Re: <nettime> Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

Páska musings...

> The 'netocracy' seems to be a rather speculative notion of class. I don't
> want to sound dismissive in any way, but it's hard to discuss such concepts
> if they're based on simplifications and generalization. (Thinking of
> classes as binary categories is the kind of generalization that also taints
> Marxism - at least before the advent of post-marxism.)

I think is can be more interesting and revealing to, rather than talk about 
'class' relationships, to talk about power/energy relationships in this regard.

I wonder if anyone on the list might comment on the relationship between those 
whose protocols 'rule' the network, and those who supply the electrical power 
that would render the whole thing redundant if the electricity was shut off...

Companies running cloud server farms must have special arrangements with 
existing or planned electrical generating capacities that they depend on, so 
those 'net' rulers have to either project their control over the whole system 
from electrical source to user-interface experience OR they have to be in some 
power relationship with the people who 'rule' the electrical grid (among many 
other complex social relations)... If this is the case, are the net-o-crats 
*really* rulers? It would seem to me that they would not be...

This would point back to the reality that the whole techno-social system is 
completely subject to basic extractives industries (hydrocarbons especially). 
Whoever controls basic resources controls the system. Anything else is illusory 
power base that can be obliterated as a result of minor provocations or 
'infractions' against those in (basic resource) control...

Obviously, one can say that there is no 'centralized' control of extractive 
resources globally, but the term 'oligarchy' -- this week 'officially' 
designated on the US by a Princeton professor -- suggests the style of 
collaborative control of basic resources that dominate the global system...

jh

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