tbyfield on Sat, 23 Mar 2019 18:13:47 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> two 'meta' notes (was Re: rage against the machine)


(1)

On 18 Mar 2019, at 22:24, Brian Holmes wrote:

Ted, I like how you look at disputes from all sides, both for the intrinsic interest of the meta-discussion, and because you put a finger on the very existence of the dispute. For me it boils down to the old question about critique, what it is, how it works, why anyone would engage in such a thing.
 <...>
thanks for the meta, Brian

Brian, to put it more bluntly, when it comes to critical discussions of aviation forensics, you are — by your own standards — out of your depth and in the same boat as the legions of just-add-water experts who opine on every subject that's trending on social media. I'm hardly an expert, but I have spent years reading widely about how aviation has reconstructed humanity at every level, from the cognition of instrumentation design, to the history of crash-test dummies, to divergent philosophies for building failsafe systems, to debates about how aviation is transforming geopolitics and even history. Hence the mini annotated bibliography at the end of my mail. So it's funny to read that you 'look for something analogous in discursive spaces like this' and 'stand for a critique of the relations between capitalism and complex systems' — then thank *me* for being 'meta'?! Morlock's comparison of Boeing's marketing of critical safety features with luxury finishes on cars nailed it. More than that, it's the kind of insight that can and should become a rallying cry in efforts to rein in megacorps that treat human lives with leather gearshifts as fungible. I guess we could say that comparison happens in a 'discursive space,' but posh abstractions like that suggest this problem is somehow new and in need of vanguardist theorizing. It isn't and doesn't. On the supply side, this 737 fiasco is just one more chapter in longstanding labor struggles for safe workplaces. Much as the flight attendants' AFA union played a pivotal role in ending Trump's government shutdown, I suspect that combined statements from the AFA and APFA (the American Airlines FA union) that their member won't be forced to fly in 737s sparked the Trump admin's sudden turnaround on the 737. On the demand side, the tradeoff between safety and 'extra' features was clear enough in 1954 to be the punchline of the Daffy Duck cartoon "Design for Leaving": after Porky Pig pushes the 'big wed button' marked IN CASE OF TIDAL WAVE in his newly <cough>automated</cough> home, elevating it hundreds of feet on a retractable pylon, Daffy Duck appears outside his door in a helicopter and says, "For a small price I can install this little blue button to get you down."

	https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x34az2i

More generally, entire swaths of current 'technology' debates — about automation and IoT, 'adversarial' this and that, how advertising is subverting democracy, etc, etc – are naive historical reenactments of front-page debates from the mid-1950s. Lots of factors enable that naivete, and voguish talk about 'complexity' is one of them. It's not an accident that complexity became a pop phenomenon starting in the '80s: corporations love it because it emphasizes the power of inexorable and inevitable systems rather than our 'simple' power to change them. Sure, the rise of computation made the math needed to explore complexity is more widely accessible; but the idea that what matters is the secret mathematical kinship between the patterns of capillaries in our retinas and the structure of whatever we're looking at — tree roots or urban spaces or networks — is mostly mystification, barely a step above staring at a fractal screensaver. So, when you say you 'stand for a critique of the relations between capitalism and complex systems,' I agree — just not in the way you intended. Effective critique stands *against* that mystification.


(2)

On 23 Mar 2019, at 6:54, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

friends, call me over-sensitive, but i think that nobody should be burned at the stake for anything in any country; i say this also because this flippant kind of rhetoric poisons the reasonable debate that is so urgently needed on the matters at issue here. (to the contrary, i am glad that some civilised countries find forms of punishment other than that for actual wrongdoing.) - unfortunately, in a world where people get imprisoned and killed for all sorts of things, there is little room for such dark humour... when all the stakes have been taken down everywhere, we'll be able to laugh about this joke again, perhaps.

Andreas, you're over-sensitive. Much as Brian's flight into abstraction misdirected discussion away from concrete facts and struggles, your focus on the brutality of Morlock's remark — which I'm pretty sure was a figure of speech, not a specific advocacy for burning at the stake over drawing and quartering or crucifixion — misdirects it away from what matters most: penetrating the corporate veils that limit liability. If multinational corporate sovereignty is to be a key part of the new global regime, we need concrete strategies for isolating and punishing corporate criminality. Boeing's reputation has suffered: another airline, Garuda, canceled a $6B order for ~50 737s, and more are likely to follow. But minimizing shareholder value isn't enough. We need regulatory systems with teeth as sharp as those used in war-crimes tribunals. Polite anti-corporate rhetoric won't change anything, but identifying specific culprits within corporations and making them pay dearly for their crimes will change everything. Best of all, it can be applied to other imponderables like massive-scale fraud, environmental degradation, arms manufacture, abuses of privacy, and all the rest. For that reason, it *will* have broad-base popular support, sooner or later. The first question is what will finally trigger it, and the second question is whether we've laid solid groundwork for effective progressive responses.

And that begs an important question that leftoids aren't prepared to answer because, in a nutshell, they're allergic to power: what *would* be appropriate punishments for people who, under color of corporate activity, engage in indiscriminate abuses of public trust.

Cheers,
Ted
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