Re: <nettime> Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism".

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

t

> John (H), I'm not sure how it helps anyone to say that the declining
> editorial quality of a posh magazine is inexorably linked in some
> thermodynamicky way with the ultimate fate of the universe. If it is, then so

If that illustration provides some insight to someone, great, if not, okay, who 
are you to judge that, given the spectrum of readers here (granted, as small and 
as limited as it may have become). Maybe I am really am a Goldwater Troll, 
knowing just what tweaks you with that invocation.

> is everything else, which doesn't really lead us anywhere but a metaphysical
> wormhole, does it? So leave us a little bit of indeterminate wiggle room,
> however transient or delusional. We'll waste the fleeting moments it gives us
> wondering why universal fate would choose -- out of the entire history of the
> entire universe -- these few years on this tiny planet to reveal such
> catastrophic changes.

Well, yes, that's definitely a point -- suggesting that another approach to some 
of the issues expressed here in a very academic, very 'literate' sense might 
find more teeth when grounded in a scientific fundamental -- fleeting moments 
are also governed by your relation to where you focus your attention and the 
energetic flows of consciousness and action that (sometimes) result -- thermo is 
not a scalar-limited concept, cosmologically anyway; and if your deep insights 
into the "correct pathway" to follow only extends to your words here, well, that 
would be the lizard eating its own tail, wouldn't it. How exactly *do* you live 
your life on a day-to-day basis in a way that activates what you express here? 
(Or does that question compromise the hidden 'ad hominem' line drawn by so many 
academics -- that the word should never really drive lived actions...)

> And please don't use nettime as a platform for this "when the shit hits the
> fan" stuff. I know you aren't one of those virulent rightist preppers and

Are you suggesting that nettime has some *other* use? Of course, you're 
moderator, so you are empowered to set your usage 'limits'.

> that your 'poetess/poet' is preferable to their BOBs and BOLs and BOVs and
> YOYOs; but that's just a parochial difference. The argument you're making is
> awfully close to theirs, and their 'argument' is a transparent allegory for
> postwar white American privilege, both real and imagined. For a lot of people
> around the world (including in the US), the "shit's been hitting the fan" for
> decades or even centuries -- which was the basis for American privilege.

That's the point, of course it's been hitting the fan ever since the US rose on
the slippery back of the hydrocarbon tiger (or any other concentration of power 
rose on the resource inputs available to it) and from that created the ordered
system of power and control that has affected, does affect, so many people 
internally and externally, locally and globally. That's what those systems *do*. 
It is a feature of the system you and I both arose within, and probably 
determined the fact that both of us are speaking at each other in this moment, 
here, in this medium, under these circumstances.

Counter to those systems of control and power are inexorable forces that include 
the embodied energies of individuals, living in the here and now, those who in 
their moment-to-moment existence *know* how to de-power those structures and are 
doing so. I just don't get the sense that you are doing such, though you are 
eloquent in your framing of the precursor conditions that would lead to an 
understanding of what such a pathway might look like.

I hear in your words, too, the resonance of that white privilege, and I would be 
very impressed it you could, get over it, or, better yet, lose it, unstead of 
using it. I struggle with the legacy of that past, but prefer to look into the 
now to see what can be done in lived praxis.

> But there is a silver lining to bringing up that nonsense in the context of a
> thread about the third-order politics of second-order cybernetics. Beer
> embodied

I'll try to remember to use just "t" in the future... how about that...

jh

--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


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