| John Hopkins on Mon, 15 Feb 2016 08:41:54 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> notes from the DIEM25 launch |
On 13/Feb/16 12:42, Felix Stalder wrote:
The material circumstances that are dragging Europe (and the US) down have more to do with geopolitical and demographic shifts, the kind of stuff that Keith Hart is talking about. These are, at least in part, related to technological changes, but are primarily embodied in logistics, distribution of productive capacities and changing patterns of the world economy (such as increasing "south-south trade") and not in techniques of crowd control.
"Material circumstances" is a key term -- and one that emphasizes some of the following points:
Don't forget a more basal causal pressure: global population which affects all the above. Whenever localized resources are depleted, human populations begin to move, and if they can't move, they get angry: "A hungry man is an angry man."
It is suggested that we are consuming 1.6 earth's worth of resources at the current population level. Surely pressures arising from this broad condition are propagating throughout the system in ways that we hardly are aware of or understand.
Perhaps the fever of the 1% to accumulate what they do is related somehow -- another expression of the persistent drive of Life to continue itself in the form of 'optimized' (used with at least some irony!) evolutionary selection.
The geo- in geopolitical change is definitely resource-depletion related to one degree or another. And certainly at some remove, but deeply related the 'political' as well.
Technological 'change' also is one driver of resource depletion and shuffling around.
I would not use a materialist approach, but trace the energy (re)sources and sinks as distributed across the entire techno-social system and globe. There is relationship between those flows and the flows of human conflict.
jh -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: