Re: <nettime> Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

On 03/Mar/14 04:24, Geert Lovink wrote:

> Thanks Cornelia, and Florian for making the translation. I don't mind
> the piece but what misses here is a bit of self-reflection of a writer
> who has

snip...

> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html (U.S.
> Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement). Geert

Good points, Geert -- I noted this in the last months, when sending out small 
packages ('normal airmail') to friends outside the US: both addresses, mine and 
theirs were entered into a database, where, with subsequent mailings, the postal 
clerk could immediately pull up all my data from that database. Another older 
example, though, as a long-time participant in the mail-art network, when I 
lived in Iceland, practically anything in-coming to me there was thoroughly 
inspected by folks in the postal office.

That said, human manual surveillance isn't cost-effective -- the Stasi state is 
a good example, in the end its structure (dis)functioned as a sclerosis in the 
vitals of the social system -- and was a major factor in the system not 
remaining flexible and innovative (as all systems must do in order to adapt and 
survive) -- and thus led to the demise (transformation) of that particular 
social system.

Back in the 1970s, towards the end of his career, my father was with the Office 
of Technology Assessment at the White House and one of the last big projects he 
worked on (as a 'systems analyst') was the automation of the US Postal Service. 
That was when the 'machinery' of comprehensive letter surveillance began to form 
-- in the interests of increasing speed, decreasing costs, and so on. Five digit 
"Zip Codes" that are now nine-digit, identify individual postal addresses. You 
want to post me? Just write 86303-7213 on an envelope (and perhaps USA) and I 
will receive it. This abstraction of the analog makes surveillance of the data 
space very possible. (Although it does not immediately suggest surveillance of 
the analog 'real' space -- that takes a huge amount of energy -- to sift through 
the data space and then to deploy meat-space observation.)

(This all echoes similar arguments from the Internet of Things community -- it's 
all for cost savings and convenience, and speed, and pleasing the consumer!). 
But in the end, the collection of information is the collection of information 
-- it becomes an available pool of abstracted 'power' as a source of feedback 
from a wider social system. The energy that is necessary to accomplish such 
feedback is *not* zero (I was astonished the first time I encountered this at 
the post office -- the clerk had to manually type in both names and addresses, 
that definitely took time/energy!), and it is precisely that energy expenditure 
that becomes a concentration of power to those who control the info/data-base. 
However, the cost, again, is an energy drain -- from simply dealing with the 
acquisition and storage of information, and then the subsequent projection of 
brute power that is necessary to control the system.

Feedback systems sap energy from the wider system that is seeking this 
information source to optimize/control who/what is being monitored. In the case 
of social systems seeking to impose increasingly granular control over 
constituent processes for whatever 'socially-mandated' reasons there is a heavy 
price to be paid -- this energy is drained from other systems processes (like 
maintenance of infrastructure, maintenance of health/food delivery systems, etc, 
etc)

The US (and the West to be sure!) has been seized by an ever more paranoiac 
mentality whose mantra is 'more feedback = more control = more security' at the 
same time as an increasing blindness to the real energy costs of such feedback 
systems. This in stark contrast to the necessity of un-controlled and 
un-monitored energy flows that are crucial in maintaining a vital social system. 
Command-and-control reification is the condition of a social system in demise (a 
footnote from my dissertation follows):

**
As an example, Václav Havel's well-known essay "The Power of the Powerless" 
contains a profound exploration of the nature of power in an extremely 
hierarchically-controlled social system near the end of its existence. It is a 
system that "for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the 
unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all 
expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified 
politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be 
implemented within its official structures." (1985) It is the application of 
power via protocol which exerts the control and eliminates (as that exertion 
becomes more and more intense) any spaces for autonomy to exist. But these 
systems reach a saturation point where the control (and feedback) system, a 
necessary structural part of it, begins to absorb all the energy available to 
the system overall -- effectively destroying it from the 'inside.'
**
So it goes!

jh
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
photographer, media artist, archivist
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


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