[Nettime-bold] Plant's Cant

[TONGOLELE@aol.com]

First, I thank all the nettimers who have weighed in with very sound 
assessments of the fallacies and inconsistencies in Sadie Plant's assertions 
about the so called Thumb tribe and her rather disingenous response to my 
first post.  I will take a moment to briefly reiterate the key points of both 
mine and my colleagues' arguments:

1. Giving a paid endorsement for cell phones the dignified title of 
"research" is like calling mock documentary styled commercials for 
anti-depressants paid for by pharmaceutical companies "information." If 
American politicians were paid off by Enron to keep their mouths shut about 
corruption it seems reasonable to assume that more than a few corporations 
are quite good at finding and financing their spin doctors and making sure 
they "look" respectable. Ph D or not, you sold your soul, Sadie Plant, and 
you cannot claim objectivity when others who operate similarly are called to 
task, and even taken to court.

2. Plant jumps to conclusions based on her observations that are both sci
entifically unsound and illogical. What was described as increased manual 
dexterity of the thumb is not a genetic mutation but simply the result of 
long term practice and exercising of a body part - many musicians evidence 
similarly surprising dexterity. It could also be argued that the increased 
dexterity was not even the result of the machine but of the exercise - hence 
we could all make our thumbs do 500 push ups a day and end up with the same 
capacities as the cell phone users. Plant appears to have fallen prey to the 
kind of hype that "fab-ab" advertisers use, promising viewers that this or 
that new fangled machine will finally enable them to lose weight, look 
beautiful, or get a life.

3. Plant is nothing short of disingenuous in suggesting that there is some 
equivalent between corporate sponsored technophilic narratives about how the 
products we are encouraged to consume at ever increasing rates will make us 
superior human beings (suggested in her views on how using cell phones make 
us have better thumbs) and the reports of independent organizations on the 
toxic effects of electronics on laborers. Such an assertion borders on the 
immoral.  Her "studies" support the interests of those who suppress the other 
information in order to maximize their profit. In that sense her arguments 
are pro-globalization in its most heinous form -- "progress" is to be 
measured by the questionable appearance of an emancipatory effect of 
technology on a few, not the outrageously unequal economic structure that 
makes a few trinkets available to an elite while starving millions, or the 
abusive labor conditions that destroy the lives of so many. Her work provides 
the narrative of seduction for Motorola enshrouded in trendy rhetoric about 
genetics and human-machine interfaces that is not only bad scholarship but it 
obfuscates deep and disturbing truths. Her pseudo-scientific views constitute 
the "master narrative" in a contemporary master/slave dialectic. 

And now, because I believe it is more important to spend my time working on 
changing  the "slave" side of that dialectic than to argue with the 
handmaidens of the masters, I will bring this to a close.

Coco Fusco

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