tbyfield on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 18:23:45 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> rage against the machine


On 26 Mar 2019, at 1:15, Brian Holmes wrote:

Despite Ted's excursions into aviation history, which at least he finds
brilliant,  plus the general manly readiness to cut the throat of, one
doesn't know exactly whom, we have gotten no further in terms of
understanding the situation than what you have transcribed. It's still
about a badly designed plane "fixed" by a cybernetic patch, in a quest for
profit that knows no bounds.

"excursions into __________ history, which at least he finds brilliant" seems like a pretty fair description of your own often-lengthy contributions to the list, Brian. Many of them are interesting, and I admire your commitment to untangling and reweaving disparate postwar intellectual and institutional threads. We need much more of that, in the US especially. But like your work with Bureau d'études, the value of those broad sweeps breaks down where the rubber meets the road, or in the case of aviation where somewhere between aerodynamics and instrumentation. Which is why, I guess, after "looking for something analogous in discursive spaces like this one," you've abruptly rediscovered the importance of the specific problem. But, as I described in some detail, cybernetic thought has been baked into aviation for decades. If anything, it's the other way around: aviation-related research was baked into cybernetics even as that new 'science' was being invented: some of the key players were working on applied problems brought into focus by aviation, ranging from fire control, to various applications of radio, to mission planning. So it's not a patch, it's the entire premise of how that industry works on almost every level. Fixing this one problem in a more sane, humane way would do nothing to resolve the countless areas where dilemmas with similar origins or structures *will* arise. And much as aviation served as one of the main vectors for distributing that style of thought globally, reforming some of the field's dominant design philosophies could do so as well.

As for slitting the throats of "one doesn't know exactly whom," no. I wrote:

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.

Andreas argue that long prison terms are good enough. That answer is easy, because it has the patina of history. But it ignores the disparate real conditions in prisons, which — in many contexts leftists would agree — are far from good enough. I have some vague idea that over the last several decades a few people spent some time thinking about the history and philosophy of punishment. In nettimish contexts (as opposed to ground-level activism in judicial and penal fields), most of that thought was applied to critiques of punishment — certainly more than to imagining new and maybe even constructive ways to address the scale and complexity of corporate criminality. Caricaturing people who'd say we should think about that as "manly" throat-slitters is dishonest and dumb. But my larger point was that systematic reform will require dismantling corporate mechanisms for obfuscating and escaping individual culpability. So, when you say...

How to express a necessary anger in a way that increases both people's
willingness and actual capacity to act politically? It's the unanswered
question I take away from the thread.

...I'd suggest that you start with the anger that's in front of you rather than invoking some romantic notion of diffuse righteous anger so you can position yourself as its philosopher. I offered at least one concrete answer: the labor activism of flight attendant unions, which I think has forced the Trump administration to do an about-face twice. There are others avenues, but finding them may require some excursions into 'aviation history.' If you aren't willing to do that, or at least to respect it, you won't get anywhere beyond unanswered questions.

Cheers,
Ted

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