Re: <nettime> DiEM25 Green Paper on Technological Sovereignty

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

To quote myself from the ideology & the infrastructure paper ( 
https://cryptome.org/2019/02/elbar.pdf ):

"The ideology of the infrastructure goes deep and is often invisible to 
the involved actors. The participants generally believe that they are 
doing the best possible job. What is specific to engineering is that the 
governing ideology is often internalized as a technical issue, and is so 
presented to the insiders and the outsiders. The presumed difficulty to 
understand technicalities is used as a barrier to shield the ideology 
from the outsiders. The baffling part is that it also works on the 
inside. It is extremely hard to penetrate this construct and separate 
the ideology from the technology: the amount of its inherent nonsense 
can shame any belief system known to man. Yet it must be done."

...

"Perhaps the most sinister aspect is that it captures the energy of 
activism, which adopts the ideological canons and builds the same 
dystopian constructs, on the premise that they are now operated by the 
good guys, as if an Open Source cage is anything but a cage. The 
underlying fallacy, that the power will be used only for good purposes, 
becomes obvious always too late, when the energy and trust have been 
exhausted. Thus the useful idiots complete the ecosystem and seal it 
against the alternatives."

m.


On 1/25/20, 11:35, Luke Munn wrote:
> Hence the quotes - I suppose I could have added "ostensibly" in there.
>
> Of course data infrastructures and the wider technological industry are
> highly political in constructing imaginaries, appropriating funding as you
> noted, aligning with public and private interests, shaping the flows of
> data, etc etc. But as I've been reading so much of this industry 'grey
> literature' for the last six months, its very much still pervaded by
> discourses of performance, efficiency, flexibility, optimisation - with
> companies as service providers. So the simple point here was just that it's


<.....>



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