<nettime> [Fwd] A Spit in the Ocean (or the limits of social network paranoia)

[Jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>]

dear Tjebbe,

as young squatters in Amsterdam in recent times both me and hellekin
did benefit from your early practices of phone alarm lists.
Considering your presence in this discussion now I feel that the
grounds for this dialogue are extremely interesting and fertile.
It certainly won't hurt nettime to have a piece of living flesh in
the slow process of pseudo-institutional advertising usage that the
majority does of it.

On Tue, 14 Feb 2012, Tjebbe van Tijen wrote:

> The message I am reacting on seems to me very romantic and very
> naive and also untrue in the sense that when you are against a
> global big firm communication system and want to construct something
> of an order order, an outsider system, the last thing you should do
> is announce it here, on the dwindling list, that once was full of
> discussion and now mostly contains one way announcement (I also use
> it for that I confess)..
>
> The quest for purity in community and with that in its communication
> systems, sounds like the manifestos for setting up 'intentional
> communities' of the sixties and seventies of last century, with
> their attempt to isolate themselves from society as it was.
>
> One can deny a try to nobody, but I doubt that such an attitude will
> have the wished effect. Paranoia is a bad basis for producing any
> social change.

Ultimately I agree with you here. Knowing him, I believe hellekin's
reasoning is tainted by the uncomfortable feeling of having a metal
detector at the entrance of a "social" space. This is something we
got used in our 9/11 decade, but it still inspires an healthy disgust
in some "romantic" types which won't trade their freedom for security
and, in this very case, not even privacy.

On the wave of such feelings, isolation is a widespread reaction: the
desire of acting on a limited, peaceful, "liberated" domain which
can become sustainable for our family, with the sidekick idea of
federating affine realities. These are often the first reactions to
paranoid, unsatisfying forms of societies where western individualist
mindsets like ours can find themselves living. I'm still not entirely
sure what an Asian mindset would really think about such reactions.

I believe what you point out here, the dicotomy between "intentional
communities" and "open societies" is a crucial point of discussion,
thanks for bringing it up.

Ultimately liberism has won the masses to socialism by constructing
the dream (American) and means (Capitalism) for an open society purely
based on quantitative, axiomatic relationships. Capitalism has been so
far a viable system of governance because has been able to embed this
dicotomy while still providing a rationality to its existance.

I agree that the challenge now should be to imagine new forms for open
societies rather than regressimg to the idea of walled gardens. Still
it holds true that the instinct of planning a walled garden and to
share the information on how to do it can be the pre-condition for the
creation of new territories, the experimentation of new rationalities.

In so far there are no open spaces that offer such conditions (nor it
looks like the industrial reconfiguration of culture will facilitate
their creation and existance), but I love your indefatigable attempts
to imagine them.


ciao

-- 
jaromil,  dyne.org developer,  http://jaromil.dyne.org
GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39




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