[Nettime-bold] Don't Panic

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

Yes, Tiziana the world is going to war, or rather the world is being led to war. It is not a new type of war, it is a good old fashioned world war, an imperialist/modernist war, with 'holy crusade' undertones. It is a racist war. It is designated 'operation infinite justice' which means that it is designed to be a permanant war. Good for military-corporate synergy. The fact that the British SAS are already 'well-in' Afghanistan means that contingency for this war is planned, one among a number of scenarios by those who devote their careers to such things. 

The last time the US went to war over a stealth attack on its territory the entire military-industrial complex of the US was lent to waging war until victory was won. The United States transformed from an isolationist democratic capitalist state to the National Security State geared up for Cold War, the beast that is now being fiocussed on little Afghanistan. The atom bomb was developed specifically to wage that war until it was won. 

Yes, folks, the Third World War is here. Its not going to go away unless we stop it before it really gets underway. We won't be able to stop it when it gets going. We'll be in it.  Like the previous two there will be profound restructurings internally within nations of the West leading to the loss of rights we presently take for granted.  The Anti-Terrorist Legislation adapted from the UK for Europe and the US leading to a Secretary for 'The Homeland' (oh dear) in the US is one instance of this. Goodbye Internet. We'll remember it fondly.

Since September 12th people have been organising peace petitions and also organising peace movements. Some of these movements have been posted in Nettime. Perhaps Nettime could become a focus for circulating and organising peace?
We have only a short time to 

Yes, the interrelations of the local and the global mean that local conflicts like those in Oldham are of a pattern. Daily in Toronto I see overt racism that I have never seen before. It's weird. Like something from the fifties. I intervene.  We are organsising a 'phone-tree' to mobilise people to decend on incidents of racism to help protect people. It is wrong, however, to think of this as a civil war carried out at a very local level. Instead we should think of it in these terms:
deeply conservative forces in many countries in the west are in contest, often in policy and legal spheres, with 'progressive' forces. Conservative fundamantalism vs The Enlightenment. Given the fundamantalism this western alliance is at war against, Islamic fundamantalism... well, we'd better stop it before it gets going.

Lachlan Brown
http://third.net
difference engine

> Are we at war? Are we on the threshold of a new type of war? Is there any
> relation between all of this? Is it a war between nation states that
> harbour international terrorists and those that oppose it? Or is it rather
> the diffusion of war at a much finer and local scale, a jump in a
> continuum that has been steadily mounting in the shadow of Empire? Isn't
> terrorism the diffusion of the civil wars of a globalised planet, the
> channeling of 'glocal' conflicts into the one-dimensional affect of
> terror? Is it a discontinuous, modulated global civil war that we are
> heading for? Is it just about Islamic fundamentalists or is it about a
> crescendo of tension and dissent that is entering into conflict with the
> inter-national capitalist nation states at higher and higher levels of
> intensity?
> 
> 
> In the middle of all this, I am trying to work on an essay on nineties
> digital capitalism, specifically the technoscientific interest in
> turbulence and the non-linear, stochastic interaction of large numbers of
> variables. Throughout the last decade, technosciences such as artificial
> life, the sciences of complexity, catastrophe theory have been exceedingly
> preoccupied with how to understand and control fluid environments, perched
> between order and disorder, whose very productivity lies in the uncanny
> unpredictability of decentralized, multiple interactions. From where we
> stand now, the other side of the threshold marked by the towers' collapse,
> it all sounds very utopian and very American.
> 
> The dissolution of the masses into a distributed space of proliferating
> connectivity, ruled by positive feedback loops, was idealistically
> supposed to generate only profitable difference. The question was only how
> to channel emergence so that it won't become too unpredictable, therefore
> potentially crossing the threshold where the self-organizing system
> dissolves or dies. This is, within artificial life, the function of the
> probe-head and that of the Reaper, the program in charge of eliminating
> unwanted variations.
> 
> With the benefit of hindsight it looks like the digital capitalists
> completely underestimated the power of turbulence to create the truly
> unpredictable, the event that crashes and pushes the whole experiment
> truly beyond control, onto another plane.
> 
> Surely there must be way to deal with this intensification of conflict and
> its emergent phenomena (the re-organization of the digital economy into a
> war economy; the attack on civil liberties; the re-constitution of a
> christian dialectic between good and evil as a simplistic and dangerous
> way to organize the chronic state of conflict in which the whole planet
> now officially lives, including the isolated giant, the territory of the
> USA).
> 
>  Surely there must be resources accumulated in years of debate and action
> against poverty, racism, and exploitation that can be brought to bear on
> this new plane, the plane defined by diffuse, global conflict, always on
> the verge of terror, and by the powerful return of the State in the wake
> of the near-collapse of rampant, digital and branded capital. Surely it
> cannot be just a a question of finding out what the sides are and sticking
> with yours. Is there a creative way to evacuates all sides?
> 
> This is definitely as 'out of control' as 'out of control' goes...
> 
> 
> Tiziana Terranova
> Dept. of Sociology
> University of Essex
> Wivenhoe Park
> Colchester
> CO4 3SQ
> tterra@essex.ac.uk
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 

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