Re: <nettime> 1994, Visions Of Heaven and Hell

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2018 at 02:06:55PM +0100, Menno Grootveld wrote:
> The URL is wrong. The correct one is
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwt-Jrmd5Ns

Sorry folks, this is indeed the URL I intended to post.

I find the documentary quite thrilling with these
rapid alternations of the fallacious optimistic clichees
that are still afloat today and the profound and pensive
words of warning that didn't fit the mood and so got
conveniently forgotten.

Nick Land is among those who said something optimistic
about inevitable decentralisation, which has turned out
to be totally wrong: the Internet has produced the
greatest degree of centralisation in human history.

Other clichées that we now know to be wrong:
- "Technology is completely neutral."
- "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes
   around it."
- "The net is like a new country."
- "It spreads the power to the people."

And here some of the forgotten wisdoms:

"It knows no moral code. It will serve any master."
"It ignores all borders. Has no sense of tradition.
 Obeys no rules."
"Technology will manipulate you."
"If we don't take the tools and use it, it's gonna be
 done for us." - "And we're not gonna like it."
"People are just talking to themselves in a cyber-bubble."
"It's more anarchy than democracy,
 and it isn't necessarily good."
Technology gives "the freedom of the jungle."
"It's also the power to bypass everything."
"It is a cyber-marketplace, with all that it entails."
"We are building the future on shifting sand, and when
 the edifice first begins to move, we will think it is
 the stirring, the exciting of the new."

"What people don't realize is what difference this technology
 is going to make to all the old power structures and authority
 systems in our society. [...]
 In some ways, that's wonderful. But in some ways, it's very
 frightening. What is going to hold society together?"

"We don't need to build homes in space [...]
 to awake one morning and find society made anew.
 Technology just needs to change our daily routine."

"The future is already in the marketplace, where it
 can flourish and destroy. And the market has a way
 of changing things without waiting to count the costs."

"Of course it allows for people to work in quite different ways.
 Of course it allows people to have much more information and
 much more choice. But it also means that everybody is competing
 with everybody else in the world. That puts tremendous pressure
 on all sorts of organisations and governments. You can't get
 away being dozy anymore. [...] Nobody can escape from all these
 changes that technology makes possible but which economics make
 absolutely essential.

"At 7 in the morning she's already at work in her
 apartment, but she has never really started work,
 because she never really stopped. In the global
 economy day and night are interchangeable." 
"They are always on-line and never off-duty.
 Totally free to fly and totally free to fall."

"The wealthy and the fortunate have always lived above
 the rest, but now they have the means to be still more
 remote. With a computer and a telephone, and an income
 which most can only dream, they can build a little
 paradise where technology sets them free."

[to be continued]

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