Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[Douglas Bagnall <douglas@halo.gen.nz>]

On 3/06/20 5:48 am, tbyfield wrote:

> everything as *broken* is a world in the past tense; all you can do is
> *rebuild* — another word that tracks "is broken" with almost hilarious
> precision...
>
>  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rebuild%2Crebuilding%2C+is+broken&year_start=1980&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crebuild%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crebuilding%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Crebuild%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crebuilding%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0

One thing that *is* broken is Google's 2012 corpus, which is revealed
more clearly when smoothing is removed:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+broken%2Cpeanut&year_start=1980&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=0

(what they choose to show me is every term plummets to zero in 2009.)

On Felix's original question, I don't have a lot to say that wouldn't
be improved by me not saying it. I am wary of predicting breaking
points in America -- more so than in normal countries where it is
already tricky -- because, you see, they *value* chaos over there. I
don't mean an anarchic freedom (though they have pockets of that of
course) but a seething mass of officious disorder. I realised this
after spending five minutes in LAX. Like, we can say the police are
terrible, they need to be fixed/replaced/exiled/whatever, but we are
not talking about one institution, rather thousands or tens of
thousands of autonomous outfits that have an association with the
brand "police". The depressing definition is they carry a badge and a
gun. How can something so splintered be reformed or broken?

Douglas



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