Re: [-empyre-] Re: TechnoPanic

["Christian McCrea" <christian@wolvesevolve.com>]

Some brief comments on technopanic;

I am no expert on Agamben but it seems to be in his calculation, there
are no states of emergency - only permanent emergencies with endlessly
complex strategies for movement. The threat beyond the border
constitutes the eternal disquiet which excuses the border's being. The
means we use to overcome the threats and draw the borders, right down
to the material, are but one subsystem of our network of instincts.
The maelstrom that lies forever out of sight is where all the
calculations take place; where we imagine the worst; futurity and
futuphilia acts as a space of calculation and panic-production. The
fog of war; the fog that belongs to war. Entire cultural narratives
are sent into the fog and return armed with paranoia and panic.

Reason is the outward-bound circumference of energy. - William Blake

The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty,
because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere
twilight, which in addition not infrequently — like the effect of a
fog or moonshine — gives to things exaggerated dimensions and
unnatural appearance. - Carl von Clausewitz

If there is any form of quantifiable relationship between the
aesthetics of war and the aesthetics of computer technology then the
articulation of panic could be traced back into this fog on the moor.
In some senses the nature of it seems Rieminnian; a state and space
where calculative acts enter and results leave.

If technology's 'dead labour' produces ghosts of traditions, it could
be here that the hauntings occur, leaving ectoplasmic traces of
practices and textile realities consumed by the process of gathering.
I am reminded of Microsoft's presentation on 'unknowable China', a
country they are happy to put manufacturing plants in but unable to
comprehend a culture of free-first software use. People unable to buy
the products they produce is nothing new - but when the space becomes
representative, perhaps software capitalism has a limit after all.

Sean's comments on the dissapearance of materiality are very
evocative; in the world of computer games (technopanic culture par
excellence), the San Diego / Tijuana border was emblematic - at one
point the most economically unequal border in the world was a
software/hardware border as workers in Tijuana drilled screws into
Xbox machines at a 50th of the rate software designers tinkered with
the 'look and feel' of a software interface only a few miles away in
San Diego. Each side experiencing a fog; authority and class power the
fog of one, material feedback and abrasion the fog of the other.

-Christian McCrea

(Very appreciative to see Herzog make an apperance; his commentary on
images as 'technical produce' in the sense of nutrition is still
compelling.)