<nettime> Technopolitics now / some thoughts, of a certain sound

[Louis Rawlins via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

What's up, Brian?

Let's start with the kicker, and I'll work my way through cherry-picked,
resonant sections:


> Technopolitics under smoke-filled skies is also an intimate reality, a
> continually shifting constellation of "everything everywhere all at once"
> as a great kung-fu film put it a few years ago. And so my final question
> is, How ya dealin' with it folks? What does technopolitical chaos mean in
> your own lives and endeavors?
>

I'm dealing alright. Alternately angry, at-peace, bewildered and sort of
seeing glimmers of edges of hope, though not for the foreseeable remainder
of my life. A long view, if you will.

Chaos means I haven't eaten or rested well, these days. Having grown up in
the environment of the 1980s and 1990s in a family trying visibly to make
the transition from "blue collar" to "white collar" I prefer to focus on my
health and my immediate environment. Today, being blue collar or white
collar doesn't matter much. People are willing to sell-out anybody to make
a gain. I built software. The same chaos. I do administrative work at my
school district. The same chaos. Solidarity doesn't have a "look" about it
anymore.


Ultimately I came to think that every turn of the technopolitical screw,
> especially the major ones, had to reach some kind of crisis-point which was
> not only economic but also military, social, political and ultimately
> psychic, as people struggled to understand the transformations, articulate
> their protagonism or resistance, and especially, deal with the consequences
> of their own radicalization (whether to the left or right or into some
> mythical or religious world or wherever). Yet these subjective and social
> crises did not necessarily shape the technopolitical outcomes.


Agreed this is the plan, as far as people allow it. Planned
obsolescence fits human exploitation like a glove. When we're done with the
bodies, we just turn them over for compost. Fund a new company, a new
initiative.


More or less every third evening in Chicago, Claire and I, the doddering
> retirees, spend the entire night just enumerating whatever batshit crazy
> things have happened in recent days, coming inevitably to the conclusion
> that the social universe in which our entire lives were shaped has well and
> duly collapsed, leaving the present moment as a precipice whose beckoning
> abyss remains totally invisible - but obviously very very deep.



I wanna say ... this is the big one, this is the game-changing crisis


When I get too caught in seeing crises, I remind myself of Mark Fisher's
note that anti-capitalism is a a built-in feature of capitalism. One feeds
the other.


... To be sure, Trump is neither Roosevelt nor Reagan


Perhaps, but they're still running game:
https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases

Watching the shift in tone from the non-news USDA press releases in the
middle of 2024 up to today in 2026 is a lesson to be learned. They are
building real foundation. WIth real humans. Concerned about worldwide
exports. Food. I tend to think of the Republican Party as a learning
organism these days. One that really, really loves the cloak of hapless
bigot because it helps them get shit done under cover being fools. That
seems to match Reagan, from what I remember.


Some comments on systems, perspectives.

Virtue Hoarders
The Case against the Professional Managerial Class
Catherine Liu
A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while
insisting on its own progressive heroism
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912253/virtue-hoarders/

I sorta stumbled across this book while I was following a complaint with
Gemini a month or so ago. I'd been trying to unravel why it was I could use
a "frontier model" LLM to talk through the nuance and edges of climate
change and wasteful data centers, while that nuance was generally lacking
in human-to-human conversation.

The book does a decent job mapping some of the changes since the 1970s
(which is a theme, which is a theme: spoiler: in the 1970s, the US
exhausted most of its internal goodwill and resource benefits from post-war
public works projects + / -  increased deregulation) and how we are now in
a place where poor people are seen as a thing to avoid and care for at arms
length, rather than seeing ourselves in compassion with one another, seeing
in the people around us that we too could be in potentially similar
circumstances.


I've already mentioned:

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2682-automation-and-the-future-of-work

Which I'm still absorbing via a vis my position on its thoughts.

In brief, Benenav makes excellent and clear arguments (from Brenner) about
how manufacturing productivity improving and wages dropping (now common
knowledge?) causes a bit of a rift of "what to do" given that people are
hoarding wealth rather than distributing it. This causes massive inequities.

The point that he makes that stuck with me is the identification that when
you head out to your protests wearing Patagonia coats, Hoka sneakers, or
drinking from a Kirkland plastic water bottle, you are protesting a system
from which you are almost completely alienated: you own no part of the
production of these goods. You are supported to protest by the system you
are protesting. But you claim no ownership of. And so, Benenav suggests you
probably need to come to peace with where you stand relative to your
requests  / demands when protesting. Maybe even how you are protesting
(see: Riot, Strike, Riot).

The reason I'm in conflict about my position is:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii153/articles/aaron-benanav-beyond-capitalism-1

Followed by:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii154/articles/aaron-benanav-beyond-capitalism-2

The first, theoretical piece, landed really nicely.

But once I got to Part 2, with the Keynesian Bancor / credit system, I
started to get lost in the system. Not because I'm dull or soft on
mathematics and systems, but because I felt like the author was a little
out of his depth relative to the parts that ought to be "you figure this
out" versus "I think this is a good idea."

In sum, I now understand why David Graeber generally refused to offer
solutions and only reluctantly put forward Universal Basic Income as a
solution at the end of "Bullshit Jobs."

People will always judge you for what you propose.

People have a hard time with the idea that the answer actually is: talk to
your neighbors. Care.

It's so much harder.



> once again, with feeling,
>
> Brian
>

With feeling. :)

May the persons and systems impacted by the electrons I've laid down here
be safe, well-fed and healthy enough that they feel like they can take
steps towards connecting with themselves and the people that surround them.

I'm grateful for everybody that crosses my path in this strange newsletter
lately. What started as an effort some 20 year ago for me to understand
"digital technology" is now to me.. a bunch of people looking at and
wondering about the world. It's pretty cool.

Cheers ya'll.

Louis


------------------------------
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
>
> --
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: https://www.nettime.org
> # contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 39, Issue 13
> *****************************************
>
-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org