Re: <nettime> Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE)
----- Forwarded message from John Hopkins
In 2013, we're watching this history repeat itself as a farce. Many people (myself included) are flabbergasted by the lack of mass-scale protest against the government programs disclosed by Snowden. It seems as if two
Speaking from the Belly of the Beast (semi-rural Arizona, next to Idaho and Alaska in terms of right-wing folks), the media consumption and actual media content here is literally stunning -- the volume on shouting heads (never-mind talking heads!!!) has the media consumer floating like a half-dead fish on the surface after dynamite in the water... It's coming from all directions, and just wait for maybe next week, when Social Security checks stop. There will be (armed) people on the streets... I see evidences of Empire in serious decline and I believe this strange passive-aggressivity will only increase as a feature of the whole damn thing. Where I am the dominant sentiment is not a far stretch from rural Afghanistan where many folks are heavily armed in their homes. Much more than an AK-47 for every man... FYI, my friend, the writer George Saunders had a great book out a couple years ago with the lead short story "The Braindead Megaphone" which explores the chilling scenario from a harsh satirical pov... but this shit is serious... You are only flabberghasted 'cause, maybe, you maybe believed a tiny bit of the 'US exceptionalism' mythology... The reality of Empire is ... the reality of Empire.
Teaching a mixed group of third year Bachelor-level students of informatics, media technology and media design, I learned that even most of them did not know or understand systems like PRISM, commercial mining of personal data and big data operations.
I stepped away from teaching (several Digital Art courses and a course titled "Meaning of Information Technology"* at the University of Colorado Boulder this year because of a deep inability on the part of the students that I had to engage in any critical discourse about technology, period. Of course, as a learning facilitator, I'm supposed to be able to make this happen, but there was another dynamic apparent -- that even the possibility (the concept!) critical engagement was not available to the students -- perhaps as a result of the "No Child Left Behind" educational policies of the Bush Regime which emphasized teaching to tests. For the first time in my 25+ years teaching path, I gave up. The brightest students were left to literally go crazy trying to extract something meaningful from their (corporate) educational experience. * It was a survey seminar for a "Technology Arts & Media" minor -- syllabus @ http://neoscenes.net/teach/cu/2013_1/atls2000_mit/syllabus.html -- I had students from practically every major on campus both humanities and sci/eng people. Facilitating a collaborative and open knowledge-building process was definitely a question of moving against a strong current... Anyway... JH -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD ensconced, unarmed and dangerous, in an ultra-conservative stronghold http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5
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Eugen Leitl