Re: <nettime> Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

--I literally saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over the sound of my freedom."

I think it's important to keep in mind that "speech acts" of this kind are mimetic and consumption oriented, rather than arising from some kind of self-made ethic. Just like on social media, shares, likes and retweets are often purposefully obscured from their points of production. We have to ask what type of life are these speakers wishing to defend? Is it material, as in sitting on the couch watching internet streamed TV, or aspirational, as in freedom from differing lifestyles and opinions?

The "new critique" beyond freedom and democracy needs a basis in something other than speech acts, especially those arising out of the current consumer market practices. The dominant mode of status quo consumerism, means collective provisioning is driven by GIS market mapping and algorithmically enhanced logistics. Suppliers, producers, and their financial backers, have outsized power in shaping the wares and slogans of the (not so free) marketplace of things and ideas. Where is the point of production of ideology if not inside computer-supercharged corporate planning and social media celebrity "influencer" cultures working in zig-zags to "renew" the same old, otherwise stale, beyond washed up, state sponsored consumerism. Market analytics is just a shiny new Divine Right of Kings for the corporate and financial elite and their enablers in the new media and flash/rash political landscape.

I find it ironic that the same crowds that were so fearful of autocracy in the Trump era (which we are arguably still in) are now questioning the viability of the idea of democracy. Maybe I'm strawmanning here, but to me this line of thinking smacks of class elitism and isn't non-human in the cool, mystical academic way, but de-human in the sense that it discredits other humans' faculties to discern future interests.

What are the institutions through which more authentic and rooted means of persuasion and collective decision making (especially provisioning) can be built? How can we decouple ourselves from the computer enabled organizers of the current market without leaving the reservation alienated and bitter?

To me it goes back to asking that man in the t-shirt about what couch he is sitting on. What house he is in. Who he wishes he could be. Why does he want the TV programming he wants? What is the root of his sense of loss? Then asking his sister the same sort of things. How do we offer direct relief, rather than shooting down folks' stamped-cotton memes and calling it poor judgement? Most would say this is idealistic, but I think staking out organizational aspirations that go beyond what is sayable to look at what is immediately workable offer much more hope to humans and non-humans alike.

On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 12:15 PM Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree that the "absolute failure of the West" is rhetorical vagary. But the idea that central societal tenets concerning "freedom" and "democracy" must be subjected to theoretical and practical critique is not.

Currently one is free to extract fossil fuels, and also free to die in a flood or a forest fire. Yet the one who extracts (maybe a deep-sea drilling company registered in the Caymans) and the one who dies (maybe an immigrant in a basement apartment in New York) are not the same. If our theory of democracy worked, the extracting and the dying would both be legitimate because we "all" (or at least a majority of us) elected the lawmakers who set the conditions under which the fuels would be extracted (and the rains, rained, and the forests, scorched). So it would be our own damn fault. But in North America and Britain and Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere (not to say "the West"), for decades there has been no chance to subject this legitimacy to a theoretical and practical critique, because even if people with such intentions are elevated to power by elections, others immediately show up yelling about their freedom.

In the backwoods of Oregon, which is having a brief respite from the fires in order to become the worst site of the coronavirus epidemic, I literally saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over the sound of my freedom." That tee-shirt was the triumphant _expression_ of decades and billions of dollars worth of corporate manipulation, including money direct from the Caymans. The same collective forces helped send a bunch of wing nuts to the US Capitol to rant about their individual freedom last January 6.

The theoretical critique of freedom and democracy has not been adequately done, but the practical critique is moving ahead fast. When New York and environs suffer more damage and death from a hurricane than Louisiana does, you can expect an infrastructural response. But here's the rub: in the absence of a theoretical/practical critique of capitalist democracy, the response will be, not decarbonization, but enhanced protection for the most well-off members of society.

The biological concept of symbiosis, and the integral evolutionary analysis of earth system science that sprang from it, offer a viable theoretical basis for practice (and a better one than the "accidental" theory of mutation that Stiegler drew on). Rather than freedom, these ideas point to interdependency as a necessary condition for continuing evolution. Stiegler was well aware that in order for such a theoretical outlook to become practical, a better idea of individuality had to be worked out, and space had to be opened up for individual contributions to collective transformation, in place of *absolutist* declarations of individual freedom. There's the arena for cultural innovation today, imho.

Brian

On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 12:14 AM Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de> wrote:
please (Daniel Ross), define "absolute failure (of the West)".

-a

ps: i suggest to leave room, in this definition, for failures of yet
other proportions.

pps: looks like adjectives are generally up for grabs these days and
might become redundant rubble, if not signifiers of the opposites, like
"precise(ly)" in many philosophical discourses.

Am 02.09.21 um 23:44 schrieb Sean Cubitt:
> thanks for circulating Patrice
>
> there's a great piece responding to similar issues byDaniel Ross (aka
> Stiegler’s translator):
>
> https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened
> <https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened>
>
>
> a flavour:
> "Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is
> associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which
> we are confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency
> depends on recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a
> necessity whose impure technological, but also social, economic and
> political conditions are alone what make possible the exercise of
> collective intelligence, belief, wisdom and decision. The temptation is
> always to say that freedom and democracy are the fundamental
> requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet the
> /absolute/ failure of the West over the past two years means that these
> ideas must /absolutely/ be subjected to critique, where the latter is
> /never/ a denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’
> limits"
>
> seán
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