[Nettime-bold] Adrian Lucas: Microsoft & GE

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

(posted with permission of the author /geert)

From: <adrian.lucas@gmx.net>
Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 1:38 AM

Someone has calculated that the combined market capitalisation of Microsoft
and General Electric is now greater than the combined market capitalisation
of the top 100 stocks of the German DAX 100 index; no wonder the US-German
relationship is at the brink. One is reminded of that moment when part of
Tokyo
was worth more than the entire California or USA, or whatever. Europe is not
in such a bad way; economic growth is slow, but as Bataille saw, the other
side of the coin of productivity growth is excess of consumption as
destruction.

Thanks for the articles. Community-building, and commons-constuction, maybe
it can only really happen sitting at the edge of an abyss, an abyss which
maybe later becomes a mainstream central plateau (Frankfurt spontis becoming
Greens, and one of them foreign minister..), or funnels into a dead-end
(Frankfurt spontis who formed RAF). Of all the political activities
happening in the
60's, maybe the only truly successful movement until 1989 was the hard slog
footwork of Willy Brandt, it may take until after 2010/2020 before we have
in
Europe a Sponti/Green President of the 'United Europe' (have you heard, they
want to rebrand Europe again !), everything takes much much longer than we
think.

Boris Groys has written touchingly (Schnitt film magazine, Autumn 2002) that
11.9 is the beginning of a love relationship between the West and the
Islamists, for the first time the media stars are Islamists, and like
paranoic
lovers, we ask ourselves, as we recall the images (long beards, caves, guns)
in
our brain, and try to imagine those images not on any camera, where will
this
conjuncture lead to, this annihilative penetration of the one with the Other
? The media stars today are no longer the dot.com executives, investment
bankers, Young British Artists, also not the digiterati generation of
critical
intellectuals, instead we must accept that the media stars today are
Islamist
suicide-bombers, security experts, nerve gas and WMD specialists, all those
people who we assumed, implicitly, had made themselves obsolescent by not
going
along with a digital flowering of the bohemian 60's.

DIAL Now
With 'D-I-A-L History' we thought we could finally let a certain history
rest in peace as irony, we smiled in Linz when that earnest Russian security
specialist (Info War symposium) suggested that the US would eventually fall
apart into 2-4 nation-states, even with the full awareness of the
perversions of
Bosnia/Kosovo/Rwanda, did we ever imagine how soon our media would soon only
invite to their columns and talk-shows the specialists on the science of
biological, chemical and nuclear weapons ? We keep on asking ourselves, is
this
repetition of the cold war a farce, as Lenin would have us believe, or is
this
a beginning of something new, maybe we should call it the 'hot war'. Is the
West so sad that it never had the chance to dead the red (and the East so
sad
that it never blasted the West), are we all (US and Russia) so sad that we
spent so much on cold war defence, what a waste, and now someone is
provoking
us, what the hell, they may have WMD weapons, but only about 100-200
(Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, N. Korea), surely we can start a war against that
kind of
adversary, to justify all that potlatch economy of weapons-making back in
the
40's to 90's. Does not North Korea, in an extreme form, epitomise what has
happened in both the West and the East since WW2 ? That in both societies,
liberal
and socialist, cultural advancement of the masses was ignored, there was
only ever a potlatch economy that made riches available to a minority, along
with the production of weapons to blackmail any power that might threaten
the
oligarchy ?

Bye, Adrian

--
Adrian Lucas
Mobile: +41 .78. 636 1812



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