[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Echelon, privacy and property

[Nmherman@aol.com]

In a message dated 6/28/2001 3:04:23 AM Central Daylight Time, 
seanc@waikato.ac.nz writes:

> I like to spend time in, I
>  guess, koan mode 

Well that's all to the good.  The problem is there are too many koans and not 
enough people in koan-mode; that's how the corporate wealth-structure 
(economy) stagnates exchange and communication, fulfillment of democratic 
genius, innovation, peaceful syncretism, good environmental policy, and 
everything else.

The koan isn't going away, but in prehistoric times a bird landing on a 
branch was a koan of intense power.  Money is a medium, and what we have now 
is a radically corporate system of media control.  It's no mystery, Chomsky 
proved it awesomely in the case of the East Timor tragedy.  

I'm an amateur economist with good math skills and a flair for novelty.  I 
think human economics have yet to make the big step into the total 
technological future.  We have no precedent for the role we are playing on 
the planet this 21st century.  We have a big arrogant dinosaur, the military 
industrial complex.  Unfortunately we have let the calcified wealth of 
corporations constitute the present system of media control.  The constitute 
it in law as well as in the minds of people; they accept it.

-- responding to people, communiques of one sort or
>  another (Leibniz, as it happens, today, tomorrow reviewing onine work by
>  Melinda Rackham and visiting Mike Stubbs' show in Auckland), and the
>  staggering environment I moved to here in Aotearoa last November. 

Sounds like you've got a great life.  I'm broke, painting houses, and doing a 
book.  I might add that those of us lucky enough to life decently in 
koan-mode have a somewhat exaggerated responsibility to those who aren't.  
The decent lives available are decreasing, and if the place gets real hot, 
well it's probably martial law--sucky for everyone not just poor people.  
There's also the issue of making our Moms and Dads proud, protestant work 
ethic, and altruism.  Economics is just the mapping of patterns within the 
actual, used system of media control.  Plus there's real good economists out 
there helping clarify this shit.  If you're interested in net art as I am, 
then you have to think and observe syncretism or its possibility.  

Or, modern neuroscience has proven the need for Genius 2000 and ideas like 
it.  

That
>  said, beauty is what I like, and hang the sublime.

If I recall the sublime, it instills both fear and admiration.  I fear and 
admire the 21st century.  I also fear and admire the human species.  I think 
the first 2000 years (the last 2000 years) have been our only reversible 
go-round as a creature.  Either we get it right now, or the next 2000 will be 
our last go-round.  I was just at a poetry reading about energy policy, and 
one of the poets read about frogs.  She said the biology community predicts 
that global collapse of biodiversity as we know it (living oceans for 
example) can only be prevented if we get it done in the next thirty years.  
After that, it's wasteland time.  That's scary and admirable.

Maybe beauty is sanity and happiness?  That's what Kant said somewhat non 
sequitur to his corpus.  

Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Network
http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000

PS--in case you don't already know, me and my Genius 2000 ideas are pariah 
here in the US.  Nobody wants to be the first to denounce their livelihood.


_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold