Vincent Van Uffelen on Sun, 17 Dec 2017 14:32:25 +0100 (CET)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: <nettime> 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists 

On 17/12/2017 10:07, e@x80.org wrote:

Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com> writes:


Echoing recent digital critics such as Douglas Rushkoff or even myself,
they ask themselves what’s revolutionary or prophetic in an industry
that relies on old-school capitalism, monopolies, micro-work, state
regulations and money as a cardinal value. And as they reject the hacker
myth, they end up calling a revered

"Hacker spaces" and similar are simply recruitment centers for the new
cognitive class that will facilitate the machine-mediated control of
the rest. People instinctively understand this, despite the deluge of
propaganda to the contrary.

Computing machines are all about control. While there is a number of
positive side effects for those on the receiving side, ultimately it's
about control of the many by the few. Tending to computing machines
('programming') has immediate gratification: you see many hapless
'users' being controlled  by your 'interface', following instructions
you embedded once into the machine, millions and millions of
times. You don't have to be there, they still obey you and your 'flow
design'. You created f*cking 15 ... 10 commandments! (nod to
Mr. Brooks.) You are god. This is the only reason why everyone and
their mother wants to 'learn' computing 'science'.

I guess ignoring both the history and ample social contributions of the
hacker and digital activism movements turns out to be very convenient to
support that kind of victimised point of view. Oh, look! The machines
made us slaves!

You are correct about what the new cognitive class means for those not
it in. Those who belong, they will be the rulers of tomorrow, and those
who are left out, they will be the ones easy to control.

The ruling class acts on a rational basis here, and a great war against
knowledge and education is currently underway, fully supported by the
capitalist elites. For them, restricting access to the cognitive class
is a key point as low education levels are a critical factor for the
survival of their status.

For better or worse it seems to me that the only way to escape control
from computers is not rejection, but in-depth education about them.

E.
I agree, the world is as fucked as we allow it to (seem to) be, and, in my eyes it is actually important to keep on revealing the opportunities that are hiding in the gray scales.
However, while some "hacker spaces" or "maker spaces" are founded and run by members of the critical hacker/digital activist cultures the vast majority are often run by way less politically engaged teams of technology enthusiasts or even worse by larger institutions. Those spaces then primarily cultivate the deep engagement with the numbing joys of learning and teaching of the skillful mastery of technology and often fall totally flat on becoming a fertile ground for critical capacity building.
The question for me is though if burning the institution is actually the way to challenge this? Isn't pure critique in damning words or symbolic acts (and what else is the act of burning infrastructure) a bit too easy and actually quite ineffective? Hacker spaces are means of amplifying certain individual and societal habits, to change these it needs to make the institutions learn new tricks. Many of these spaces are actually based on some DIY, DITO, co-created, and co-organised visions and quite often run by well meaning people that are open for active (as in willing and capable to spend the needed time and energy to demonstrate the viability, validity, and utility of change) critique. I believe that those spaces can be nudged to change, that it is worth to try to claim influence over these valuable infrastructures, and the potential actualized by trying to meddle with the organisational structures of these places is effort way better spent than energetically, conceptually, relationally, and culturally cheap one-off (ok, two-off so far) interventions. 

\\vincent






#  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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: