Morlock Elloi on Wed, 27 Dec 2017 20:37:01 +0100 (CET)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: <nettime> The California Ideology has a fascist character


The interesting part was analysis of the amplification effect of the machines. It has two components, the combination of which is a killer one:

- sheer volume, which saturates physical/biological receptors: as when someone cranks up the power on audio amplifier, the conversation stops, and the only experience available is the music. Too many likes, alerts, sexts, 'news', mentions, etc. do the similar.

- pre-selection at the source: what is amplified is not what's out there, just a biased fraction of it. You don't get to point your receptors to stimuli/scenery; that has been decided for you at the remote point. You think you might reconstruct the original reality by interpolating between these served pre-selected points (a text message, a like, a news item, your hosted photo collection, etc.) but you are underestimating how clever the pre-selection and machine formatting/massaging of the original can be.

This is not to say that forcing a declaration of unconditional love through 140 characters (let's take the simplest, apparently benign formatting constraint) is inherently evil. However, that number was decided by someone else, not you. And just when you got used/conditioned to it over years, someone (machine? human?) changed it to 280 characters. So what happens with your previous declaration(s) of love? Are they now inferior? Now you need to learn how to construct and interpret new, longer ones. A simple change in format will be (slightly) shaping your synapses.

What is evil is that the hand of mediator (with 500W class A amplifier) creeped between you and the world - not just news items from faraway countries, but also emotional transmissions from people close (or remote) to you, readings of recorded knowledge, and your own past and memories.

It's the elevator music you can never escape.



On 12/27/17, 02:07, André Rebentisch wrote:
Looks like his "class" perception of internet essentiality ironically
reflects a "class" background, which he pretended to identify as an issue.

"Without an intellectual compass, the road to reliable information that
promotes one's own judgment..."

#  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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: