Re: <nettime> The ends of democracy

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

It seems to me that Heiko, borrowing from Lewis Carrol, said a lot about
the decline of the democratic public sphere:

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."

Hmm, referring to Allan's point about Martin Wolff, right, his whole
discourse says capitalist democracy needs better elites. He's probably told
it a lot more than three times. Wait, huh? Doesn't it also need better
citizens? I think citizenry-elites is a feedback loop. An old and
overburdened one at this point, to be sure, going back to the Manchester
days of what Andreas Malm calls "fossil capitalism." Still one has to work
at and beyond one's own place in this bloody loop. Complicity with the
told-you-three-times rule of populism is a failure of citizenship, and just
a plain political failure of the individual, even if you're cynical about
citizenship.

Louis Rawlins is thinking about "what it looks like to have a new
politics," which to me is the most interesting. One way is trying to
stimulate different discussions, different aesthetics, outside the "Jump to
Conclusions" variety (lol for the video!). I do it by participating in
art/politics groups, like Casa Río in Argentina, or the Mississippi River
Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange here in the Midwest, or what's
now the Anthropocene Commons (formerly Anthropocene Curriculum), up in the
stratosphere and landing soon at a university near you. With my wife
Claire, we're also running Watershed Art and Ecology out of our house in
Chicago, and in terms of "what it looks like to have a new politics," I am
particularly interested in the work of Muindi Fanuel Muindi, who's coming
to Watershed next May. All these people and things can be easily looked up
if you're curious.

I'm in favor of unlimited democratic experiments in civil society, without
writing off the importance of government and its elites. In fact I have
deliberately opted for schizophrenia, throwing my all into the grassroots
at one moment, then actively trying to "see like a state" the next. Here in
the US it's amazing what has been accomplished by the open revolt and
profound social critique of the grassroots movement following George
Floyd's assassination in Minnesota. Almost astonishingly, the results
include not just falling statues and major change in attitudes at the
molecular level, but also the most progressive legislation to come out of
the Minnesota state legislature for the past fifty years at least. It's far
from solving all problems but still encouraging.

I'm also reading a philosophy book that comes close to the issues of the
original post. It's called "Green Leviathan or the Poetics of Political
Liberty." The point is how to create a social contract on a global scale,
under the conditions demanded and allowed by climate change and AI. In
other words: How to achieve a political liberty that can solve the problems
that individual freedom has created? This has been a major question on
nettime for years. How to make democratic use of networked technology to
address collective problems and obtain functioning solutions? What kinds of
non-technological ethics and aesthetics are needed? How to abandon a purely
libertarian or anarcho-capitalist conception of individual freedom and
national sovereignty, without creating a coercive Hobbesian super-state
that reboots the old dead-ends in automated form, at a higher power? Well,
the book has a bit of that idealized classroom feel that often comes from
mainstream liberal philosophers. And in terms of details about AI, there
aren't any, it's just assumed that AI could help with an awful lot of
wicked problems at global scale, if it don't become a wicked problem in
itself and "destroy the world" as the pundits say. Still in all, Green
Leviathan is fascinating, and it definitely pays attention to the civil
society-state feedback loop in its vital complexities. So I think I'll
finish this one.

best to all, Brian

On Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 8:44 PM Louis Rawlins via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> Uf. Feelin this, Brian.
>
>
> > On my way to Argentina a couple weeks ago I started listening to the book
> > by Martin Wolff, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. I was drawn by the
> > use of the central concept, which has been deployed by Wolfgang Streek
> for
> > many years. The basic idea, as old as Marx, is that capitalism has been
> > historically associated with democracy, not by accident but because free
> > labor is much more productive (that's Marx) and because free
> entrepreneurs
> > can process information and invent new business combinations more
> > efficiently than any centralized government (that's Hayek and
> Schumpeter).
> > However, democratic government delivers not only a legitimation but also
> a
> > contradiction of capitalism, because it is not just about the individual
> > freedom to labor and invent. It's also about collective decisions
> > concerning resource use, the regulation of production and the
> distribution
> > of the results.
> >
>
> It's possible I've mentioned on the list, but there is a bit in
> *Psychopolitics:
> Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power* <http://v> by Byung-Chul Han
> (trans. by Erik Butler), where Byung-Chul starts the text by outlining and
> comparing modes of extraction:
>
>
>    - allo-extraction – taking away from something else, like mining and
>    harvesting
>    - auto-extraction – taking away from one's self, like up-all-night
>    computer programming, poverty wage work on agricultural lands
>
>
> Similar to what you mention, I never finished the book, but the thought has
> stuck with me. (I've been struggling to read more than an essay in NLR
> lately since every book I read feels like just another story that I've
> already read in Borges's infinite library.)
>
> More to your provocation though, I've been thinking more into what it looks
> like to have a new politics, and I admit, it's difficult with the
> surrounding influences. Writing poetry, chatting with folks (like this!
> hooray), and drawing have been helping quite a bit in that regard.
> Bypassing the expected forms of coming to conclusions
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDEL4Ty950Q>, as it were.
>
> Totally with you on making good use of our remaining years on this earth.
>
> Peace,  Louis
> --
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