Re: <nettime> A venture into hybridisation

[human being <human@electronetwork.org>]

  Constructing the Digital Commons by Eric Kluitenberg is, to
  me, a persuasive and inspiring essay and it somehow keeps
  a balance that is rare, of the same or a similar scale. it would
  be incredibly easy to accidentally maul the delicate origami of
  ideas and approaches suspended here, due to language, to
  what might be considered a 'condition' of language, which is
  an assumption which underlies various definitions, definers
  needing a common basis (in mind) of which to write through.

  this abstraction, writing as i am, already threatens the value
  of the text and ideas by a new layer of interpretive narrowing-
  down of meaning, based on what is common existing between
  sender and receiver in the online peer-to-peer communication.
  that is, these words now being typed are written and seen and
  interpreted non-verbally, in ways that are significantly different
  in the conception or realization of one's identity to another in
  urban and-or physical space, or, verbally via videoconferencing
  which is limited in its own way, recontextualizing language and
  communication and physicality based on relative experiences.

  this to say that yes, excellent are commons, public, temporary,
  hybrid, social, yet as language, in language, in forms of this
  amorphous switching of networks, what is the groundwork for
  common 'sense' which would be partially necessary (limited)
  to address the vast differences in realities, contexts, language?
  where may the similarities begin, and what is the assumption
  underlying (and overlying) this basis for common any-thinking?

  reading

  reading is psychological. it is a way of receiving or perceiving
  and in this medium of text, in trying to organize a semblance of
  a whole, it is contingent upon the connection not only between
  one writer and one reader but between all readers and writers.
  this is the scale of the public question, the commons, identity...

  one may read defensively or offensively, or both, suspending
  the exactitude of decision upon another's ideas, in the vast
  infinite monkey-typing universe of which meaning is scribed.
  before response to the writer, a reader must respond to their
  own model of what exists, what is. and in doing so, a process
  of whittling down, hewing of the larger community of people
  and variations upon a theme (of free thought, democracy, etc)
  is brought to where someone is to receive it, and to make the
  bridge or to roadblock or blast it apart, between the meaning
  systems - fuzzily choosing how one passively or actively is
  to address a question, a statement, a total system of thought.

  the writing which resonates with me, surprises, catches me
  off guard, puts a positive spin on the paranoia with a heavy
  dose of counterpoint, for fairness. it does not persuade by
  following/executing a script, as a computer may a program,
  instead it is the activation of the script, a shared but partial
  understanding, suspended, and absurd, from which to read,
  write, and communicate- but whereto? further into texts, into
  ideas, even of the most anarchic proselytizing of ideologies,
  becomes proprietary to the extent the processing work is
  off-loaded to another's system to figure out how things work,
  or to decide for another what to do, what to write, how to act.

  sure, intellectual property, but if the lawyers arguing cases
  speak from private viewpoints to private conditions of law,
  it may be considered in a 'commons' as long as these parties
  agree, and may not represent a wider public. why- it is to be
  wondered if the mind may have something to do with thinking,
  with all this language mushing about, grinding in upon itself,
  the psychologies of readers-writers, of the spinning disks (vs.
  whirling dervishes) and how they, as a group, interpret things.
  not, necessarily, on interpretation, but interpreters, wholesale
  discounted a priori via certain privatized discourses in realms
  of identity, on and on, to people who drive specific computers.

  identity

  this identity is the receiver, if one considers communications in
  comparison to a transmission and a reception and also a built-
  in knowledge system, a smart-system of the brain, experience
  the basis for a 'personal' empiricism, both public and private,
  yet of many publics, and many privates, co-existing, morphing.
  it depends on experience how one reads, how one thinks, and
  upon discourse as it is presented, processed, and represented.

  in the feedback loop, or the looping of language, it would be fair
  to say that the information monotony is equally distributed in the
  stalled political-economy of mind, which is of a social question,
  which it is presented as in the essay (it seems) and yet the social
  is evenly distributed in proprietary formats, not due to intention,
  but due to contexts pre-existing the individual, and the activated
  collection of people now alive. the high points in the greatest of
  speeches does not appeal to man or mankind but to that which
  encompasses all people. yet, it is through a language system,
  at least in american-english and other western languages, that
  have sexual and gender differentiation built-into the processing
  script-- that is, how one perceives, is taught and trained to see,
  to experience, and builds their empire of life upon this lit house.

  this realm of the social, the basis for where one is when one is
  reading or writing data, ideas, expressions, emotions, actively,
  passively, is an assumption. it is assumed to be an attribute
  held in common, by some enigma of sense of self-perception.
  who one is, how one is, one's psychological mental networks.
  who am i? is a question that needs to be defined before one,
  or as one, runs the script versus the other person's realisms.
  or, it can be avoided altogether by ignoring the existence of
  the hybrids that do not fit the logical models, all are unequal.
  one will triumph, one model, and its basis is a mental construct
  that carries with it certain rules and regulations for the system
  of operating in an environment, of mind, of people and things.
  if one does not exist, in the prevailing model, they may either
  have no body, or no mind, depending on the psychology of
  the prevailing model. examples are so vast and historically
  so pervasive in the fabric of people that it is left unspecified.

