<nettime> Re: Deleuze Contra Barbrook

[cisler <cisler@inreach.com>]

Since being laid off, I have not been on Nettime for a few months, so I may
have missed a previous reference to the following:

www.theatlantic.com/issues/97dec/democ.htm
"Was Democracy Just a Moment?" by Robert D. Kaplan

<The global triumph of democracy was to be the glorious climax of
the American Century. But democracy may not be the system that
will best serve the world -- or even the one that will prevail in
places that now consider themselves bastions of freedom.>

--
www.collegehill.com/ilp-news/boyle.html

Internet Legal Practices Newletter
"The ILPN Talks with Professor James
   Boyle about Internet Law, Online Free
   Speech, and Intellectual Property "

>From the interview:
   BOYLE: I really started my analysis as a response to the "digital
   libertarianism" that I felt dominated debate on the Net. The key
   features of this libertarianism were that it tended to be extremely
   optimistic about communications technology -- seeing in it an
   inherent tilt towards freedom -- and extremely skeptical about the
   ability of the state to regulate the Net; the state was seen as too
   stupid, slow, and geographically too limited to deal with the Net's
   distributed architecture, its mercurial information flows and its
   global extent. I found this very interesting. Most kinds of
   libertarianism are extremely aware of the dangers of state power
   and often blind to the dangers posed by large concentrations of
   private power.
--
<and an paper by Boyle that relates a bit more to the comments by Wark:>

www.wcl.american.edu/pub/faculty/boyle/foucault.htm
Foucault In Cyberspace:  Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors
by James Boyle

Abstract:

"[T]he problems to which the theory of sovereignty were addressed were in
effect confined to the general mechanisms of power, to the way in which its
forms of existence at the higher level of society influenced its exercise at
the lowest levels.. In effect, the mode in which power was exercised could
be defined in its essentials in terms of the relationship sovereign-subject.
But ..we have the .. emergence or rather the invention of a new mechanism of
power possessed of a highly specific procedural techniques.. which is also,
I believe, absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty...It is
a type of power which is constantly exercised by means of surveillance
rather than in a discontinuous manner by means of a system of levies or
obligations distributed over time....It presupposes a tightly knit grid of
material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign... This
non-sovereign power, which lies outside the form of sovereignty, is
disciplinary power..."

Steve Cisler
cisler@pobox.com
home.inreach.com/cisler

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