Re: <nettime> Mesopotamia's burning

[Keith Hart <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>]

Are Flagan wrote:

>I fear both of you are fatally wrong.<

If I had had more space than the aisde you refer to, I would say that any
movement for a better world would do well to look for support inside
America. The Americans bring education, technology, economic power and a
liberal democratic tradition to these issues. In the areas that concern
nettime, such as software development, music and the like, Americans often
take the lead. As a first step, it pays to distinguish between the
American people and their government. But I do so as part of a general
strategy to uncouple the link between state and society that is so
essential to nationalist discourse. Although Roy said that US civil
society empirically is a greater power than the state, I would say that it
has the potential to be so, but this has not always been evident in the
last two years. I really have no idea what is currently the balance of
forces in American society and the world at large. But I am working to
develop a limited analysis of how one might identify them and judge their
possible effects. Once I have a better idea of the sides involved, I would
like to lend my weight to the one I favour. Even if we are about to be
overwhelmed by the most effective totalitarianism ever, I would like to be
in the resistance. It does not depend on a prediction that we will
inevitably win or even that we have much of a chance. I start by trying to
avoid totalizing statements.

There are obvious links here to the new thread "Second Superpower" which
also. unless I am mistaken, comes out of America.

Mark Stahlman wrote:

>This museum (along with the various "palaces") was the storehouse for
many of those SSO "fetish" objects and it might be a "good" idea to
scatter them to various ritual "temples" in the Alps and
Paris/London/Berlin (where they are now probably heading) than to have
them around in Iraq as it trys to shake its heritage as the Ur-UFO landing
site (i.e. the "cradle" of civilization.)<

I am grateful for this reminder of the link between the occult and the new
communication technologies (and for addressing the substance of my
satirical sausage mix.  I believe that we are primitives who just stumbled
into the first possibility of making a species consciousmess. Then we
might get up the speed to communicate with forms of life elsewhere. In the
meantime, it's like ants trying to talk to us. The ant occult anyone?

Keith Hart




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