  the assumption

  language, based upon the construct of personal identity, in
  its public and private manifestations can influence, confine,
  and define a situation. if one reads Descartes today, in the
  reading, one must in some ways interpret the psychology of
  the writer to update the text, as the 'i' who thinks then and now
  is not the same, through parochial or secularized observations
  and yet the meaning is still transmitted through reinterpreting,
  via recontextualization, by way of considering the question
  anew, with new contingencies but potentially keeping much
  of the same model, as the empiricism of the scientific method,
  it too being caught or better yet- captured in language, as the
  political-economy of language precedes the public object in
  weighing data, interpreted by privatized mindsets with #'s.

  therefore, it is proposed that this social question of a commons,
  however slight or shifting, is the question not asked but already
  presumed answered by a majoritarian world-view, driven by
  the same corporatized (single-bodied) mindsets which drive
  the universalizing-mindsets through educational manufacture.
  it is assumed that justice=justice, when in fact justice=opinion
  based upon experience based upon perception based upon
  identity based upon communication based upon language
  based upon culture based upon context based upon all that
  came before and all that may be the future in one's mind'set.

  [language is easy to defeat, ideas are easy to defeat, it is much
  harder to construct a solid framework for many views (and in
  a way, that messy democracy) than it is to destroy it, to simply
  be 'against', even if 'for' the other option, the status quo. silence.
  it is impossible to convince a secularized world-view of a basic
  shared corruption, via language, via logic, upon the judgments
  in a world based upon a private-basis in competing mindsets,
  winners and losers, and fights, but always winners and losers.
  they have a name for it here in the USA, called 'the underdog',
  the down & out, who counteract the larger system, often failing.
  this is not where counterpoint positions are coming from today,
  for the mass independent cultures, when interacting on similar
  scales to mass media and privatized bureaucracies, and Earth.
  it is from a position of equality, posed as inequality, where the
  false logic of inequality is parsed out and disingenuous when
  not accepting that the corruption of mind is a common trait. to
  not acknowledge this is intellectually self-annihilating and it
  is easy to discredit a moral stance when it is no more moral,
  right, or good, in terms of competing privatized worldviews.

  instead, if persons were to able to accept the social question
  as a constraint, investigate its inner (individual and group)
  dynamics, and work together _beyond this state, then people
  would be able to not only passively interact as a hybrid in the
  given constraints of oppressive culture, but also co-opt the
  co-option and reverse the panopticon by way of shared truth
  that returns ideas from the current ideological malaise, social
  questions from the politic-economic determinism, and human
  relations to a shared scale - where a person can be both right
  and wrong, where arguments and ideas are ambiguous and
  ever-changing, yet can be upgraded, updated, reconsidered,
  constantly recontextualized in the foreground while in that
  background, something slower, more constant, progresses.]

  language

  one can write and read inside/into or outside/out-of texts, or
  within and without, here and there. spatial, palatial in time.
  language in computational media, or recorded media, can
  become similar to space-time machines that go back and
  forth across experience, between individuals and groups.
  of these, there are so many variations and exponentially
  profound complexities between people who are employing
  language, based on identity, on thinking, that whatever it
  is that is written is trashed or treasured given the viewers
  response. maybe someday in the future the dead ideas
  that little the electronic worlds will be gathered into more
  accurate models of what is shared as common experience.
  today, language is a calculus of differentiation, the abstract
  expressionism of assumed (universal) meaning/perception.

  there are many publics and many privates, per person, per
  individual, per group or collectivity. and a public set might
  have multiple public subsets, private subsets and hybrids
  in-between of public-private relations. this is the problem
  of the US model, exemplified by the New American State.
  the common, being, populist exploitation of the privatized
  system, a government by business executives raiding the
  coffers of a company that only a public collective can stop.
  yet, the collective is mired deep in language, bogged-down
  as is said in times of war or bureaucratic malfunctioning. it
  is a mild yet incoherent reaction unless sung in unison, a
  clatter and clamor perceived potentially as pure annoyance
  as it can be, rest assured, claimed to be this way, privately
  to those similar in identity who want and need to believe in
  a system that includes them, their needs, wants, and hopes.
  in a state of fear, more uncertain and fear does not help in
  designing a counterclaim, besides its further proprietization.
  the language, shifting, goes towards a larger whole instead
  of the smaller groups, in appealing to a mass scale of mind.

