Re: <nettime> Endgame?

I think that the best way to interpret this all is that neoliberalism is finally coming home to Europe and the U.S..

All of the modes of governmentality (surveillance, the logic of security supplanting the logic of sovereignty, dissolution of the divide between police and military, etc.) that have historically defined colonial enterprises are now being internalized by those that first deployed them under the guise of austerity, security, etc..

So all of the things that we're used to seeing routinely occur the global south (election rigging, political assassinations, blatant corruption, etc.), typically with implicit Western support, have now started to become normalized in the West / Global North as well.

As a consequence, as the state shrinks to become nothing more than security/military state meant to defend capital, capital of course will play an increasingly important role in political life. Expect facebook, google, amazon, etc, to readily fill the voids left behind by various crises, austerities, and failures.

With regard to the "what is to be done" question? I've already said my words on this matter multiple times on this list so I won't repeat them here other than saying that the BDS movement is one of the few things giving me hope these days, simply because it is growing, is international, involves civil society, states, activist groups, etc., and resembles something like a new version of the notion of the "general strike" but adapted to global form.

Best,

_____________________________________

Dr. Ian Alan Paul
www.ianalanpaul.com
Assistant Professor of Emerging Media
Art Department, SUNY Stony Brook

“History is made by men and women,

just as it can also be unmade and rewritten,

always with various silences and elisions,

always with shapes imposed and

disfigurements tolerated.”

-Edward Said

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 5:14 PM, Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com> wrote:

Isn't the simplest and the most effective way to act: support the presidency?

Funny how the only thing ideology's blind spot can do is grow to gigantic proportions. That is the endgame.

Folks, as Trump's presidency collapses, what we see in the newspapers
are multiple preconditions for some kind of rally-round-the-flag war, on
a much bigger scale than we are already used to:

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