Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 3, Issue 3

[Louis Rawlins via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

sense / feel / overdeveloped hacking

Really dig that term of "overdeveloped countries." A good turn to a tried
and tired concept of development.

Brian, while I was reading your post backwards on my phone, Fleet Foxes,
"If You Need To, Keep Time on Me"
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6rVJYmQFiY> came on the radio. If the
song doesn't speak to the weather, perhaps the art chosen for YouTube might.

This morning, I woke up thinking about "abstract machines" as a way of
describing techno-feudal capture. The words are clunky, but the sense was
that as freelancers are "captured" by companies like UpWork, Fiverr and
Aquent, the personal relationship and general meandering of meeting people
to come together to get work done disappears. Much as lords and landowners
held sway over huge tracts of land, parceling it out to sharecroppers and
their equivalents the world over, people lost their ability to know, find
and cultivate their own food. Driving them towards constant struggle.

Since Guattari and Deleuze had already invaded my consciousness, I took for
exploring some more of their *Million Plateaus* and puzzled around "smooth"
and "striated" "strata" trying to find shape in the ways that we,
presently, eschew the natural (smooth) world that we find ourselves in, in
favor of the ordered (striated) complex that we operate in just to
communicate with one another on this mailing list. The levels of complexity
to get one pixel to glow through the operating system of my laptop, while
I'm pinging information back-and-forth over a tapestry network designed for
military readiness and redundancy just so it can get to Google and shine
back through my composition screen, within my browser is boggling. Simply
way more than electricity happening here, folks. Expectations of when and
how frequently that electricity is supposed to work. Meaning behind each
network and where it's located in the world. Each layer (strata?!) has its
own intentions and purpose, it seems and yet it gets me no closer to food.
Just expression.

The bit that has been gnawing at me for a week, was a point made about the
earth flipping magnetic poles 42,000 years ago coinciding with the first
known cave art. It's been known to me, for a long time, that war coincides
with stunning and penetrating art. Scan art history from the years 1880 to
1950, and you'll see a sort of marker of stressful times and how people
reinstill joy and curiosity into the world. Recognizing that, perhaps,
42,000 our distant relatives produced stunning art in reaction to climate
change is moving to me. Talking about the weather. On cave walls. How
amazing is that?

And so these thoughts have slowly been sinking into traditional practices
and recognition of efforts here in the SF Bay Area to rematriate land
through indigenous land trusts. A sort of "setting aside" for stewardship
in acknowledgement that the format of interactions we have today aren't
ideal, but maybe we can – as suggested – "grow inwards" for awhile and find
some new practices to how we relate to ourselves, our bodies and the land
we find our bodies on and within.

Peace ya'll.

Louis


End of reply to nettime-l Digest, Vol 3, Issue 3
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