Re: <nettime> universitas gulagiensis digest [hopkins]

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

ei amigo...

> Sure. Yet let me say that, pragmatically yours, I can't think of any
> insitutions of such size being configured differently, looking at the
> place where we live, InI call it Babylon.

yeah, for sure...

> You'll find me side by side with all those protesting against the
> overwhelming presence of the military-industrial complex, we should
> even join forces planning something else out of the hashes of
> post-modernism, yet I can't avoid thinking that the very medium that
> puts us in contact (and the best example of Deleuze and Guattari's
> rhizome) comes from there, via a monopolization of research funds
> indeed: and this situation looks like growing, not diminishing.

what I have experienced (from the start of life, literally, spending the second 
6 weeks of life transiting the AlCan Highway from Strategic Air Command HQ in 
Anchorage Alaska, across Canada & the US to the Pentagon in DC) is that the 
military-industrial complex continually generates a (technological) 
contingencies, a good historical example being the interstate highway system. 
(It's a bit simplistic an example, but I believe it illustrates the general 
principle.)  The primary purpose of the highway system was/is to deploy men and 
material around the continent and facilitate whatever else needs to happen to 
support those deployments.  The net result is that communities, families, and 
relationships are shattered en mass across the entire social system as 'men' can 
be moved around great distances much easier than before (when it took Ike 
Eisenhower 7 weeks to move a battalion from coast to coast around WWI).  Of 
course the highway system is sold to the taxpayers as a marvelous technological 
innovation (thank you, Hitler's autobahn system) that brings FREEDOM!  The 
shattered social structure then is partially patched together with a 
house-to-house centrally-deployed telecom network "the next best thing to being 
there." and there is only praise and happiness for the telecom network, as every 
one has not clearly understood that the MIC concept of freedom means only that 
the 'system' is free to utilize participants in the social system as much as it 
can (taxation, finance control and profit, consumerism, industrial control of 
the production of food, etc, etc)...

So in the Light of this example, it is easy to see why we are all so enamored of 
the Darpa Net that has us in its sway, we are feeling like it brings us a little 
bit more community than we have had before it came along.  And the crucial 
question becomes, where did the paucity of relation come from that we were 
subject to before?  When that is identified, the principle of 'progress' and 
'development' may be seen for what it is -- a means of happily enslaving the 
whole lot of humanity to a Master of its own making (and in its own image).

> So I won't praise MIT for open courseware, but I respect the concerns
> of those operators that let their (well funded) research be free and
> accessible, because these are also the grounds on which I base my own
> criticism of technology - one could still argue that those of us
> focusing on technology might deserve ethernal damnation :)

hehe, it is the plight of human incarnation in Babylon that puts us in the 
imperfect technology of body, and that body then utilized (distorts) existing 
flows of energy around it to to ensure its procreative activities.  Its only a 
sliding scale, where each technology is placed.  The concept is the same, so the 
process of carving a wooden harrow and harnessing it to a beast of burden can 
wreak havoc on the community of critters there in the cultivated soil only 
differs by degree from driving a 1.5-million-dollar John Deere harvester across 
a thousand acres of Monsanto-gen-x wheat in a day.  Life distorts the flows that 
it is immersed in.

> Said that, InI feel grateful for reminding us that another World is
> possible.

But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth  ;-)

as long as we have some Other(s) to encounter and interact with, regardless of 
the technological intermediation, we can still be inspired and electrified and 
moved to a higher level of be-ing...

jh


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