Video Lab - Toxic Earth
Added 2022-07-27 21:18:22 +0000 UTCMore of the cosmic horror of where we are and what is to come. Let me know if you want more on these specific stories, but what I am trying to do is generate a mesh of references that work together for future reference--it'll be hit and miss, but hopefully there are a few hits, and a means of escape from talking in circles about what "the left" and "the right" are doing on a given Thursday. More to come
Comments
"§2.04 — The term ‘peer-to-peer’ (henceforth ‘P2P’) is a conceptual lynchpin of exceptional significance. The leverage the term offers to socio-political understanding is, perhaps ironically, peerless. It can be considered, without serious risk of exaggeration, as the key to modernity’s most fundamental tendency, and the supreme expression of its ideological ambiguity, because it asserts absolute formal flatness and equality (of ‘nodes’), while opening to an unlimited substantial diversity of fortune.[46] All the complexities of immanent, or critically processed, social arrangements are delegated to it, with a comprehensiveness that tests the very meaning of ‘society’ at the outer edge of its abstraction, where it designates a functional multiplicity of non-specific agents. ‘P2P’ simultaneously captures agency as a node, identity as a connective address, the elimination of concentrated – or ‘transcendent’ – oversight, network sovereignty, and the technicization of political-economic relations." (Nick Land, Crypto-Current) Not saying I think this is a good thing, but it's still a poignant metaphor describing the same thing your metaphor / myth does. Conceiving of modernity / capitalism as a network with nodes is a powerful framework to explore, whatever the results might be. I highly suggest exploring MIT's Semiotext(e) series if you haven't. There's even a Baudrillard book in it.
Walker Goff
2022-11-24 02:37:30 +0000 UTC“Empire would gladly represent itself, then, as a network in which everyone would be a node. In each of these nodes, the norm makes up the element of social conductivity. Even before the circulation of information, a biopolitical causality passes through it with more or less resistance, depending upon the gradient of normality. Each node—country, body, firm, political party—is held responsible for its resistance. This is even the case to the point of absolute non-conductivity, to the point of the refraction of flows. The node in question will then be declared guilty, criminal, inhuman, and will become the object of an imperial intervention.” (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, 150)
Walker Goff
2022-11-24 02:30:38 +0000 UTC
