Re: <nettime> Utopia is finally over

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Today's Topics:

   1. Utopia is finally over (Brian Holmes)

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2022 15:19:46 -0600
From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
To: nettime <nettime-l@kein.org>
Subject: <nettime> Utopia is finally over
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        <CANuiTgy=2f8kxkXhSYDgdxgqZFfyBphQ53_nzaSXHgr9+FF+yg@mail.gmail.com>
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I vividly remember driving past the shuttered customs buildings on the
Franco-Belgian border in the mid-1990s. Paris-Amsterdam had become a
freeway trip. Seven years later, colorful pieces of paper appeared in
everyone's hands: the euro. Almost simultaneously, China entered the World
Trade Organization. Anyone with historical awareness and access to live
information from around the planet could have predicted what would happen
over the middle term: the rise of inequality, the formation of a
transnational oligarchy, extreme environmental degradation, the reemergence
of far-right forces, and ultimately, geopolitical clashes leading to war.
Yet even those who did predict such things experienced a utopian period of
free international cooperation, creativity, travel, the formation of new
kinds of communities and the chance to express a new spirit that had
emerged after the end of the Cold War in 1989-92. In fact the entire
neoliberal period, with market populism at its core, saw incredible
flowerings of culture across the earth, something worth remembering and
trying to interpret.

America's useless wars in Central Asia and the Middle East (supported by
Nato in the former case) cast an excruciating light over this period, as
did the inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere and the corresponding
failure to do anything about it. You'd have thought that the global
financial crisis of 2007-12 would have put an end to all this, but instead
it reinforced the oligarchies. Meanwhile, privileged people all over the
world kept the party going. I was in Mongolia, on an amazing cross-cultural
art junket in 2014, when a Polish artist agitatedly explained to me what I
was not getting: Vladimir Putin's ability to run circles around Western
governments and populations with the destabilizing techniques of what was
then called "non-linear warfare" - while at the same time engaging in the
real thing.

No one knows where the current conflict will end, if war will extend beyond
Ukraine's borders, how the crucial issue of Russian-Chinese cooperation
will play out over the coming months, whether the unified world economy
will split into rival blocs (Nato vs Shanghai Cooperation Organization), or
whether a new, even more corrupt status quo will emerge that allows the EU
to remain Russia's number 1 trading partner. As I write, the former SPD
chancellor of Germany during the go-go years of globalization, Gerhard
Schroeder, has not yet stepped down from his position as chairman of the
board of Rosneft.

Whatever the outcomes, everyone knows a divide has been crossed, and that
the short and middle-term responses will be crucial. There's half a chance
to purge the global financial / real-estate system of highly corruptive
Russian money, and to quell the voices of those who see Putin's militarist
nationalism as the model for a virile white authoritarian resurgence across
the so-called West (I'll leave others to speculate about contrary
possibilities). Maybe a live demonstration of what risk really means will
convince politicians and populations to prepare more deliberately for
obvious and pressing future challenges. Anyway, the giddy period that so
many of us lived through ended long ago. Now, at least a decade too late, I
think that period is both formally and functionally closed for the
international system. It turns out Covid was just a prelude, or maybe an
incubator. How to forge new ideas and pick up new tools in a radically
different world?

My heart goes out to all those hit by this war.

Brian
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End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 173, Issue 25
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