<nettime> Tout Ideas That Remove Obstacles To Our Business

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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The crisis of the planet today is a crisis of European modernity.  All continents have largely adopted this European approach.

Its not far off target to say that two basic forms of modernization are contesting for dominance of the foreseeable future, and that the outcome of this contest will generally shape the third millennium.

The first two millennia, as has been argued, were shaped by two main forces: Reason and Authority, which is to say, algorithm and power.  The first one we could say was the more inflected toward power, i.e. the years 1-1000, since the network of books was not yet highly developed and the sword had a generally greater sway.  The second millennium, which has been called the millennium of the book (which is a network mind you not a paperweight) and of the ascent of spoken languages beyond archival Latin, then might match closer to Reason.

What options exist for the third?  I see two.  One is full mechanization, where Reason and Authority subsume each other into a single tissue called Machine.  It overwhelms and destroys, early in the millennium, all organic biological life on the planet as it has evolved these last ten or so billion years, reducing it to a kind of homogeneous slurry of matter and energy for consumptive redirection, a chimera of pabulum and shit which ultimately becomes both at once.

The other choice before us, at least for now one hopes, is not Machine, but Experience, which Machines cannot have and only imitate.  Experience always fell to second or third place behind Reason and Authority, throughout Europe's short and turbid reign thus far, but once given equality could emanate intrinsically from both humans and other biological life forms like trees, mammals, forests, rivers, fungi, birds, and fish.  Every living thing in fact, since they all can do Experience quite well, would be involved in an equal-peer relationship to Authority and Reason.

Far from being destroyed, biological life on the planet manifested through Experience could be restored and preserved.  We would not become a planet that killed its organic matrix by technological overwhelm.

This choice, my friend, is up to you.


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