open Democracy News Analysis - Imaginary futures: frozen and fluid time, Richard Barbrook - Comments

http://taghioff.info/dant/ on "Imaginary futures: frozen and fluid time"

http://taghioff.info/dant/ — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:42:05 +0100

What is interesting about the information age is that communication becomes a stand-in for the future, for progress.

But communication is a term that alienates "information" "channels" and "flows" from the people saying and the circumstances they say in.

The information future is thus a disconnected rather than a connected future. One of the things that this vision of progress, as well as the philosophies of representation that accompany it, cannot cope with is, the suprising character of the surround.

Things come out of the blue, from beyond representation, and this brings the focus back to the environment. Which gives you a sense of what this vision of progress is hiding. Currently the planet is likely to change in a surprising and disconcerting way, which is likely to disturb agriculture and raise food prices, particularly in the tropics.

For people on less than a dollar a day (purchasing power parity) this means not being able to afford food. Alienating communication from this surround is an illness and an illusion that obscures progress:

Progress now is to ensure that we reconnect with the situation of the majority. If you look globally, a majority are still living close to the edge, the monetisation of people's lives, whilst looking good on paper, merely covers up the environmental marginality of so many in the world.

If we can reconnect with these issues, maybe we have a future.

douglas-jones on "Imaginary futures: frozen and fluid time"

douglas-jones — Fri, 18 May 2007 01:20:36 +0100

May I make one comment.

Part of our information society is contained in our use of words.

Thus �jihardi terrorism immediately invokes the fear of Islam and includes the belief that Islam Jihardi is aggressive, destructive and requiring a circumscribed set of beliefs by all.

This is I think a very Western view, copy for our leaders assault on �difference� standing bin the way of wealth and hegemony, theirs.

Reading the Bible can lead to a similar view, as it has for the Fundamentalist Christian Right.

Either view is a limited selective trawling of the texts.

After all just because our definition of terrorism excludes our own does not mean it does not exist.

Imaginary futures: frozen and fluid time, Richard Barbrook

Wed, 16 May 2007 00:00:00 +0100

Like artificial intelligence, the concept of the information society is an old acquaintance. For decades, politicians, pundits and experts have been telling the citizens of the developed world that the arrival of this digital utopia is imminent. These premonitions have been confirmed by media coverage of the increasing sophistication and rapid proliferation of iconic technologies: personal computers, satellite television, cable systems, mobile phones, video games and, above all, the internet.

During the late 1990s dotcom boom, the Californian acolytes of the information society became intoxicated with millennial fervour. Kevin Kelly (in New Rules for the New Economy) claimed that the net had created a "new paradigm" which had abolished the boom-and-bust economic cycle. Manuel Castells published a multi-volume celebration of the transition from the miseries of industrial nationalism to the marvels of post-industrial globalism.

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