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Network Weaving - Post-Societal Realities - Coggle Diagram
Network Weaving - Post-Societal Realities
After Nations -- Rana Dasgupta
Before Nations
1914, 25% of world pop lived in sovereign nations
The rest were colonial territories of European states
Since 1918, 99.8% live in nation states
0.2% are in Greenland, Western Sahara, HK, Macau, Puerto Rico
20th c all political forms became illegitimate except the Western
Rabindranath Tagore: “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual center; my refuge is humanity.”
After Nations
Nation states have a “totalitarian claim over the past”
Civil wars do not arise de “ancient hatreds” but instead built into the “winner-takes-all architecture of the nation-state itself”
“
Rocks have nationality
…as well as plant and animal species”
Nation-state = turbulent, unstable, and
temporary
“The nation state is a
circular
argument”
State exists to rep “the people” but the ppl come AFTER the state, are its “consequence”
Massim d’Azeglio: “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.”
Use compulsory primary schools as propaganda for state formation
I remember saying the Pledge of Allegience in class in grade school
Ambiguous, shifting definition
Not always ethnically homogeneous
More than one lang, religion
The state is administrative furniture
Req powers of coercion and propaganda → only possible with modern tech
→ for this reason, nation-states are a modern phenomena
States as monopolies is
anomalous
There used to be levels of checks at local, provincial, imperial
also need systems to manage sovereign debt
birth of the nation-state associated with est 1694 Bank of England
Nations are
finite
Exclusive citizenship, insiders v/s outsiders,
limited national territory
Minorities find themselves in a grey areas
“The instability of national identities gives the nation-state, in fact, an
inalienable genocidal core
.”
when the Ottoman Empire became Turkey, slaughtered all Assyrians, Greeks, Armenians
I remember a teacher from Armenia who openly expressed her disdain for Turkey (people)
Political Science
downplays complexity
the future must resemble the past
Breaks down during radical transformation e.g. fall of Communism
We think about financial breakdown, ecological catastrophe, the rise of intelligent machines–but we devote not a moment’s thought to the next political scenario
based on Amer and Brit theory and experience
No exp with civil war, revoln, totalitarian gov, foreign infiltration, occupation
Anglo-American liberal democracy as the norm
“High pt of democracy has probably passed, leaving national populations exposed once again to normal abuses associated with monopolies”
No longer any fit entre politics and reality →
mass migration is the only possible democratic expression
What are Nations?
Tactical system embedded in larger sys e.g. capitalist system
Charles Tilly: “two interdependent master processes of the modern era, are the creation of a system of national states and the formation of a worldwide capitalist system”
A relentless “
presentism
” that makes us forget
how antique we actually are
After gender, nationality is the most fund aspect of contemporary human ID
Lose nation = lose ourselves
Unhook de this dependency → there may be freedom and plenitude after the breakdown
AxAT: Future Art Ecosystems -- Serpentine R&D
AxAT = Art and Advanced Technology
When Adv Tech becomes the materials and media (no established protocols)
address issues in contemporary art: class, colonialism, climate crisis
Imported solutions, grey area entre art and tech
“Institutional legitimacy comes with reduced appetite for risk” by K. McDowell
Tech industry as art patron
art stacks =studios operating at scale, integrating fxns like digital R&D
Emerging: blockchains, gene editing, ML
Established, but unknown consequences: social networks, EV, outer space
Destabilization = formation of how tech transforming art industry
“Pursuit of success in adjacent fields while maintaining artistic credibility”
“success across fields can become a motivation and a goal in its own right.”
Conceptronica
= trend for electronic musicians to diversify into contemporary art; coined by Simon Reynolds, music critic
Dynamic Materials
Store and process aud interactions OR
Internal logic
tech cont to develop, in flux
“General instability of these tech also offers a moment of opp”
Worlding
= construction of worlds; networks
Worlds =/= networks, bc worlds use synth actors as inputs, not ext participants or data
Developing Networks
“We do that by fostering a community and working with people who we know have brilliant ideas,
who are careful about how technology is being deployed
.” Carmen Aguilar y Wedge
Are there higher stakes in AxAT, with tech as the artistic medium?
More diverse, bc unlikely to know how to use all tech, need collab
Constructing Narratives
“To show that worlds could collide” - R. Armstrong
Ian Cheng: “I watch my dog sleep. Sleeping is extremely predictable. But every time he switches, or he wakes up to change position, it's like a miniature revelation. And I always wanted to capture that energy in artwork.”
