Re: <nettime> Bridging the Gap between Technology and Progressive Politics in Europe

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

Exactly.

Two excerpts from the paper I wrote on the topic:

""
One aspect of this ideology is centralization. Centralization of 
traffic, directories, data bases, personal information, you name it. 
That center is somewhere where you are not. People interfacing machines 
built under this ideology are called ’users’. This is telling, as those, 
for example, driving machines or being driven in machines are called 
differently - drivers, pilots or passengers. The prospect of having 
millions obey machine instructions designed by few is very seductive. In 
the previous times only select novelists, directors, songwriters and 
dictators enjoyed this replicative amplification of consequences, mostly 
for entertainment, enlightenment and indoctrination of the audience. 
Today the code determines conversations, money flows, employment, 
entertainment, and the rest of the life.

Perhaps the most sinister aspect is that it captures the energy of 
activism, which adopts the ideological canons and builds the same 
dystopian constructs, on the premise that they are now operated by the 
good guys, as if an Open Source cage is anything but a cage. The 
underlying fallacy, that the power will be used only for good purposes, 
becomes obvious always too late, when the energy and trust have been 
exhausted. Thus the useful idiots complete the ecosystem and seal it 
against the alternatives.

...

Almost every single ’app’ and ’web site’ is based on this paradigm. 
There is a server and there are thousands/millions/billions ’clients’. 
The underlying motivation is that the owner of the server has control 
over multitudes of clients. The edge equipment owners themselves do not 
need this centralization any more than San Francisco residents need to 
pass Market/Van Ness every time they go to the grocery store, but they 
have little choice. This is considered normal - from dreams of every 
startup that few will make and operate something that billions will use, 
to schools where engineers learn to make servers work and to make 
clients work.
""




On 12/4/18, 16:04, Emery Hemingway wrote:
> To quote Melvin Conway, "organizations which design systems ...
> are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the
> communication structures of these organizations"[1]. For this
> reason teams that develop security software are willing to
> operate as isolated individuals under the rule of a dictator to
> produce software that operates under total control of the user.
> Conversly, Facebook built the worlds largest open office[2]
> because its goal is to produce pervasive software without form
> or boundary.
>
> Producing progressive social software will take a body of designers
> to define the structure and flow of interactions between users in
> abstract terms. This body will need to restructure itself to reflect
> successive design iterations. Implementation of course requires
> engineers, but engineers need to organize themselves differently
> from social designers for purely technical reasons. Unfortunetly
> it is simply not practical to gather engineers, designers, and
> users under the same organizational principles.

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