Re: <nettime> Fw: Enemies of the Future

[Pit Schultz <pit@klubradio.de>]

MW> The great myth of our times is that
MW> markets are somehow naturally occuring, and that business left
MW> to its own devices operates in a 'free market'. Markets require
MW> a regulatory framework in which to function.

yep.

one regulatory framework might be 'nature' itself, or what we know or do
about it. physics, ecology, the body, society, economy, tourism,
hamburgers...

interestingly the hunt for the higgs particle which is just happening in
CERN, or the spreading of the solar wings of the international space lab,
webcasted by NASA, are rather useless events within a narrow economical
framework. they are performances, effective and not efficiant but
certainly state funded.

in a larger timespan then a men's life, even space experiments might
become lucrative. and if not, it really doesn't matter. as long as it
feeds imagination today. global warming doesn't feed imagination. it's not
like sex in space. it's interesting that the U.S. was unable to find a
consensus in Den Haag while everybody was guessing how many ballots were
between the two presidents. as Lenin would have said, the worse the
better. the weather doesn't 'perform', but the internet performed very
well, if it goes up or down, it generates a buzz. stock markets as a
theater of all kinds of fantasies, are more important then the weather.
therefore one must be able to buy trees in Brasilia and calculate them
against smog producing cars in New York City. cars are also state funded.

opposed to the writers of this retrograde pawlovian leftist report which
claimed to be about the future, and contained so many empty names, it
sounded to me like those bands from the 70ies which cannot stop to play
bad blues rock, which even in their time was 'out', so, opposed to the
timeless art of whining, its so much the question if we are able to exist
outside of the media stage, where everything has to fit into a certain
choreography, which nobody ever has seen but everybody tries to follow.
the lies of gore, the syntax of bush, empty corporate logos, boring
nettime threads, it all already disappeared and we can watch our own
shadows playing boxers. nice figure, mr. stahlman. we are already looking
at our screens from inside. this is post-science-fiction. it already
happened. toktok.

to felix and doug:

think about all the money beeing spent. i think the railways and highways
comparision is fine, and popular because of its metaphoric value.
nevertheless electrification might be the nearest neighbor here. the fast
spread of the networks of power around the turn of the century allowed a
major restructuring of production. it still is visible in the machine-like
architecture of metropoles like chicago or berlin. railways and highways
transport matter, electrical wires transport power. with such an ammount
of net investment (after the big prosperity from the colonies) a new
economic growth was expected, a change of all-day-lives, and a devaluation
of all values, an explosion of productivity which collapsed in the rise of
nationalism. after classic modernism came cybernetic modernism. was it an
answer to nation-state-war-machines going mad? what comes after the
information age? so much is clear, the 'new economy' around
electricification certainly was partly responsible for the overinvestments
in the 20ies and the following depression. today the overconsumption of
energy still causes problems for the whole system which cannot be solved
with or 'on' the internet itself. instant brain allocation needed.


who's in control today?

[ ] bush 'n gore
[ ] the ballot machines
[ ] nasdaq and dow jones
[ ] Icann
[ ] your mother



MW> On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:

>> >Felix is quite right, the bubble is not the main thing. But it
>> >is not entirely irrelevant either. The 'irrational exuberance'
>> >of investors plowed a lot of money into dotcoms that, in
>> >hindsight, could have been better invested elswhere. Its the
>> >price you pay, in a market economy for getting resources
>> >allocated more or less right most of the time -- those times
>> >when investment just goes up in smoke.
>>
>> How do you know they're correctly allocated most of the time? By what
>> standard? What's your counterfactual?
>>







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