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

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

 want to try another, simpler way to ask the question: Should I be
terrified to see my personal dot on a public coronamap? Or is there a
world in which individual freedoms cohere for a collective good?

Answering Frederic, I guess I am fatalistic about social change: far
as I can see, the neoliberal pattern of society has been shattered.
Not only current norms, but our own selves will undergo a gradual
metamorphosis. This has been underway since 2008, but there has been
no clear ask from the people, no unified demand. Today there is. The
issue is whether left/progressive forces can respond in constructive
ways to the huge demand for protection that's arising from global
populations.

In the wake of the quarantines, when technopolitical change begins
to fuel the recovery, very few will claim they don't need protection
from pandemics, or hurricanes, or food shortages or financial
crises. They're finally gonna understand the phrase *systemic risk*,
and they're gonna demand the build-out of protective machines and
institutions. That's what society did in South Korea after the MERS
epidemic in 2015 (same in Hong Kong and Singapore if I understand
right). And there's no reason to be fatalistic about it: we have
great concepts and practices on the left when it comes to protection,
we call that solidarity. Even in the US there's finally a big push
in that direction. But what does built solidarity look like on a
cybernetic earth populated by over 7 billion human beings?

For sure it could look like an authoritarian regime, what John talked
about. Especially because China is already starting to make a bid for
hegemony by displaying both its effective response to the epidemic
inside its borders (near eradication) plus its overwhelming capacity
to deliver the protective goods outside (masks, ventilators, etc). The
CCP runs the most populous country on earth as a command-and-control
system, in an integrally repressive way as the Uyghur camps show.
Frederic, on my view, that's the social structure that really
corresponds to first-order cybernetics. Such command-and-control
structures do exist in a parcellary way under democratic capitalism
(NSA etc). But what we have before our eyes is the dramatic decay and
breakdown of quite a different system.

China with its overpowering discipline now looks very powerful
in the face of the West, because it's relatively coherent and it
can act. By contrast in so-called Western countries (including a
lot of Asian ones btw) the steering functions are fulfilled in
multiple spheres by autonomous, self-reflexive organizations, with
an attendant load of chaos compounded by competition and corruption.
With its transnationalization of production and consumption, its
plethora of multilateral institutions and its massive build-out
of competing communications networks, the neoliberal society has
operated on second-order principles: observing systems observing other
observing systems. It's interesting to realize that the second-order
thinking emerged with Varela, Maturana and Von Foerster in 1968: it
was a breakthrough, a new possibility, but it became coextensive
to the neoliberal form of organization. Castells called that the
network society. At times it felt like a cultural utopia, and it
offered significant freedoms. Most of what I am comes from there.
But it has above all been a perfect system for hyper-competitive
capitalism, which long ago did away with everything good about it.
Capitalism unbound has wreaked havoc on territorial societies and
it has unleashed chaos at the heart of its own creation, the world
market. Right now as government after government botches its response
to the pandemic, this way of running things looks not just weak but
deadly. Terrifying in a word.

How to create an integrative, third-order
communication-and-coordination system that maintains the open space
of critical and existential difference, while overcoming the unwanted
consequences that arise from 7 billion technologically empowered and
chaotically interacting individuals - plus corporations, governments,
armies etc? What kind of public power would that take? What kind of
subject would create and inhabit such a system?

That's the ecological question, the Anthropocene question, which
ultimately applies to the species. But the pandemic panic is the
first event to bring this question to such a huge part of the
world's populations, through the peculiar stop that is imposed on
productive/consumptive activity. It's that dead stop in the face
of death that causes the present weird, roiling, immobile psychic
panic - the moment when calculable risk becomes sheer terrifying
uncertainty. And Andreas is right to ask exactly what the Don't_Panic
machine would look like, because in due order of logic, there have
to be pragmatically innovative devices before any larger structure
takes shape. Andreas is asking, how would a contact-tracing phone
app provide anything different from what the GAFAM surveillance
capitalists already have? And how would it be different from the
surveillance state which has the GAFAM data-stash and more?

Listen, I believe in the division of labor and I give it up to others
for the tech, let's hear the ideas. What's striking in the Korean and
Italian accounts is that both invoke the need for public buy-in and
public trust, essentially trust with your life, which most governments
in the West have not had for decades. And btw, trust is not just a
function of cryptonomy. In this case it's a high-stakes negotiation
over the rights and responsibilities of mobility. The thing is to show
not to hide. It's fascinating that the South Korean government could
see the release of at least part of the harvested information as the
only way to make the whole system effective. Everyone should know
about your mobility. Of course this is what GAFAM doesn't do: instead
they try to gain a secret advantage by manipulating your unconscious.
No one, even yourself, should know where they got you.

I haven't read Felix's post yet, I'm sure he has clearer ideas.
But I'd say, the Korean and Italian apps still sound dodgy to me.
If anyone wants to work on a genuine problem of social justice
philosophy, start by asking questions about how to structure public
knowledge of individual behavior with environmental consequences,
and then apply the answers to corporations, bureaucracies and
states, as well as individuals. If we want a new and better social
order, there has to be some kind of working continuity between those
different scales. To place one's own bodily data in vital interaction
with a solidary governmental system that does not hide its face or
intentions: that's something populations could aspire to -- IF, and
only IF, they could be convinced such a system was trustworthy.
Being-in-common for 7 billion people requires some form of legitimate
and critical *systemic trust* that has not yet been imagined. This is
the red dot at the heart of the question.

There is now a chance, at least half a chance to build some
Anthropocene machines and institutions that would not be the poison
fruits of military control or disaster capitalism. It has to be done
in the existing public political-economic realm, and for us in the US,
it depends not only on defeating the adversary but also on overcoming
the polarization, which is the hardest part. But the pandemic is
definitely calling for a reboot of solidarity, and the main political
struggle is about how to build it, how to organize it, how to make
culture out of it, where to go from here.

best to all, Brian




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