Re: <nettime> Hacked Team

[Jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>]

On Sun, 19 Jul 2015, morlockelloi@yahoo.com wrote:

> The shift I mentioned is the shift from being managed/herded by a
> relatively large number of humans, to being managed/herded by a
> large number of machines controlled by a small number of humans, and
> the power pyramid becoming a very steep needle.

I see. Very good point.

> How do you classify builders of these power-multiplication machines?

Trans-humanists?

Perhaps better: trans-humanists funded by the sort of white-trash
accellerators like the Thiel fellowship or Italian yuppie-tech-morons
and gov-lackeys.

In case of HT the 'power-multiplicators', the ministries of the
pyramids are the VCs and again I believe that the financial world has
nothing in place to fix such net-of-trust problems. What a pity, all
that literature about trust written for nothing.

> Cryptography can help not being seen (consult "How Not To Be
> Seen"), but it hardly changes the power equation. On the contrary,
> it enforces the centralization paradigm: the number of people
> that benevolently design cryptographic machines is miniscule. 10?
> 100? 500 (I doubt)? It is trivial and cheap to subvert that whole
> ecosystem.

not so miniscule anymore, believe me.

> While, of course, "everyone should be free to study", it just
> doesn't happen, and the asymmetry grows.

see above. Code is getting everywhere, even the art world is flooded
by code related themes and technicians nowadays. I stopped doing
"internet-art" or "computer-art" or net.art already since 10 years,
this is not interesting anymore really. The world in 10 years from now
will be full of coders and I'm not just talking about the "western
world". Code is thought in schools, there are festivals about code,
teenagers go to codemotion sort of events like they'd be going to a
justin bieber concert... and I leave you imagine the consequences of
this, they go far beyond our topic.

> Everyone just wants to download.

it may be a generational gap talking, yet I'm sure digital natives are
pretty comfortable with being seen shallow by their teachers, who are
anyway completely unable to talk their language. But have a look at
what's happening in places like github sometimes.

> How many can understand and deploy the real Voight-Kampff
> test (but designed for humans, and works faster:
> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.04441.pdf )?
>
> But I agree, blaming the worker bees is futile, and the Luddites end
> up badly. Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?

I'm not sure the politics of fear, the privacy rethoric, the
middle-class facebook protests, the crypto-angst will last so so long.
These are all obsessions and fears for the 1%, the rockstars of our
times: the hackers. Meanwhile we do live in interesting times, while
many things are going wrong (and people on this list can well claim
having predicted that) once we accept that in life things do go wrong,
the changes ahead will appear too engaging to go introspective and
live in fear. We did that already with nature and we are still in the
process of understanding it is not only an enemy, nor just a subject
for laboratory examinations

What I mean to say at last is that there is no purity, I believe this
to be the core post-humanist mantra, as Antonio Caronia once said
http://www.disruptionlab.org/cyborg

And none of the digital-natives out there are busy with purity,
contrary to what most of the previous generations are. This may turn
out to be a good antidote to centralization paradigm you mention...

ciao

-- 
Denis "Jaromil" Roio, Dyne.org Think (& Do) Tank
We are free to share code and we code to share freedom
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