Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

Adam - nice question...definitely something to consider...especially in light of democracy being understood as on the wane..well before Trump...or becoming a 'managed' society as opposed to an active democracy.

On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 9:41 AM Lichty, Patrick M <[email protected]> wrote:

As a brief provocation, I think the question might relate to the American form of democracy versus other models like the Indian one, which has its own issues, but it is operating at 3x the size of America. The norion of radical democracy versus representative versus republican democracy, social democracy.

Here, wanting to insert...that the notion of 'intersectionality' is vital to the new mosaic of democracy which has emerged to counteract neo-liberal 'universalist' democracy...one blanket can't cover all.

In short, if democracy morphs in ways that are appropriate to the milieu, It still seems one of the most viable forms unless we see that social media affect democracy like the shift to written language disrupted Classic al Greece.

and accelerationism...as part of that...of losing sight of values due to speed

as Adam points out, and I sure feel at my age...processing is so important

"Human beings (animals) need
space and time to digest change and to recognize patterns."

artificial intelligence may be able to adequately make some decisions for us, but not all and logic does not rule what is human...imho

molly

On 1/20/21, 11:12 AM, "Adam Burns" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote:

Hi Brian,

On 19/01/2021 19:29, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Democracy as collective self-governance basically works - to the
> extent it ever does work - when different groups of people achieve
> consensus and even some degree of common purpose by peaceful,
> procedural deliberation.

I am of the opinion that this may have been true.

But.

Does this least worse form we call democracy scale in our current
environment?

In my humble life of something over 50 years, human population has
doubled. Despite the tragedy of the death rate of COVID, it has hardly
made a dent on human population growth. The entire global pandemic has
put back human population growth back by less than a week.

Now add time. And digital media & platforms. And speed of propagation of
machine mediated communications. Global scale communication (with its
current limitations) is now almost instant and vast in reach. Albeit in
forms controlled and influenced by relatively new media players.

We are, I believe, stumbling in the dark. Human beings (animals) need
space and time to digest change and to recognize patterns.

The more we come to understand the nature of large complex systems, the
more we see that certain qualia only make sense at certain ranges of
scale before models, concepts, and classifications break down.

As James Lovelock has recently written in his book Novacene, do we need
silicon to add to our carbon to help the universe look and understand
itself further through the conversion of energy to information? Or is
this something we cannot abide?

I'm unsure whether we really understand where we are at this point of time.

Not that we ever have!

Best to all,

Adam.

# 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: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

# 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: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: