Re: <nettime> choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

This is an intricate text with a lot of angles on the subject - not a 
bad thing, since the subject in question is now 4,500 people! I want to 
look behind just one sentence:

"From the beginning, <nettime> served as an environment for 
experimentation with the new medium and, beyond that, as a collaborative 
platform to prepare publications outside of it."

In terms of publication, Ted and Felix are firstly talking about the 
"Zentralkomittee" readers that were published in the early days of 
nettime. But there is a more informal and sometimes unacknowledged type 
of collaborative writing that emerges from this kind of list, which is 
also worth some attention. For example, "my" texts on cybernetics in the 
mid-2000s were to a certain degree products of list-wide debates, as I 
usually indicated somewhere in the footnotes to the published versions. 
I also had the great experience of launching a collaborative project on 
the subject of Technopolitics through mailing-list exchanges with Armin 
Medosch and others (that project didn't actually start here, but nettime 
has been the most important venue for written debate about those 
issues). I would be curious to know if some others have had interesting 
experiences with this type of informal collaboration?

As noted last April Fools', there will be good reasons for fresh 
conceptual collaborations in the future. The neoliberal order with its 
bewildering anarcho-libertarian ideology is on the way out. We are 
headed toward a new state-form based on third-order cybernetics, or 
general ecology, in which finely grained data on global populations will 
be used to repress those populations, but also to facilitate and channel 
behaviors more adaptive to the overall earth system. As resource use 
continues to grow, survival issues will increasingly make earth-system 
dynamics into an ultimate reference point, directly present and 
determinant for all experience, yet not susceptible of direct control. 
This leads to fundamental epistemological shifts, with many cascading 
effects on human-machine combinations (we cyborgs, I mean). Of course, 
the second-order paradigm of multiple autonomous agents modeling each 
others' behavior will never entirely disappear, just as the first-order 
logic of command, communication and control has never ceased to govern 
individual machine systems. First-order cybernetics was exemplified by a 
missile seeking its target; and the second order, by a bunch of 
hedge-funds making wild bets according to their speculative models of 
their rivals' wild bets. I think both of those cases will look very 
different from whatever kind of system emerges to coordinate, say, the 
movement of millions of driverless cars through a busy urban region.

While neither finance or war are likely to disappear, many new forms of 
continental- and global-level coordination are likely to take hold, 
affecting not just states and governments, but also individual agents 
relating to each other through densely patterned networks. 
Continental-scale smart grids for distributed electricity production are 
one possible example of a new kind of large-scale system, and 
potentially a crucial one. But I would look further to novel forms of 
water recylcing, emissions control and even weather modulation, not to 
mention a total embrace of identity control by the included classses, 
panic-dampening efforts during political-economic crises, etc. Silicon 
Valley remains the most obvious candidate to invent, commercialize and 
roll out the early versions of these systems; but Silicon Valley itself 
will become an ever-more global complex, increasingly shaped by a 
globally inegrated state-form. I don't say all this is for the better, 
nor necessarily for the worst. I say it's likely to happen. Wouldn't it 
be interesting to analyze this gradual metamorphosis?

The Technopolitics project was designed as a kind of observatory or 
distributed digital Wunderblock to keep tabs on the ways that the world 
is reacting to the financial crisis and the subsequent period of 
economic stagnation and military chaos, which is not yet over. Now, 
however, it looks to me as though inter-state cooperation (or what used 
to be called "inter-imperialist cooperation") will succeed in overcoming 
the contradictions of capitalism once more, setting the stage for 
massive new rounds of infrastructure building accompanied by the 
emergence of previously unimaginable organizational forms and new 
cultural-ideological horizons as well. The crucial intervention so far 
has been the unprecedented injection of some 12 trillion USD into the 
global monetary system by central banks, which know very well what each 
other are doing. The next crucial intervention will be to actually *do* 
something coherent with that money. In other words, look forward to 
attempts at orchestrating global economic productivity, somewhat at the 
US and the Allies did during WWII and in the decade thereafter. The 
collapse of the American security system in the Middle East, the 
desperate gambits of Russia and the military growing pains of China have 
yet to be surmounted; but i think they will be. Global corporations will 
obviously survive and thrive through this process, and they will 
administrate most of the coming investment wave. However, I think that 
key aspects of the coming round of global development will be 
orchestrated by the new inter-state/inter-imperialist order, in order to 
coordinate production/consumption and provide earth-system level 
services for all included populations. Who will do this? A consortium of 
countries including China. Whether the US or the EU will be part of it, 
I don't know. In short, the 21st century is not likely to be your 
grandpa's political economy!

I don't expect any recognizable pattern to become visible for a decade 
or more; but it is likely that that the decisive breakthroughs of the 
future are actually being invented right now, without us knowing it. 
First-order cybernetics was analyzed, critiqued and subverted in the 
Sixties and Seventies, and second-order forms were at the heart of our 
concerns in the Nineties and the Noughties. Don't you think a Third Age 
of net-critique is dawning? Who wants to have a go at that one?

curiously, Brian

***

Cybernetics essays ("Dark Crystals" section):
https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/book-materials

Two forks of Technopolitics:
http://www.thenextlayer.org/technopolitics_group
http://threecrises.org


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