Re: <nettime> "Too bad your great ideas never work."

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 2017-09-17 02:14, Keith Hart wrote:
> The relationship between technology and society is very different in
> Asia, Latin

Indeed. A few months ago we, the Vienna-based Technopolitics group [1],
hosted an exhibition and a series of workshops around the piece
"Timeline: Tracing Information Society". The timeline is a graphic
representation of some 500 entries that trace, on different levels and
with different set of a assumptions the emergence and transformation of
the Information Society and it's present crises.

We chose the concept of the Information Society because seemed open
enough to allow for wide range of different perspectives yet still
precise to generate some coherence.

This, of course, is an impossible attempt, but the obvious impossibility
is entry to very interesting and open-ended exchanges.

One of the most profound outcomes for me was the realization that the
entire concept of the Information Society, even as a vague framework
that can be bent in various directions, made no sense at all in this
context.

Not that information technology and associated politics were not
important, they obviously are very much so, but the underlying
assumption of techno-economic paradigms and the relationship between
technology and society this expresses were simply not applicable.

The drivers for social transformations are conceptualized differently,
and the role of politics in relation to economics, is entirely
different.  Themes such as stability/chaos, that resonate deep through
history, were much more useful to help understand radical shifts -- in
society as well as in the economy. Most things are we were
conceptualizing as causes were seen as effects, and the other way around.


[1] http://technopolitics.info


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