User:Ssstephen/Reading/On Socialist Cybernetics

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

from institute of network cultures

an abyss of technology’s potential for emancipatory progress
ritual is the most important programming technology of the human body.

Unattributed quote on this raar Nooscope facebook page.

tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis

Today’s power – Tiqqun claims – is driven by the cybernetic hypothesis, which assumes that biological, physical and social patterns are programmed and programmable.

Gene sequencing. Genetic modification. This feels very creepy. Where is the autonomy and the turbulent flow.

There is no top, no head or absolute single authority, no central navigator. 

Does anyone know where we are going then?

‘Panic makes the cyberneticians panic’ – because chaotic situations make states of equilibriums implode and limit prognostic thinking.

Panic attack. Out of control. That's how it all starts, but is disrupting the power enough to change the system? Maybe but I dont know where we're going.

The practice of attacking, sabotaging or overloading infrastructure can be seen as a form of resistance.

Accelerate Manifesto, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

reject the leftist fetishism for what is called ‘folk politics’: flat democratic organization, spatial limitations, romanticist deceleration and folkloristic localism.

I dont know if these are fetishes so much as dreams, is it better to acknowledge they are unachievable or to try anyway? AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE DEFEATED.

Technologies are understood as tools and conditions for planning, thinking and doing. A consequence of accelerationist politics is that infrastructure, communication technology, medication, mathematical methods etc., all developed and produced under the reign of capitalism, do not have to be destroyed but to be applied differently, be rebuild and hacked.

But how do you hold it in another way. Is there a different way to navigate the cloud or to use Adobe for example. A silly way. A noisy way. What is a corporation for?

It's only fair to tell you
I'm absolutely cuckoo

The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs.

Is love radical?

The surplus of Will must find issue in the elevation of the individual towards the godhead; and the method of such elevation is by religion, love, and art. Now these three things are indissolubly bound up with wine, for they are themselves species of intoxication.

The Green Goddess, Aleister Crowley.

Can I use the mechanisms of the state to help me to tell you: I'm in love with you?

the only existing first person account of the birth of modern computing in Russia.

One problem in the Soviet Union was, for example, the lack of standardization and coordination for computer networks. In the US and the Western World, general communication protocols, like TCP/IP, or addressing systems, like DNS, were widely implemented over a battled period spanning into the 1980s. Without such standards for digital communication and because of incompatible hardware and software the bunch of different soviet networks were never to be connected. Each one was sheltered and veiled by intransparency and the fear of losing already gained privileges.

TCP/IP defeated communism? Winners are efficient and efficacious?

President Salvador Allende lead the multiparty alliance that ranged from the Communist Party to Christian socialists.

Are all political beliefs religious? Mazdak.

Stafford Beer talking about recursion and control. Holons are silly? Or useful? They used telex machines to instantaneously monitor and control the economy, because telex machines were cheap. But Chile was too long and thin and the workers kept striking so they lost control. "If you've only got one computer then ipso facto you're centralised."

Starting in August 1972, the team constructed a hexagon room in central Santiago. It contained seven swiveling chairs with control buttons in the armrest. The geometric forms were used to control the slides, because the future participants were members of the government or factory workers who could not properly use a keyboard. 

Geometric formations. The unicursal hexigram. The figure of love.

Working on a regular keyboard was a competence of female secretaries at this time and the designers aimed for direct control of the men in the Opsroom instead of any intermediation. 

The woman as the intermediary. The machine as her replacement. Ectogenesis.

A question for contemporary accelerationism could therefore be: What is the state today, should it be abolished, and how should a post-capitalist society in whole be organized instead? Or repeating Lenin’s formulas with the deep hope for better answers than those we know: What is to be done?, and Where to begin?

Can any of these questions be answered in isolation from assumptions about the answers to the others?