Nietzsche said: “God is dead and we killed him”. At his time 1844-1900 this was correct. I say “The Internet is God – get with the program”

I heard that Warren Buffet is calling this an economic Pearl Harbour.

Someone pointed out that a lot of big iron went down – the banks – Lehman, Wachovia, WaMu etc.

I thought that he was referring to how quickly America decided to go to war following the event. And I think he was trying to give some hope to the American public – the guy is pretty “Apple Pie”.

Anyway I don’t give him much of a chance – he’s in his twilight years and as Felix Stalder explains:

the discourse of the public sphere, particularly around politics, seems increasingly artificial and insincere. This is partly because of the corrosive effects of television–driven media politics, partly it is also because politicians need to make difficult compromises to gain majorities and offer overall solutions that cannot accommodate the high degree of particularity of the “mix–and–match” lives of many individuals [30]. Politics, and the public sphere around it, appears as the domain of cynics. This only deepens the crisis of the public sphere, which has been analyzed for the last 40 years in terms of the commercial capture of the media and the manipulation of discourse through professional PR

Growing up I learned that Monopolies were bad.

Growing up in BC I learned that.

Now that I’m grown up and still living in BC.

I realize that they are not bad.

Monopolies are where the good pensions are.

Here are some great lyrics:

Somewhere along the way I found the meaning,

woke up dreamin’ along the way.

Never quite seems the same when you awakin’,

and makin’ up for the time you’ve such a price to pay,

and then they take the dream away, and it just ain’t fair.

Help me thru the night Mama, help me to ease the pain.

Tell me it’s alright, help me thru the night once again.

That’s the danger in petending,

trying to defend yourself from someone else’s war,

don’t know what they’re fighting for,

and they just don’t care.

So help me see the light mama, open my eyes again.

Tell me it’s alright, help me thru the night once again

Would ya help me,

Would ya help me,

I am in the middle of a discussion about Elton John’s “Song for Guy”.

After listening to it again on YouTube

The lyrics to the song are simply “Life isn’t everything”. Yet when I watched the video he actually repeats the word “life” eight times.

I was reminded of what someone told me about the last page of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. The page is said to contain repetitive uses of the word “yes” and is meant to be the affirmation of life that females represent.

first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Excerpt from a recent post of his at P2P Foundation Blog.

What I want to point out is the enormous contrast between the denial and gloom and doom of the mainstream system, and the deep-rooted optimism of the peer to peer forces as represented by people and movements like Vinay Gupta and the Swadeshi movement, and there are thousands upon thousands like them (the 7,000 pages of documentation on such movements in our wiki are but a fraction of what is happening). We are no longer happy with reforming the system, and asking ‘them’ to change the policies. We are no longer satisfied with wanting a revolution, to start doing things our way ‘afterwards’, fated to replicate the very hierarchical forces we wanted to replace. We are already past that point. We are already, like the Christians in the Roman world, constructing the new world we want to live in. We are changing our subjectivities, our relational networks, and the very structures we want to live in. Just as the Roman elite could just not comprehend the new Christian mentality, neither can the current elite understand what is happening. An entirely different new world is growing and gestating within the old, not directly challenging it, but nevertheless deeply transforming it, not tomorrow or in the future, but right now.

(This is of course not to deny that there will be many defeats and pitfalls on the way!)

Junkies.

Interesting thought.

Masses are junkies needing their fix. 

Politics preys on this.

(F)ear (Uncertainty) and (D)oubt

FUD Junkies

From the P2P Foundation:

My highlights on the first read:

From an organizational (not political!) point of view, these new forms of cooperation are best classified as anarchist, in that they are based on voluntary actions, self–motivation and mutual trust.

Yet, this expansion of civil society brought about by these new forms of collaboration not controlled by the state or captured fully by economic interests, has deep political repercussions. For the state, it possesses a set of new challenges. First, it accelerates the erosion of the classic public sphere, so critical to the legitimacy of liberal democracy. Second, the state is challenged, both through peaceful means and through violence, by new actors that is has structural difficulties interacting with.

Nevertheless it adds to the crisis of those institutions that require a traditional public sphere to function. Compared with the immediacy and authenticity these new forms of cooperation seem to offer, partly because these limited, focused associations do not need to make difficult compromises, the discourse of the public sphere, particularly around politics, seems increasingly artificial and insincere. This is partly because of the corrosive effects of television–driven media politics, partly it is also because politicians need to make difficult compromises to gain majorities and offer overall solutions that cannot accommodate the high degree of particularity of the “mix–and–match” lives of many individuals [30]. Politics, and the public sphere around it, appears as the domain of cynics. This only deepens the crisis of the public sphere, which has been analyzed for the last 40 years in terms of the commercial capture of the media and the manipulation of discourse through professional PR [31]. While the public sphere as the discursive, and normative, anchoring of liberal democracy has been eroding for a long time and created a crisis of democracy relatively unrelated to the developments discussed here [32], what is historically new is that people are capable of creating their own “publics” on a local or translocal level. In other words, the old mode of political (mass) communication is not just becoming weaker, but is actively challenged by a new one.

The state and its organizations have a highly developed capacity to deal with homologous organizations — structurally similar to itself — with a small number of representatives with a formal mandate to speak on behalf of many people — such as unions or professional associations. Yet, they it poses significant challenges to interface with organizations that are structurally very different as described above.

They filter their demands not in a way that bureaucracies can easily recognize and address them. The lack of representation — which is so characteristic for these networked organizations based on weak cooperation — makes it dangerous for the state to interact with them because the state draws its very legitimization from representation. Thus, in a formal way, incorporating non–representative organizations further undermines the legitimacy of the liberal state.

One of the ways in which the state can react to this development is by trying to withhold certain types of information, thus preventing the analysis and publication by networked actors most likely very critical of their actions [37]. The notion of “executive privilege” — that is the right of the government to act outside the realm of public scrutiny — is playing a key role in the governance of the current U.S. administration. But similar tendencies can be observed in Europe as well, which lead, as Saskia Sassen observes, to a general strengthening of the executive organs at the expense of the legislature tasked with overseeing them and interfacing with the public at large.

This contributes to a context where the dissolution of privacy for citizens (both voluntary through self–publishing and involuntary through aggregation and data retention) coincides with the growing secrecy of administrative institutions, be they private or public.

Today, “adversary intellectuals”, to use again Huntington’s term, are situated on the left and on the right, within and outside the Western discourse, and are armed with rapid publication tools, if not more physically dangerous weapons. Since they do not need to address large publics (as the mass media need to), they can focus in depth on the few issues that are of special interest to them and which have the power to mobilize their particular networks. For the managers of authority, this creates a lose–lose situation, which they address by retreating from the public as much as they can. Normatively, this is justified by stressing the demands of “security” against which the demands of civil liberties and democratic accountability are deemed to be secondary.

The relationship between the expansion of civil society and rise of authoritarian democracies is intricate and contradictory. From the point of view of the state, it’s not just that transparency can be a nuisance and new form of secrecy need to be installed.

The ability to meet strangers and start meaningful exchanges and cooperation is sharply expanding. We may be entering a golden age of voluntary associations, what I called bourgeois anarchism. Yet, at the same time, the ability of these new publics to function as counterweight to political power cannot (yet?) compensate, despite hopeful incidents [45], for the emptying out of the old public sphere. It is the very emergence of these new publics that contributes to the growing secrecy of some very important elements of the state. Thus, we can wittiness the flowering of free cooperation taking place within an renewed authoritarianism emerging at the core of Western, liberal democracies.