Jaromil on Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:29:28 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> universitas gulagiensis digest [hopkins]


dear John,

> From: John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> Aaron Swartz charged for downloading too many Journal

>  > cheers. however MIT itself seems a pretty open minded
>  > institution, just consider the open courseware, not sure how it
>  > gets into the picture here.
> 
> Oh, J.!  just a reminder:
> 
> open-ness is perhaps a front to further concentrate influence and a
> controlling stake in the discourse and operation of technocratic
> educational processes.  I don't know the numbers, but major chunks
> of their research is directly tied in to the military-industrial
> complex, ever since WWII, and therefore, controlled access to many
> places.  Obviously not to the 'regular' schooling areas, but...  MIT
> has many faces, some of them pleasant to look at and others ... not
> so...

Sure. Yet let me say that, pragmatically yours, I can't think of any
insitutions of such size being configured differently, looking at the
place where we live, InI call it Babylon.

Maybe there can be another place, like Auroville or so, yet in the
coming decades the requirements for such long standing institutions in
modern western society are fulfilled by such a bloody osmosis:
military-industrial complex, mainstream news corporations (closely
tied to the former, Murdoch docet) and research. You might confirm
this dynamic is even found in Asia ...

You'll find me side by side with all those protesting against the
overwhelming presence of the military-industrial complex, we should
even join forces planning something else out of the hashes of
post-modernism, yet I can't avoid thinking that the very medium that
puts us in contact (and the best example of Deleuze and Guattari's
rhizome) comes from there, via a monopolization of research funds
indeed: and this situation looks like growing, not diminishing.

So I won't praise MIT for open courseware, but I respect the concerns
of those operators that let their (well funded) research be free and
accessible, because these are also the grounds on which I base my own
criticism of technology - one could still argue that those of us
focusing on technology might deserve ethernal damnation :)

Said that, InI feel grateful for reminding us that another World is
possible.

ciao

-- 
jaromil,  dyne.org developer,  http://jaromil.dyne.org
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