Re: <nettime> Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[mp <mp@aktivix.org>]

On 01/11/2018 10:23, Carsten Agger wrote:
> 
> On 11/1/18 10:56 AM, mp wrote:
> 
>> James Scott writes about peasant uprising that one of the first points
>> of attacks commonly are the offices of documentation/paper holding
>> bureaucracies: there where power is preserved and managed. That, today,
>> would be server farms, I suppose.
>>
>> So, should we really fight to get 'free' software (when it actually
>> entails destruction and let's be honest, in great part serves to satisfy
>> our own screen addictions and brain candy obsessions, or, as they call
>> it, intellectual pursuits)?
> 
> That's another question and a valid argument: Do we even want computers
> to exist at all?
> 
> Note, that if we *do* want it, software needs to be free.  And, if we
> can't avoid them to exist and we need to use software, software also
> needs to be free.

There's an additional (meta)question: what kind of software/hardware?

The alphabetic culture that spawned book culture, which in turn led to
computers, is only one of an infinity of possible literacies (beware
conflating the general with the particular). "The book" (and now the
computer) has also historically been a colonial force that violently
destroyed all other forms of literacies: it is a monocultural literacy.

See for instance attached paper. Here is a quote touching upon some of
the significant aspects of these colonial/conquest processes:

"The narrow vision of what ‘writing’ was led to the encoding of
indigenous languages in Roman script in an attempt to ‘render the spoken
visible.’ Latin was seen by those chronicling the ‘New World languages’
as a universal linguistic system, and as such this was taken as the
grammatical basis for the Amerindian languages (Mignolo, 1992,
p.  304). Since they were Spanish speakers, the early scholars’ attempts
to represent the sounds of the languages were governed by Spanish
phonographic rules (the lasting effect of which will be discussed in the
third section of this article). The first ‘alphabetizing’ of indigenous
languages, then, can be understood as an “opression symbolique” (Calvet,
1999, p. 233), a ‘symbolic oppression’ whereby languages are forced into
the norms of an external system and made an object which the
colonizers can ‘possess’ (Mignolo, 1992, p. 306). From the outset, the
‘technology of literacy’ was used in such a way that it removed language
and literacy from the indigenous peoples and reframed them to fit with a
colonial worldview."

This kind of literacy has brought us detachment from the soil and the
earth as such, climate chaos and, in its Twitter form, Trumpisms.

There are other aspects touching upon mathematics and information
storage/retrieval/manipulation.

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