Re: <nettime> The California Ideology has a fascist character

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

The interesting part was analysis of the amplification effect of the 
machines. It has two components, the combination of which is a killer one:

- sheer volume, which saturates physical/biological receptors: as when 
someone cranks up the power on audio amplifier, the conversation stops, 
and the only experience available is the music. Too many likes, alerts, 
sexts, 'news', mentions, etc. do the similar.

- pre-selection at the source: what is amplified is not what's out 
there, just a biased fraction of it. You don't get to point your 
receptors to stimuli/scenery; that has been decided for you at the 
remote point. You think you might reconstruct the original reality by 
interpolating between these served pre-selected points (a text message, 
a like, a news item, your hosted photo collection, etc.) but you are 
underestimating how clever the pre-selection and machine 
formatting/massaging of the original can be.

This is not to say that forcing a declaration of unconditional love 
through 140 characters (let's take the simplest, apparently benign 
formatting constraint) is inherently evil. However, that number was 
decided by someone else, not you. And just when you got used/conditioned 
to it over years, someone (machine? human?) changed it to 280 
characters. So what happens with your previous declaration(s) of love? 
Are they now inferior? Now you need to learn how to construct and 
interpret new, longer ones. A simple change in format will be (slightly) 
shaping your synapses.

What is evil is that the hand of mediator (with 500W class A amplifier) 
creeped between you and the world - not just news items from faraway 
countries, but also emotional transmissions from people close (or 
remote) to you, readings of recorded knowledge, and your own past and 
memories.

It's the elevator music you can never escape.



On 12/27/17, 02:07, André Rebentisch wrote:
> Looks like his "class" perception of internet essentiality ironically
> reflects a "class" background, which he pretended to identify as an issue.
>
> "Without an intellectual compass, the road to reliable information that
> promotes one's own judgment..."

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