nettime: Re: hypergarbage.. hyperbole..

[hank@wimsey.com (Hank Bull)]

At the beginning, this project proposed that the current debate in 
Canada/Quebec is insoluble as long as politicians fail to realize how much 
technology has transformed community. But, as KK points out, one thing that 
hasn't transformed is class. In spite of the fact that the current power 
structure has been subverted and challenged at the margins, the effect of 
electronic networks so far has not been to break down any hierarchies but, 
on the contrary, to concentrate power into fewer hands than ever before.

When the German Minister of Justice says, 'the traditional 
national state will prove obsolete' I wonder what he has in mind to replace 
it. What he knows: it's already happened. Governments have no more power, no 
more identity. Of the many wars now raging around the planet, none are 
between nations, all are tribal. Control of currency values has fallen to 
young stock market speculators. Multi-nationals pay no taxes. 

So we are not in a national but a multi-national situation. Like the 
post-modern, a hybrid, a temporary contemporary. A privatized network 
constitutes the provisional world government. Civil conflicts, the not so 
slow imolation of cultural traditions, are controlled like the weather, not 
by cigar chomping leaders carving maps, but by the hackers of fractal 
catastophe. Our provincial politicians look quaint, but they know their 
place in the new world order. It's Telco's on top, at least for now.

But the situation remains fluid. The thing about a global brain, it can 
change its mind over night.


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