Re: <nettime> VW

["t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 3 Oct 2015, at 15:07, Florian Cramer wrote:

> If you carefully read my points here on Nettime, then it shouldn't
> have escaped you that I defended this funding (against Ted) and
> actually consider it a good case of repurposing company profits for
> public research and education.

No, I didn't say anything like that and wouldn't have. One of my 
favorite hobbyhorses is the problematic state of higher ed in the US, 
which is mostly a byproduct of the privatization of educational finance. 
The implied alternative of that privatization is public funding -- but 
even that will depends, at some point, on private economic activity. I 
don't know enough about the VW / Lower Saxony model to say much about 
it, but it's probably better than the dominant model we have in the US.

More generally, mechanistic ideas about how 'money buys influence' do 
too much violence to the mercurial and sometimes paradoxical ways 
influence can work. And in ~European contexts -- and German culture in 
particular, given its complicated play of historical dis/continuities 
over the twentieth century -- they're especially ill-suited. And, of 
course, there are times when a bit of quiet from Germanic media 
theorists might be seen as a feature not a bug, sort of like adblock. ;^)

Cheers,
T


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