Re: <nettime> Anand Giridharadas: FIFA's digital philosophy (NYT/IHT)

[Matze Schmidt <matze.schmidt@n0name.de>]

> the game played in a Mumbai slum looks like the game played at the
> World Cup, with many of the same rules, rhythms, rites.

I don't agree. I'm not speaking from slums of any "southern town" but
from the 'multi culture' city Berlin-Kreuzberg, and people here do two
things: They watch the matches yelling, bbqing, drinking or they play
on the streets or on special fields sometimes copying their heroes
they know from the screen shouting/citing the names of the stars. In
Hannover two men got shot in a fight about the championships - one
dead. These are not the rules of the sober games in South Africa on
screen. But most people here are just waving their stupid flags in
mass reproduction of a new nationlism related to the games. Bethink
that South Africa is one of the biggest buyers of German weapons.

> A new digital philosophy

What might that be, a "digital" thinking? Does Anand Giridharadas mean
the thinking about digital machines? There is nothing like a digital
human process despite of Kurzweil, de Kerckhove and all futurists.
There may be a combination of the mediation of 'digital' pictures
(in this case of football) and perception and cognition. But this
is still intermediation. The cyborg is a phantasma. Even pictures
are not digital. We could not even see them, perceive as digital
images (the movie "The Matrix" mades this clear unintentionally)
though some geniuses may find patterns in columns and rows -- pictures
with figures are a high level perception two. They are generated in
a digital process but it appears to be an ontological mistake to
talk about digital human processes. "Digital Philosophy" seems to be
misleading and marks the ever-problem of humane disciplines to invent
new terms and labels for itself: "Cultural Studies", "Gender Studies",
"Football Studies", "Soccer Studies"...

M





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