[Nettime-bold] Re[7]: <nettime> Fw: Enemies of the Future

[Pit Schultz <pit@klubradio.de>]

MW> The great myth of our times is that
MW> markets are somehow naturally occuring, and that business left
MW> to its own devices operates in a 'free market'. Markets require
MW> a regulatory framework in which to function.

yep.

one regulatory framework might be 'nature' itself, or what we know or
do about it. physics, ecology, the body, society, economy, tourism,
hamburgers...

interestingly the hunt for the higgs particle which is just happening
in CERN, or the spreading of the solar wings of the international
space lab, webcasted by NASA, are rather useless events within a
narrow economical framework. they are performances, effective and not
efficiant but certainly state funded.

in a larger timespan then a men's life, even space experiments might
become lucrative. and if not, it really doesn't matter. as long as it
feeds imagination today. global warming doesn't feed imagination. it's
not like sex in space. it's interesting that the U.S. was unable to find
a consensus in Den Haag while everybody was guessing how many ballots
were between the two presidents. as Lenin would have said, the worse
the better. the weather doesn't 'perform', but the internet performed
very well, if it goes up or down, it generates a buzz. stock markets
as a theater of all kinds of fantasies, are more important then the
weather. therefore one must be able to buy trees in Brasilia and
calculate them against smog producing cars in New York City. cars
are also state funded.

opposed to the writers of this retrograde pawlovian leftist report
which claimed to be about the future, and contained so many empty
names, it sounded to me like those bands from the 70ies which cannot
stop to play bad blues rock, which even in their time was 'out',
so, opposed to the timeless art of whining, its so much the
question if we are able to exist outside of the media stage, where
everything has to fit into a certain choreography, which nobody ever
has seen but everybody tries to follow. the lies of gore, the
syntax of bush, empty corporate logos, boring nettime threads, it
all already disappeared and we can watch our own shadows playing
boxers. nice figure, mr. stahlman. we are already looking at our
screens from inside. this is post-science-fiction. it already
happened. toktok.

to felix and doug:
think about all the money beeing spent. i think the railways and
highways comparision is fine, and popular because of its metaphoric
value. nevertheless electrification might be the nearest neighbor
here. the fast spread of the networks of power around the turn of the
century allowed a major restructuring of production. it still is
visible in the machine-like architecture of metropoles like chicago or
berlin. railways and highways transport matter, electrical wires
transport power. with such an ammount of net investment (after the big
prosperity from the colonies) a new economic growth was expected, a
change of all-day-lives, and a devaluation of all values, an explosion
of productivity which collapsed in the rise of nationalism. after
classic modernism came cybernetic modernism. was it an answer to
nation-state-war-machines going mad? what comes after the information
age? so much is clear, the 'new economy' around electricification
certainly was partly responsible for the overinvestments in the 20ies
and the following depression. today the overconsumption of energy
still causes problems for the whole system which cannot be solved with
or 'on' the internet itself. instant brain allocation needed.


who's in control today?

[ ] bush 'n gore
[ ] the ballot machines
[ ] nasdaq and dow jones
[ ] Icann
[ ] your mother



MW> On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:

>> >Felix is quite right, the bubble is not the main thing. But it
>> >is not entirely irrelevant either. The 'irrational exuberance'
>> >of investors plowed a lot of money into dotcoms that, in
>> >hindsight, could have been better invested elswhere. Its the
>> >price you pay, in a market economy for getting resources
>> >allocated more or less right most of the time -- those times
>> >when investment just goes up in smoke.
>>
>> How do you know they're correctly allocated most of the time? By what
>> standard? What's your counterfactual?
>>



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