Re: <nettime> rage against the machine

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 26 Mar 2019, at 1:15, Brian Holmes wrote:

> Despite Ted's excursions into aviation history, which at least he 
> finds
> brilliant,  plus the general manly readiness to cut the throat of, one
> doesn't know exactly whom, we have gotten no further in terms of
> understanding the situation than what you have transcribed. It's still
> about a badly designed plane "fixed" by a cybernetic patch, in a quest 
> for
> profit that knows no bounds.

"excursions into __________ history, which at least he finds brilliant" 
seems like a pretty fair description of your own often-lengthy 
contributions to the list, Brian. Many of them are interesting, and I 
admire your commitment to untangling and reweaving disparate postwar 
intellectual and institutional threads. We need much more of that, in 
the US especially. But like your work with Bureau d'études, the value 
of those broad sweeps breaks down where the rubber meets the road, or in 
the case of aviation where somewhere between aerodynamics and 
instrumentation. Which is why, I guess, after "looking for something 
analogous in discursive spaces like this one," you've abruptly 
rediscovered the importance of the specific problem. But, as I described 
in some detail, cybernetic thought has been baked into aviation for 
decades. If anything, it's the other way around: aviation-related 
research was baked into cybernetics even as that new 'science' was being 
invented: some of the key players were working on applied problems 
brought into focus by aviation, ranging from fire control, to various 
applications of radio, to mission planning. So it's not a patch, it's 
the entire premise of how that industry works on almost every level. 
Fixing this one problem in a more sane, humane way would do nothing to 
resolve the countless areas where dilemmas with similar origins or 
structures *will* arise. And much as aviation served as one of the main 
vectors for distributing that style of thought globally, reforming some 
of the field's dominant design philosophies could do so as well.

As for slitting the throats of "one doesn't know exactly whom," no. I 
wrote:

> And that begs an important question that leftoids aren't prepared to 
> answer because, in a nutshell, they're allergic to power: what *would* 
> be appropriate punishments for people who, under color of corporate 
> activity, engage in indiscriminate abuses of public trust.

Andreas argue that long prison terms are good enough. That answer is 
easy, because it has the patina of history. But it ignores the disparate 
real conditions in prisons, which — in many contexts leftists would 
agree — are far from good enough. I have some vague idea that over the 
last several decades a few people spent some time thinking about the 
history and philosophy of punishment. In nettimish contexts (as opposed 
to ground-level activism in judicial and penal fields), most of that 
thought was applied to critiques of punishment — certainly more than 
to imagining new and maybe even constructive ways to address the scale 
and complexity of corporate criminality. Caricaturing people who'd say 
we should think about that as "manly" throat-slitters is dishonest and 
dumb. But my larger point was that systematic reform will require 
dismantling corporate mechanisms for obfuscating and escaping individual 
culpability. So, when you say...

> How to express a necessary anger in a way that increases both people's
> willingness and actual capacity to act politically? It's the 
> unanswered
> question I take away from the thread.

...I'd suggest that you start with the anger that's in front of you 
rather than invoking some romantic notion of diffuse righteous anger so 
you can position yourself as its philosopher. I offered at least one 
concrete answer: the labor activism of flight attendant unions, which I 
think has forced the Trump administration to do an about-face twice. 
There are others avenues, but finding them may require some excursions 
into 'aviation history.' If you aren't willing to do that, or at least 
to respect it, you won't get anywhere beyond unanswered questions.

Cheers,
Ted

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