<nettime> Time and Experience: Constitution, Co-optocurrency, the Demagogue, and Leonardo of Vinci (ten days early)

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Very soon we will know.  

The USA traditional conservative party, now hijacked by a ragtag team of kleptocrats and demagogues, will be defeated by the lone remaining normal party in the US on Election Day 2024, or it won't be.  Its defeat, because of terrible unpopularity and the resilience of society in once again rejecting the klepto-demagogue plan for trashing the republic hence thwarting their schemes, will be a good thing and allow normal life to show its abilities for real, for a while longer, in fact just enough to get lasting results.  

However, even such a defeat on voting day would be only a partial victory.  Machiavellian control by destruction will still be the main plan of the klepto-demagogues and their party, still for now a hijacked traditional conservative party, and Leonardian government by conscience and rational decency will have to continue working hard to provide a compelling alternative that solves problems and works well in real life not just theoretically.

Going forward, regardless of election day, what does the klepto-demagogue party, fueled by corruptocurrency of a hundred kinds and terrified by any kind of accountability at all, want and need most?  Well, they have to dismantle all opposition, all checks and balances, every Achilles heel they have faced since politics first started.  The lower they stoop in scraping the bottom of the barrel politically, culturally, economically, and intellectually, the less they can tolerate the idea of being accountable in any way.  So, their first priority is to pull up the ladder behind them and insulate their perceived wins from any potential future rematch.  Canceling voting rights, or even future elections, is an oldie but a goodie, and there are many variations on that theme.  Starting major wars is the other method, by far the most tragic, attractive to demagogues throughout history for its irreversible unaccountability, and since the present klepto-demagogue has already played their other cards this worst-case option is all the more likely if not practically guaranteed.  

This is why demagogues get ugly, and guardrails thought safe and sound fail to everyone's chagrin.  For past examples we need look no further than a hundred years ago.  The world was confused and troubled, partly very well-off and partly not, newly disoriented by life with all its nuances like psychology, and wanted a simple fix.  So they chose laissez-faire, militarized, entertaining demagogues to fix things.  The result was disaster, creating many curses we still struggle to escape, which is why traditional conservatives who can (no longer being on the ballot) are warning us loudly not to elect the demagogues again.  

Yet people forget.  We don't think the bad old days can return, and we think the leash is not frayed.  To this forgetfulness kleptocracy adds lots of gravy, known in Soviet times as blat and Mao's day as holiday cookies, then Bob's your uncle, doomed to repeat.  What frantic, distraught, and overmatched AI/GPT golem, trained to copy and paste the past into the present and thus create an artificial future, would not repeat this brilliant idea?  They lack any ability not to regurgitate the worst of the past, these golems, and might best be described by the simple verbal compound "rinse and repeat."  

No, the computers will not save us sadly.  We living intellects are the only hope for conscience, because every computer golem is based on the assumption, which is more like despair, that there is no living intellect with conscience that can cope with anything, so every semblance of conscience must be purged like disobedient data from the calculus.  That's how the decline escalates, paradoxically.  In the old golem story the builder of the robot guardian-avenger, i.e. the human, has to put a single word into the intake chute of the monster-sphinx gone berserk, trashing the town and everyone in it.  This word is experience, Esperienza, experiencia, the Latin experientia for experiment, and so on.  As Francis Bacon said in his Novum Organum, 1620, "for the meantime (as we have before observed) our only hope is in the regeneration of the sciences, by regularly raising them on the foundation of experience and building them anew, which I think none can venture to affirm to have been already done or even thought of" (ut eae scilicet ab experientia certo ordine excitentur et rursus condantur).

Ken Burns' next film is due out two weeks after the next US election, not before, and explains how Leonardo formulated and built an extremely innovative, conscience-driven, almost universal, and virtually indestructible aesthetic information network based on Esperienza, Italian for experience and experiment, reality and imagination in all the sciences and arts, to help reinforce Dante's esperienza (from Paradiso I & II) and preserve it as a "higher tribunal" than the prince who Machiavelli claimed, and taught modernity to parrot back to itself cravenly in slobbering fashion over and over, had no justifiable accountability to anyone or anything higher because there is nothing both supernatural and real.  (Machiavelli of course, this inventor of modern systems of accelerated ignorance which Wiener -- and Eisenhower for that matter -- warned of, being blinded by envy, despair, and pale ire, failed to see the supernatural in Esperienza, it being part imaginative and part real, the culture-hero built in to every living person, plant, and animal always and forever, but rather chose the ignominious path of persecuting every profezia.)

Despite our unfortunate timing dilemma in re voting, we can read Ken Burns' films' press release below, discuss "Disciple of Experience" and Esperienza, watch his interview with Walter Isaacson, boost the anti-klepto-demagogue ticket's unity and turnout via whatever personal networks of communication we have left, and live to work another day (or term).  That we can most certainly do, and the AI/GPT ignoramus can go to heck right?  

After all, as Leonardo wrote unmistakably in permanent ink around 1490, in the Codex Atlanticus 520r notebook page next to a double-helical torus in three dimensions with centripetal tendencies:  

"Body born of the perspective of Leonardo of Vinci, disciple of experience.  
Let this body be made not of examples from another body, but only of simple lines."

Therefore we can also, in pondering Esperienza, the allegory of La Joconde, La Gioconda, of which Leonardo wrote, hidden in plain sight a la Dupin, "as maestra, I will acknowledge her, and in every case call her as evidence," look at the website below called ExperienceDemocracy2024 about how experience is the foundation of the US Constitution, Blake's first word-image printing synthesis, and Dewey's modern educational reforms, among many other good things.  We can weave of AI/GPT, as just one strand of many having equal dignity in the fabric of all nature and all art, not a hideous shirt of Nessus designed to infinitely repeat our own past crimes and guilt but a responsible, wise, and sustainable garment, like unto Prospero's cloak of magic made to survive the Tempest, and accountably say, once nature has been protected from our own monstrosity by inner decency and faith that right makes might, "lie there my art."  

We can also sing and play the song, "Experience, Minnesota." 
 

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Codex Atlanticus 520r:
https://teche.museogalileo.it/leonardo/foglio/index.html?num=ATL.1039.1&lang=en
(Corpo nato dalla prospettiva Leonardo Vinci, discepolo della sperienzia.
Sia fatto questo corpo sanza esemplo d’alcun corpo, ma solamente con semplici linie.)

Ken Burns Leonardo film press release:
https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/blogs/news/leonardo-da-vinci-a-new-film-from-ken-burns-to-air-on-pbs-november-18-and-19-2024/

Ken Burns interview with Walter Isaacson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVnVvQE7NmU

ExperienceDemocracy2024.org/experience-democracy-is

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Experience, Minnesota

D, E, D, F#

Town where I dwell
Some call it Midwest hell
I call it right on time
Rings out like a bell

Farms and lakes abound
We all go ramblin' around
The buzzin' and the bugs
We like that rocky sound

D, E, F#, G

O, Fitzgerald
Rogers Nelson
Bobby Stinson
(Brenda Ueland)

E, G

Experience for sure

Ancient word for veda
Italian esperienza
All the verb we're talkin'
Like a true bonanza

Chorus

G, A, C

If they say
You rubes have lost your way
Then all a summer's day

A, C

Unleash and let it play

Lead

Right wings are a flappin'
Big plans about to happen
Hamilton reminds us
You win by patient scrappin'

Chorus

Outro


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