  if the individual is _allowed to have inconsistency, is allowed
  to acknowledge logical flaws in processing of experience, is
  allowed to 'not know', and is allowed to cede knowledge to
  an opposing position if it is accurately stated in the commons,
  that certain things in common cannot simply be willed-away
  or ignored, in making a case for an approach to public ideas,
  then there is a change that all the people in the group can
  start to co-process on individual levels, filling in gaping holes
  of inconsistency that is so fond of ideology, self-righteously.
  to demote the prevailing private model of mind, interpreting
  beforehand, the private perspective, scaling this up, to the
  universal conceit, and instead to consider _both sides of an
  argument, or its multitudinous sides in any empirical system
  in search of commonality. this would include concessions,
  and in doing so, reframing questions, recontextualizing the
  state of mind, being. those who dismiss compromise are in
  danger of living in absolutes, a potentially deadly constraint.

  to deny the power and influence of 'being alternative' or in
  being progressive or artists or culture-workers or whatnot,
  that the universities are basically not owned by this very
  constituency, and that it is at no-fault in the process of the
  society as it is today, in the life of mind, is pure corruption.
  what is not would be to acknowledge this, and to work the
  way to the common table, utilizing the common language
  and identity, as a peaceful force of change, transformation.
  when it is threatening for academics to think, for themselves
  that is, to acknowledge bugs in the knowledge systems, and
  to be stuck in language without backing up and figuring it
  out, why, how so, where- in asking questions again in the
  educational sphere, instead of the advertised and mass-
  marketed and public-relations sell that is today's political-
  economy of architecture, sad to say, is to move out of the
  language trap, not through leaving language, but advancing
  the language model, the way of communicating, relating.

  for instance, if coders were radical, their minds would not
  be operating in proprietary mode when thinking of the realm
  of the commons. yet, there are more 'libraries' for .mp3 and
  CD collections for web-databases, than a single contact
  database for which to organize networks of people online.
  that is to say, to leverage skills for this publicness. to be
  in relation. instead, it is through differentiation that value
  is formed, weighed, and measured. and the fabulousness
  of success does not stop people from overvaluing their own
  work, in terms of its value, by keeping it in the private realm.
  not practicing what is preached, via language, vis-a-vis mind.

  or, e-mail petitions, or news forwarded endlessly, mindless
  in its pavlovian chain-of-events to set the hordes salivating
  to get the majoritarian private choirs backing up the sermons.
  instead, vitriol and hatred, anger and denial, abuse and the
  ignorant use of power and force, in exactly the ways despised
  by 'the other' privateers, keeps the balance of things unjust.
  what if the same e-mail was actually written, used as a form
  of powerful communication, not to or for the internal debate,
  but to the opposite vantage, utilizing 'reason' that is based
  on common facts, not just speculation and built-up myths.
  that certainty has been achieved on the social scale as to
  the condition of humanity worldwide in the short period of
  2 years online when disengaged pundits woke up is ironic.
  if persons were able to publicly voice the ideas circulating,
  to reason for themselves, to debate, that persuasive force
  and power of the commons and the hybrid would renew
  the potential for counter-balance, not based upon conceit
  and the hubris of cultural cachet or dominance, but on the
  strategic deployment of ideas, questions, and public minds.

  that is, by hijacking the text, the communication, embedded
  in the language, distorting it, turning it upon itself until every-
  one is saying the same thing, or nothing, well, being, or, in
  essence, existence, stenciled on sidewalks next to private-
  plaques declaring ownership of these urban walks in direct
  contradiction to the ideal of the public, or to see with the eye
  or the camera and record what is visible everywhere and it
  is this activity yesterday and today, illegal, that that subtly is
  to be lost if it is not to be gained, regained, brought back from
  oblivion and obsequious self-referentialism, ad nauseam.

  yes, hybrids, yes, public, yes, common sense, yes, people,
  yes, truth, yes, environments, yes, awareness, yes, discourse,
  yes action, yes cooperation, yes uncertainty, yes compromise,
  yes, concessions, yes, getting to the table, yes, working with
  one another, yes, radical yet responsible freedoms, building,
  bridges, basics, constructions. the scale, another step back,
  to the wider, larger, more whole public. the one who is in the
  silent state of being, who is uncertain, it is persuasion of the
  balanced approach, of allowing faults, opposition, argument,
  messiness, conflict, but for the purpose of prevailing, winning
  for all, the public. yet minds need to be able to read it, hear
  it, feel it, know it. need to be spoken to, written to, not beaten
  into submission to inferior models of what is real experience.

  [it is possible the text is destroyed in its interpretation, for the
  communication is across vast differences in basic assumptions
  and beliefs about the present, to make certain points. though
  the original text did not have this attribute. it was considered
  worth the problems to write into this quagmire, even if maimed.]






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