Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>]

> <Perhaps I was unclear... but my intention was not to inquire about things
> that
> are broken (and hence in need of fixing)


Thank you

but about historical discontinuities, about possible breaks with
> established patterns that open up space for new dynamics, for the better or
> worse.


We are feeling the answer to this with every protest, and all the looting
and every new video of dissenters being beaten or hearing they have been
shot.

>
> For example, the decline of trust in institutions of liberal democracy
> -- parliaments, elected governments, the press, the judicial
> system, science and so on -- has been long and steady.


Last night 12,000 San Francisco students, my son included, marched from
Dolores Park to the signifier of the Hall of Justice. This was a
student-led peaceful protest.

More than 60% of Americans trusted in US gov on the late 1960s, less than
> 20% do it
> today. Internationally, this is perhaps decline is perhaps even steeper.


It may be the best feature of the current White House administration that
it has successfully stripped away all the trappings of the neoliberalism
that clogged our pores before. Within the psychosis, all fairness and
leadership is laid bare as a sham, which in turn produces the need for
refinement and mediation.

>
>
> But for a long time, relatively little happened, Legitimacy eroded,
> but the institutions staggered on. No reforms, no alternatives. But
> this cannot go on for ever. At some point, something breaks.


The thinness of a veneer of equity or democracy...

Quite arguably, the breaking point was the election of Trump/Johonson etc.


That was the beginning of the end of the stupor that decades of padding out
the failures with NeoLiberal jargon and it’s complacent apathy had brought
about. No one really did much to stop Trump’s election. Many were just
caught up in the fairytale of Hillary Clinton being The First Woman Prez,
after Obama had been The First Black President. Identity politics was just
building the momentum for its own demise.

>
> Of course, one can argue that someone like Trump is the effect of the
> post-Nixon turn of the republican party,


Nixon looks like a self-effacing hippy by comparison. LOL. Trump is closer
to Reagan?


but at some point, the effect
> becomes the cause for something quite different. But which effect and
> cause for what, if anything?


End of the militarized police state that all past Administrations of all
colors and parties has helped to build based largely on the idea that
blacks, especially black men, but not only, are to blame for most crime in
this country and abroad and that this is a perfectly justifiable state of
existence so...in order to be safe, we need to incarcerate black men at a
rate so indecently skewed as to fill our jails 80percent with their faces
and to vilify their existence in countless films and TV and to shoot them
if they move.

Have you seen the gear, the numbers, the technology? If that were my bling
I’d be home free from poverty and corruption...you know? I wouldn’t have to
be stealing.

What has broken (imho)  for the good of all is the idea that anyone is
going to take this excessive use of force lying down or by paying for
it...with our tax money. Do you know what it must be costing to deploy the
numbers of cops?

Hence, in the midst of boring self isolation we are rudely awaking the
differences between a billionaire class defended by high-styled goons and
the poverty class of angry black families who are struggling to survive and
students with loans to pay..,

Molly



#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: