Re: <nettime> Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Frédéric Neyrat <fneyrat@gmail.com>]

Dear Brian,

Would I be correct if I say that I see in the last paragraphs of your email
a form of fatalism! Not because you try to think - very well - the future,
but because of the alternative frame that you propose: either the defense
of the "autonomous individual" or the cybernetic being-in-common.

Let's be honest: I'm totally hopeless, so in this sense I'm even more than
fatalist. Yet when I try to imagine how the spirit - let's use an old, old
fashion concept! - can breathe, I see the spirit, that is to say the
possibility to think and not to calculate, the possibility of absolute
metaphors, of unknown affects, of "dialectic images," on a threshold, on
the line that divides your alternative. I see a being-in-common on the side
of the Great Refusal and the individual on the side of the cybernetic
society, that is to say a chiasma that recombines your alternative. I see a
second-order cybernetics that insists on the void around which negative
loops spiral, not the first-order one that helps the police. I see a
complete opposition between being-in-common and first-order cybernetics,
that is to say the annihilation of the common. And I see the possibility to
participate in the elaboration of a society in which technology will be
used for the common, not against it. I see, I see... But I'm blind of
course.

Take care,

Frederic

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________________



On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 6:31 AM Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
wrote:

> There is an interview in today's Corriere della Sera describing the
> contact-tracing app that three Italian firms are developing for the
> Department of Civil Protection:



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