| walter palmetshofer on Mon, 4 Sep 2017 11:39:29 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> When repression is cheaper than redistribution |
hi Keith,remembered this 5min part of an interview with Adam Curtis regarding your question
https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-65-no-future-feat-adam-curtis-121216#t=45:45The question is "Do you really want change or do you want just change things a little bit?"
49:50 "you spot real change, when ..." risk aversion, or the pricetag you might have to pay walter On 2017-09-04 11:18, Keith Hart wrote:
Excellent point, Felix and nice riposte, Patrice. Tocqueville, in The Old Regime and the Revolution published just before he died, explained the latter's causes as follows: 1. The spread of Enlightenment ideas of freedom and equality to the masses (birth of the mass media) 2. The rigid system of social stratification (in England any soldier or merchant can become a lord). 3. Economic expansion pushing several classes up against No. 2 4. Repression rather raising the lid of the pressure cooker a bit. One could say that the digital revolution has promoted No. 1 on a global scale, but also their negation. Neoliberalism definitely ended 20th century class mobility (the 1% are increasingly like the 18th century French nobility). Ah, No. 3, sorry folks it's moving in the opposite direction, especially in the West. Not so sure which way No. 4 goes for us: my attitude to surveillance is that I can beat it. I'm faster than they are. The main point, however, to which nettime seems to be immune, is that we (the insular white critics) are not going to be where the action is and don't have a clue about how to hook up with the majority who are already there. Keith On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 10:56 AM, Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:Well, there is an absurdly simple way to achieve this change of calculus, though a costly one - for us: leave the screens, go down in the street and start getting killed by the riot police, preferably in numbers. No modern 'democratic' dispensation survives that, as Jacques Chirac knew all too well. His successors everywhere might be less smart, but they shall discover soon enough that lethal repression is very costly indeed, as it upsets the cart of the consumption-based economy real bad. Of course when Xi-JinPing marches in, what will happen sooner rather than later, the whole rule-book will change, but in the meanwhile we do have some opportunity to 'change that calculus' ... On 2017-09-04 10:44, Felix Stalder wrote:Recently, the German political scientist Ulrike Guérot argued that digital technologies changed the political calculus of the ruling elites: repression is now seen as cheaper than redistribution to maintain the system. This research, by the Center for Political Studies (CPS), University of Michigan, puts numbers to this claim. Advanced democracies spent just shy of $9 billion to surveil 74% of their population, at a cost of $10/person. Now, this of course are not the entire costs of the apparatus of repression, but just indicates how incredibly cheap surveillance blanket surveillance has become. To gain any traction for political change, we need to change this calculus, by making surveillance and repression expensive again. Felix http://cpsblog.isr.umich.edu/?p=2129 [1] <...> While nations worldwide have spent at least $27.1 billion USD (or $7 per individual) to surveil 4.138 billion individuals (i.e., 73 percent of the world population), stable autocracies are the highest per-capita spenders on mass surveillance. In total, authoritarian regimes have spent $10.967 billion USD to surveil 81 percent of their populations (0.1 billion individuals), even though this sub-set of states tends to have the lowest levels of high-technology capabilities. Stable autocracies have also invested 11-fold more than any other regime-type, by spending $110 USD per individual surveilled, followed second-highest by advanced democracies who have invested $8.909 billion USD in total ($11 USD per individual) covering 0.812 billion individuals (74 percent of their population). In contrast to high-spending dictatorships and democracies, developing and emerging democracies have invested $4.784 billion USD (or $1-2 per individual) for tracking 2.875 billion people (72 percent of their population). It is possible that in a hyper-globalizing environment increasingly characterized by non-state economic (e.g., multi-national corporations) and political (e.g., transnational terror organizations) activity, nation-states have both learned from and mimicked each other’s investments in mass surveillance as an increasingly central activity in exercising power over their polities and jurisdictions. It is also likely that the technological revolution in digitally-enabled big data and cloud computing capabilities as well as the ubiquitous digital wiring of global populations (through mobile telephony and digital communication) have technically enabled states to access and organize population-wide data on their citizens in ways not possible in previous eras. <....># distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l [2] # archive: http://www.nettime.org [3] contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:-- Prof. Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk [4] 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 Links: ------ [1] http://cpsblog.isr.umich.edu/?p=2129 [2] http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l [3] http://www.nettime.org [4] http://www.thememorybank.co.uk # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: