Re: <nettime> Imagine

I think the question of what computers did to society, and to its relations with nature, is rather different from the question of what the internet did to society and nature.

Mainframe computers were at the center of the postwar organizational complex - by which I mean the state-orchestrated mode of production that gives scientific research an immediately productive role within militarized corporations. That mode of production is really inaugurated by the Manhattan Project for the creation of the atomic bomb, and despite how interesting and tragic a figure like Oppenheimer may be, it's a pity to focus only on a single person when what's at stake is the organizational complex that absorbs any individual (and later spits them out again, if need be).

The internet as it emerged in the 1980s and 90s is about the proliferation of computerized telecommunications. It has contributed to the hyperconsumption and hypermobility of flexible individuals, while at the same time bringing two new elements into the organizational complex: namely just-in-time logistics and transnational finance.

Imagine a world in which China and India did not undergo explosive industrial growth within a global financial and logistics system under American management. Perhaps in a calmer and less competitive atmosphere, the intense social and ecological critiques of the 1960s and 70s would have resulted in societies based on human development in multiple dimensions (liberation, solidarity, cultural efflorescence) and not just economic growth. Perhaps the New International Economic Order that aimed to free Third World countries from neocolonial dependency would have succeeded, rather than being wiped out by transnational finance. Perhaps today we would all live in stable social democracies whose citizens are able to participate in deliberative processes, internalize the results, and actually govern themselves, so as to face the real problems. Would this be better than a frenetically networked world where hidden puppet masters inflame spiraling fears whose surface effects give them momentary political advantage, but whose deep causes they are utterly powerless to change?

Imagine all the people...

On Wed, Aug 2, 2023 at 6:25 AM Joseph Rabie via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org> wrote:

I understood that the great acceleration occurred through the need to maintain the enormous industrial complex put into place (in the US particularly) to produce weaponry, and whatever else was needed to win the Second World War.

The military tool became a mass production tool. The American way of consumer life was to be pushed on the whole world. Nothing really to do with computers.

Joe.

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> Le 2 août 2023 à 12:13, Felix Stalder via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org> a écrit :
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> That's a great intellectual challenge. And the TRUMP is a pretty good answer, not the least because Trump is a not an isolated phenomenon, but the culmination of a lot of longer-term developments.
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> Let's say the internet became socially relevant during the 1990s and let's look at the "great acceleration" charts, arguably the most relevant summary of socio-physical trends over the 250 years. Surprisingly, there seems to be no connection. We cannot see an impact of the internet on these charts.
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> I made the argument elsewhere [1] that the bend in all the indicators around 1950 can be explained by computerization and the new more intensive extraction processes it required and enabled. In this view, the internet allowed a trend to continue that might otherwise have run into its own contradictions and limitations.
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> [1] Escape Velocity. Computing and the Great Acceleration. 2022
> https://aksioma.org/escape-velocity.computing-and-the-great-acceleration
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> This view is close to Weizenbaum's famous analysis of the first wave of computerization in the 1970s:
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> “Many of the problems of growth and complexity that pressed insistently and irresistibly during the postwar decades could have served as incentives for political innovation....Yet, the computer did arrive ‘just in time.’But in time for what? In time to save–and to save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize–social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them. The computer, then, was used to conserve America’s social and political institutions. It buttressed them and immunized them, at least temporarily, against enormous pressure for change. Its influence has been substantially the same in other societies that have allowed the computer to make substantial inroads upon their institutions: Japan and Germany immediately come to mind.” (1976: 31)
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> Thus, in my view, what the internet enabled was the continuation of the great acceleration beyond previous social systemic limits. Now we are crashing against the geophysical woefully unprepared socially. Which creates openings for people like Trump.
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>> On 8/1/23 17:08, David Garcia via Nettime-tmp wrote:
>> Thanks Chris, one response that has struck me as a strong candidate, was the response when I asked my partner, Nanette, to name just one significant thing that would be different if the internet had never been invented... She gave a one word answer "TRUMP".
>>> On 2023-08-01 07:22, christine treguier wrote:
>>> Thanks for that challenge david. Not easy indeed and politically so
>>> interesting. A way to un-knitt, or re-knitt what has been mistakingnly
>>> knitted...
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>>> Chris
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>>> Le 01/08/2023 à 11:20, David Garcia via Nettime-tmp a écrit :
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>>>> Science fiction is by no means always about the future it can also
>>>> start by imagining an alternative past or present but with a single key
>>>> counterfactual that changes everything. So taking this as a starting
>>>> point let's suppose the internet had never been invented (or otherwise
>>>> come into being). In this scenario the computer is still there, mobile
>>>> telephony is still there, just not the internet. There are those who
>>>> might argue that such a proposition is itself technologically
>>>> illiterate as the internet follows as inevitably as night follows day
>>>> from the existence and proximity of telephony and computers. So the
>>>> marriage is inevitable as is the progeny. To which I reply; of course
>>>> but that is the author’s challenge, to imagine a plausible set of
>>>> circumstantial obstacles, social, political, technical or military. How
>>>> might it have happened and how would the world look? what would have
>>>> changed? The exercise is in some sense a war against amnesia as even
>>>> those of us born before the age of mass computing would struggle to
>>>> remember what life was like before the internet.
>>>>
>>>> David Garcia
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