Artist effort to inform and motivate range of collaborators
So Artist becomes a critic/curator: must generate variations on central story about what the work is and what is it “doing”
The Metaverse is a Contested Territory --
Mindy Seu
Hard SciFi: “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline
inspired M. Zuckerberg
Meta claims "Metaverse" as its territory
“Metaverse” coined by Snow Crash scifi novel
Single, universal virtual world
Holds mtg in Horizon Workrooms
“The Metaverse is a Cubicle” by B. Tarnoff, 2021
“Employers want to find a way to exercise managerial control over remote workers, to bring the collaborative and socially cohesive aspects of in-person work to remote/hybrid environments, and to push work to lower-wage regions.”
Stories = primary influencers for worldbuilding
Fiction root = to form/build
Virtual root = virtue, virtu (manliness), vir (man)
OASIS is free
IOI wishes to monetize, revoke user anonymity, revoke free speech
Meta also privatizing and homogenizing online spaces, commodify users, sell their data
“virtual reality—and the metaverse by association—pits the future defined by its citizens against a future defined by for-profit corporations”
Eric Ravenscraft. “Selling a phone is fine, but selling the future is more profitable.”
Surveillance Capitalism
Digital tech driven by nostalgia and
platform capitalism
History of VR
want to und physiology of the human eye
military-driven dev
VR = “any online digital platform—Second Life, of course, but also Instagram—in which the user participates in a virtual world, as well as to the new media technology that bears this name.” -D. Levitt and S. Rothberg
“VR builds theories of worlds through our experience of them…
“VR helps to shift our powerful cultural attachments to particular notions of individual and social group boundaries through experiences that ... reveal the flexibility of the human itself in relation to (its) others.” —Deborah Levitt
Identity Tourism
= online role-playing sites that offer the participant the ability to select their race, gender, and physical appearance (Lisa Nakamura)
reinforces stereotypes and a sense of otherness.
What pushes people to imagine is the need to imagine: a survival mechanism to find release from the pressures of your current reality.
Figures like Zuckerberg and Cline require less imagination for change because the status quo benefits them.
“VR is a bit like a rich white kid with famous parents: It never stops failing upward, forever graded on a generous curve, always judged based on its ‘potential’ rather than its results,” writes David Karpf in Wired.
“Soft” scifi = how new psycho-social frameworks shape exp
Prioritize social questioning over tech evoln
1933 — the first published use of the term “virtual reality” is found in Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and its Double. For him, “it refers rather to a particular potential for metamorphoses in states of matter and being that may be accessed via…theater.”
Suspension of Disbelief
Politigram and the Post-Left --Joshua Citarella
Posting ironic or trollish content = self ID as
Anarcho-capitalists
describe capitalism as “a highly ethical system of voluntary transactions between mutually consenting parties”.
True source of tyranny and oppression was monopoly power of gov
Right wing property views
Pro-diversity, radical indivdualists
“I want gay married couples to protect their marijuana plants with unregistered firearms they bought with Bitcoin”. They are anti-state and pro-freedom.
However, soon morphs into highly authoritarian ideas
Civic nationalism, ethno-nationalism
→ group known as
alt-right
Enmeshed in larger community called
Politigram
Political radicals on Instagram
Intentionally follow their political opponents
Demand deregulation and privatization
“These platform spaces accelerate radicalization in unprecedented ways”
Same reason ppl go into art: “a mass leaderless online movement organized around open source digital images which create cultural agitations and contribute to a major shift in public discourse at a volatile time in history.”
“Vote with their feet” by leaving one sovereignty to join another
Unusual ideologies: Dharmic Eco-Reactionaryism, Christian Bolshevism, etc.
White males, 12-17
Many struggle with depression, social isolation, family prob, trouble at school
→ temptation to troll real world, sow political chaos
Minds of Amer malcontents
Two speculative futures
Ancapistan
Transhumania
Radical left is more poorly organized, smaller followings
Anti-civilization, eco-anarchist groups, Cyber-nihilists
Full swing when Clinton loses election in 2016
Literally teenage Deleuzian scholars who sympathize with Ted Kaczynski; “I’m okay with the possibility of dying from a toothache because the true cost of technology means that many others must die or live as slaves.”
Post Left: “
it has to get worse before it gets worse
”
imminently unfolding dystopias
Where Marx says that alienation arises with industrial capitalism from waged labor and the commodity form, the Post-left would argue that alienation begins even earlier with agrarian societies and labor specialization.
Imminent eco disaster, need for
degrowth
“Ecological collapse is extraordinarily effective in radicalizing Gen Z.”