Re: <nettime> Strom vs Morozov: knockdown punch

The thing to conclude from this thread is that capitalism is a beast. You hope it's gonna change, and then it just adds new fangs. We all watched this happen despite (or even to some extent, because of) Nineties-era hopes that decentralized networks would translate into a distributed productive basis for a new society. Dyne.org took this hope on board in the most pragmatic way possible, and Jaromil, your conclusions after two decades of sustained effort are definitely heard on this end. It's sad to be the one who gives them a theoretical framework, but this is where resistance comes from, right? I don't think there's any way to share struggles, to socialize resistance, without updating the critical analysis of power. And we're overdue for a reboot on that account.

Felix, your pamphlet does something fundamental in that regard, which is basically to ask, is the mining in data-mining the same as the mining in South America? Or in other words, has the raw expropriation of colonialism ever been separable from the rule-governed exploitation of factory labor? The answer that has emerged everywhere, and especially in the Americas, is no, the beast of capitalism has those two heads. The pamphlet is particularly interesting because it tries to grasp them together, and to see how they have together caused the Great Acceleration of climate change, rather than defaulting back to one or the other as the prime explanation. To me it is certain that the Great Acceleration of the 1950s would have never happened without the postwar spread of the cybernetic regime, which includes not just computers but a vast organizational form, the corporate state. It takes a willful ignorance not to see that this has always been a neocolonial, extractive regime (the example of oil extraction, one of the biggest consumers of CPU cycles, is there for all to see). Okay, that ignorance was deliberately practiced by many of us for decades, out of hope, as a kind of constructive wager - no regrets about it. But now is a time of resistance, and it's really getting urgent to have more precise observations and stronger theories about where the double-headed and heavily fanged beast of capitalism is going. That's why I came out against the idea of techno-feudalism, and all the reductive hipster concepts that now just limit our understanding, with no political benefit in return.

Since 2008 there has been huge uncertainty about how cybernetic capitalism would evolve, because of insuperable contradictions within its financial core. After Trump and Brexit, the just-in-time system of globalization came equally into question. Now the Ukraine war, including China's qualified support for Russia, has made it clear that this system of production-distribution will not stand. We are headed for a major restructuring, further influenced by the fearsome encroaching reality of climate change. How is the existing system, the beast, cybernetic capitalism, going to morph under these new conditions?

For years on nettime we speculated about exactly that question, but each crisis, from the dot-com bust onwards, was quelled by the injection of central-bank money into the system. Now it seems that the free-money strategy has reached its limits. All the world saw that China was able to use direct state control of the economy to solve a major financial crisis on a 2008 scale, centered in real estate and particularly around the Evergreen corporation. Apparently they dealt with it, you don't hear any more about it. This is definitely a clue. It is apparently possible to combine cybernetic capitalism with a strong state. Whether or how that combination might come into being in the so-called West is a real question.

In any event I am certain that the thing we speculated about for so long is now really happening. The neoliberal paradigm is being hit by all the monsters that it has created - Russia, precarity, climate change - and at the same time, AI is coming out of the box. A new production-distribution system is both technically imaginable and widely desired. The next decade will see, either generalized war and entropic breakdown, or a reformulation of the exploitative/extractive combo. I reckon that option 2 is more likely, although definitely with limited war, of the kind we're seeing now or maybe worse. If you don't want to leave the right-wing ideologists in charge of the question of a state-led, protective cybernetics, then now is the time to give up the hipster concepts and restart the pragmatic analysis of what is indeed a very ugly beast. How to grasp it as it emerges?

courage to all,

Brian

On Wed, Jul 6, 2022 at 5:27 AM Jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org> wrote:

dear Brian, Felix and nettime readers,

coincidentally, let me share some recent news, small but relevant to complete the analysis:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lennart-Poettering-Out-Red-Hat

let me complete with what this magazine (historically pro-systemd and aggressively posed against all critics) is perhaps afraid to tell: the master of systemd now works for Micro$oft. https://twitter.com/jaromil/status/1544618996833583104 I hope you don't mind me per-using your quote Brian.

On Sun, 03 Jul 2022, Brian Holmes wrote:

> This is totally on point, Jaromil. The tech industry has always been able to think cybernetically - it has to, in order to handle interactive networks with millions of users - but what you're pointing out, in a very specific situation, is how it's now able to carry out integrated strategies affecting entire fields or "modes of practice." In your example, it means reshaping all the factors that condition the software development process, including institutional ones such as the literature on standards and the processes for their validation.
>
> On the global level both Google and Microsoft are notorious for transforming governance through the introduction of particular types of software and information-processing services that reshape the activity of corporate officials and bureaucrats, and in that way, affect entire societies. However I had never considered that Red Hat would be doing the same within social-democratic spheres where FOSS development is supported by public money. It's somewhat depressing news, because FOSS development for public use is really one of the few places where the social-steering capacities of Silicon Valley are challenged... I don't have the expertise to fully evaluate what you're saying (although I have read about Devuan and the systemd controversies!) - but anyway, yes, I think we are talking about exactly the same thing here.

I love how the research and works by Florian Gottke remind us about the importance of topping statues, an act operating through the language of liturgy, and firmly preluding radical changes in governance.

And so there is a symbolic event last year worth mentioning: the topping of RMS from his role as prophet: we wrote about it here https://medium.com/think-do-tank/open-letter-to-the-free-software-movement-7ddc7429b474 - an open letter written together with Christina Derazenski, a big loss as I believe she'd be able to describe much better than me what is happening and through the lenses of feminism.

Today we have the not-so-symbolic event of Linux development being steered by Micro$oft, with all implications enounced in this thread.

So now let me once again use nettime to mark an event in time - this list is the best literary blockchain around! :^D

Today we witness the epilogue of what was the F/OSS movement with all its dreams of glory and democracy or do-ocracy or whatever fascinated our friend Biella so much when describing Debian. Today we observe what you mention as a "classic cybernetic takeover" vastly overlooked by academic literature about governance and free software.

I am fascinated by all this, but somehow relieved there will be no more a global F/OSS movement, just pockets of resistance.

Foucault, Deleuze, Caronia... they have seen all this already.

And they were right: being and becoming marginal, feels good.

Also some security experts were right from the beginning, about using OpenBSD.

ciao

--

Denis "Jaromil" Roio https://Dyne.org think &do tank
Ph.D, CTO & co-founder software to empower communities
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