Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com>]

Hi Felix,

This morning I was thinking about the idea of turning points so to speak, and whether the course of current events may be "breaking" one way or a different way.

Perhaps the courses of events are a bit like flowing water, where there can be turbulence because of an obstacle that causes rotation or diversion in particular directions, but the general flow balances out eventually (as in the case of rivers).  Yet sometimes I suppose even a river can jump its course and go quite a different way, perhaps long-term.

One thought I had is that we may be seeing a turning (in fact but also perception) of the net impact of technology from solving problems to creating problems.  I mean this in an uncontroversial sense mainly, i.e. that whereas the "improvement of life" curve for technology has been leveling out (food, housing, medicine), the "harm to life" curve has been increasing rapidly, mainly in the form of climate change but also other problems.  Perhaps this year or decade a meaningful majority of people are taking a different approach to technology, sort of like the push for "human-centered" design but trying also to address other harms of technological systems to the environment, society, equality, justice, non-human species, and other kinds of value.

Not to praise dialectics, and certainly not overly, but such a turning point could make sense even as a simple call-and-reply or stimulus-response dynamic.  Or, a simple feedback mechanism, a point of diminishing returns, an over-saturation falling out of solution, pangs of conscience, waking up and smelling the coffee -- any such concepts may apply.

Neither political party in the US is really denying climate change or racial inequality much these days.  There is bipartisan support for green infrastructure initiatives to help reboot the economy, a green deal if not a new one, and whoever wins in November will probably advance this in some form.  It is also interesting to notice how the rabid nationalist-populism of five years ago seems less effective.  We may have reached an at least local turning point where the benefit of such rhetoric to anyone, even the most rabid of the rabid, is decreasing.  Certainly the libertarian zero-state solution is in the dustbin for now given the giant scope of the Covid-19 bailout.  Who knows, we may even see the emergence of a new 21st c. "moral mandate" for the former Western Bloc to advance the causes of equality and environmental protection in much the same way that voting and free speech acted as exportable rallying cries and unifying moral motives in the previous century.

Of course in complex systems there is usually, and perhaps by definition, an equal and opposite reaction for every action, which can lead to a dizzying array of permutations.  Moreover, it seems possible that strange yet highly influential occurrences can sometimes change the course of things disproportionately, seemingly at random but not really, by way of rapid transpositions.

Another turning point which might be here now, but depends more on human agency and choice, is how we view our aesthetic existence relative to technology.  For a long time humanity has viewed its ability to create aesthetic effects as a kind of divine power that rises above the earth of actual people, nature, and perhaps even time.  Increases in technological capability have generally reinforced this belief, and have done so on multiple levels.  In a sense we have let ourselves believe that by our technology we can create our experience, and ignored the limits to this.  Sadly, Freudian theory is still very powerful in the humanities, despite its originator having lost scientific credibility, leaving in a sense its practitioners (which may include all of us) up the proverbial creek with no paddle.

Can such errors of omission and confusion be learned from and set aside?  It may depend on how we define agency.  All people are wedded to their beliefs and it hurts sometimes to change them, whether by loss of status, self-esteem, income, or one's head.  This doesn't mean it's not possible, but it does imply that choices which cannot be predicted in advance could play a major role.

I've been writing some blogs at Leonardo.info about "the mindful Mona Lisa," arguing that the painting has been largely misread (in large part because of Freud's explanation that Leonardo was painting his mom) as not being, at all, about technological history much less the proper balance between the human and the technological.  This balance is, to my view, the key "turning point" of any anthropocene era, any period of time in which the consequences of a planet's acquisition of technology begin to overpower the pre-technological systems of that planet in totalistic ways.  I believe that Leonardo meant to tell us something about engineering and its long-term development into the "fabric" of our existence, and he did this by placing a bridge in the landscape. However, according to all the art history I can find about it (except for one writer) the bridge is the one and only detail of the painting that means nothing and does not bring in any contextual words, images, or ideas from Leona
 rdo's notebooks.

Whether a blog about the Mona Lisa can make any difference for better or worse is of course totally unknown, and if Godel's incompleteness theorem applies to such things, unknowable!  And maybe even making a difference is over-rated.

Very best regards,

Max



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