensive extraction processes it required and enabled. In this view, the internet allowed a trend to continue that might otherwise have run into its own contradictions and limitations.
[1] Escape Velocity. Computing and the Great Acceleration. 2022 https://aksioma.org/escape-velocity.computing-and-the-great-accelerationThis view is close to Weizenbaum's famous analysis of the first wave of computerization in the 1970s:
“Many of the problems of growth and complexity that pressed insistently and irresistibly during the postwar decades could have served as incentives for political innovation....Yet, the computer did arrive ‘just in time.’But in time for what? In time to save–and to save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize–social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them. The computer, then, was used to conserve America’s social and political institutions. It buttressed them and immunized them, at least temporarily, against enormous pressure for change. Its influence has been substantially the same in other societies that have allowed the computer to make substantial inroads upon their institutions: Japan and Germany immediately come to mind.” (1976: 31)
Thus, in my view, what the internet enabled was the continuation of the great acceleration beyond previous social systemic limits. Now we are crashing against the geophysical woefully unprepared socially. Which creates openings for people like Trump.
On 8/1/23 17:08, David Garcia via Nettime-tmp wrote:
Thanks Chris, one response that has struck me as a strong candidate, was the response when I asked my partner, Nanette, to name just one significant thing that would be different if the internet had never been invented... She gave a one word answer "TRUMP".On 2023-08-01 07:22, christine treguier wrote:Thanks for that challenge david. Not easy indeed and politically so interesting. A way to un-knitt, or re-knitt what has been mistakingnly knitted... Chris Le 01/08/2023 à 11:20, David Garcia via Nettime-tmp a écrit :Science fiction is by no means always about the future it can also start by imagining an alternative past or present but with a single key counterfactual that changes everything. So taking this as a starting point let's suppose the internet had never been invented (or otherwise come into being). In this scenario the computer is still there, mobile telephony is still there, just not the internet. There are those who might argue that such a proposition is itself technologically illiterate as the internet follows as inevitably as night follows day from the existence and proximity of telephony and computers. So the marriage is inevitable as is the progeny. To which I reply; of course but that is the author’s challenge, to imagine a plausible set of circumstantial obstacles, social, political, technical or military. How might it have happened and how would the world look? what would have changed? The exercise is in some sense a war against amnesia as even those of us born before the age of mass computing would struggle to remember what life was like before the internet. David Garcia # 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: https://mail.ljudmila.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-tmp # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:# 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: https://mail.ljudmila.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-tmp# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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