Re: <nettime> Wikileaks and Gitmo files

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

Ei Felix ---

> and shocking, scandalous information simply leads to cynicism. Ah,
> Obama is just another Bush.

my old friend Frieder Nake reminded me in an email before the election ended in 
2008 that:

"The anarchists have this beautiful principal line: If elections were capable of 
changing anything, they would long have been forbidden."

As someone who worked for an (unsuccessful) national (independent party) 
candidate in the 1980 campaign -- John Anderson (yet another Harvard Law grad 
from Illinois) -- it was at the moment when Reagan won 489/538 electoral college 
votes that I realized that nothing will change.  Reagan became president on the 
vote of only 19% of the population ...!

The systems of power/energy collection and projection of the kind showcased in 
the US are quite immune to political difference or "change."  They have been 
for, say, 40-50 years perhaps?  Once the basic structures of the post-war 
military-industrial-economic machine were put in place, the relations of power 
have hardly changed at all except in the details of sourcing of foundational 
energy sources ('foreign' oil being a primary driver among a handful of other 
strategic materials -- see http://tinyurl.com/5sjgl9o for example).

The only solid hope for a future is a world where there are no central 
(super-power) points for the concentration of energy resources: for without 
large concentrations, there can be no subsequent directed/projected expressions 
of (military) power.  Thermodynamics rules all these complex social systems, 
regardless of the ideology used to paper the surface of the system: without 
constant influxes of energy, the systems will tend to disorder.

A disordered (less ordered) world may perhaps be more or less safe for any 
particular individual, who knows, as it will hold more potential for change (as 
in less stability).  But an increased flux of change has no moral imperative nor 
any ideology...

and on today's news...

"With the growth of industry comes the possibility of a predatory life; and if 
the groups of savages crowd one another in the struggle for subsistence, there 
is a provocation to hostilities, and a predatory habit of life ensues. There is 
a consequent growth of a predatory culture, which may for the present purpose be 
treated as the beginning of the barbarian culture. This predatory culture shows 
itself in a growth of suitable institutions. The group divides itself 
conventionally into a fighting and a peace-keeping class, with a corresponding 
division of labor. Fighting, together with other work that involves a serious 
element of exploit, becomes the employment of the able-bodied men; the 
uneventful everyday work of the group falls to the women and the infirm. — 
Thorstein Veblen"

http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/16611

cheers,

jh





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