[-empyre-] nothing gives - mathematical reality of biopolitical implants

[simon]

On 27/11/14 09:15, Alan Sondheim wrote:
> this country, for all its military power and swashbuckling and 
> back-room international deals, operates on the principle of 
> endocolonization

two areas of IBM expenditure last year interested me: the internet of 
things (of course they don't call it this, the actual nomenclature is 
closer to 'control society' for reversing it as Smart) and Big Data. The 
first category deals with the widening spread of networked sensor and 
surveillance technics across cities and fields, inserted into urban 
traffic flows and agribusiness (and actual bodies, of course - to keep 
it visceral). This data gathering is for the sake of governing complex 
systems; for example, water supply in African countries, ensuring 
greater supply where there is greater need; the traffic system in London 
uses an IBM system to promote efficient transit, steer flows around 
obstacles, minimise bottlenecks, distribute peak time across the wider 
network - controlling the signs which in turn control the people. Potato 
farmers in Idaho use field sensors to communicate their crops. They tell 
them when and where fertiliser is needed, pest control, watering. The 
Idaho data is compiled and 'analysed', processed by a group in 
Canterbury, New Zealand.

Then there is the shibboleth of Big Data. A goldmine for consultants, 
who, like oracles (shaman) claim to be able to parse an iota of sense 
from it. Data is in fact not analysed - for detail or to its genesis - 
but is the object of recursive and reticulating operations of 
organisation through statistical relationality, following a 
non-intensive or powerless line of (re)searching for the difference of 
the same. This statistical same - of these identical organs that are 
brought to emergence - subjects the erstwhile subjects of states to the 
governance of a mathematical reality, an abstraction layer isolating 
power from the points at which it is inflicted.

'endocolonisation' recalls the sometimes cited axiom whereby capitalist 
states having exhausted their violent energy-resource grab, and having 
extended the borders of capitalism, its reach and their reach, globally, 
now turn their violence on their own populations, particularly the 
middle classes, which history contrived to construct as sacrifice. This 
process has been called neoliberalism. I know it from the example of 
Chile and then New Zealand, from 1984, a propitious date. And like the 
previous colonial period of empire, and the golden Keynesian post-war 
rise of middle class values - education, art, humanities - that followed 
for a handful of nations, this present colonisation is dirty, malevolent 
and violent. And as Ana has indicated it is misogynist. It is misogynist 
before it is misanthropic.

Best,
Simon


PS: On 26/11/14 20:02, Alan Sondheim wrote:
>
>
> thank you for this - is are there any particular references? would be 
> useful - alan
Heisig, James W. /Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School/

but, respectfully, this was nothing compared to travelling in Japan.


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