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

[Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

sorry for my poor joke about a cull of the ultra-rich: perhaps it's wrong to invite the 8 men who Oxfam declared three years back owned as much as the the poorer half of the world's population to join hospital porters in the world's most understaffed hospitals - for the good of their souls?

But I hold to the point that capital is incapable of securing its own survival. This is how we know it is not human (and indeed not a life-form, since every life form will strive to ensure that it can continue living). Take the Athabasca tar sands: using intense energies to extract il gets very expensive ill which, however, does guarantee a supply should other regions take their cue from Saddam Hussein and cut out the middleman by setting fire to their own assets. But the other upshot is that the price of bitumen, which used to come from the same resource, skyrockets, making it too expensive to build new roads to run the cars on that are going to burn the oil for you.

The failure to rein in the derivatives market in the wake of the GFC is a prime example; as is the whole Anthopocene gamble that Xi, Trump, Modi et al are wagering.

More distressing is the opposite side of surveillant information economics. There is little value to be got from gathering data on predictable behaviours; interactions are of interest when they are unpredictable.But at the point when enough information has been gathered to make the vast majority (the logic of info-capital says 'all') of human behaviour predictable, then the function of human behaviours in information generation ends, and humans become redundant.

The risk under the virus situation is that unpredictable behaviours could be fatal, and not just to the perpetrators. I keep thinking of Thomas Ray who used to say that the largest under-inhabited bio-mass on Earth is the human population, and that as long as it is underpopulated, there will always be critters evolving to make their homes in it.

Enough apocalypse! Enough of the exceptional humans who think their system will prevail over the deaths of others. Enough of the human exception that thinks we should be able to do 'whatever it takes' to ensure our survival over the rest of the planet.

As Andreas says, the situation may not be revolutionary, but it has all the hallmarks of being evolutionary. So to Brian's initiating query: individualism or general intellect, the answer is of course the general intellect; but in a form that no longer severs humans from either the technical or natural environment. Resource and information extraction are both terminal trajectories; finding alliances with the repressed and oppressed world is intrinsic: dead labour is even more intrinsic to living than it was when Marx was writing Capital; the labours of Gaia ditto. An eco-technic commons is the means and the goal: the only question is how move it from some kind of ontology into practice


Sean

________________________________
From: Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>
Sent: Friday, 20 March 2020 8:32 PM
To: Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>; nettime-l@mail.kein.org <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

Dear Sean, folks,

thanks for the useful historical references. I've already gone on record
here as being against speculations on who should die in what way.


<....>




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