[-empyre-] Mushrooms and Ruins

Wed Jun 13 04:43:16 AEST 2018

Dear John Jordan,

Thanks for having clearly formulated the alternative that we need to
confront.

To your last sentence, I would add:
are we condemned to live in the ruins of capitalism? Another
mushroom(-at-the-end-of-the-world) question actually.

Concerning ruins and mushrooms, this quotation (I need to find the
English translation)
that a friend of mine sent to me:

"Il y a deux sortes de ruines : l’une, ouvrage du temps ; l’autre, ouvrage
des hommes. Les premières n’ont rien de désagréable, parce que la nature
travaille auprès des ans. Font-ils des décombres, elle y sème des fleurs ;
entrouvrent-ils un tombeau, elle y place le nid d’une colombe : sans cesse
occupée à reproduire, elle environne la mort des plus douces illusions de
la vie. Les secondes ruines sont plutôt des dévastations que des ruines ;
elles n’offrent que l’image du néant, sans une puissance réparatrice. […]
Quand Dieu, pour des raisons qui nous sont inconnues, veut hâter les ruines
du monde, il ordonne au Temps de prêter sa faux à l’homme, et le temps nous
voit avec épouvante ravager dans un clin d’oeil ce qu’il eût mis des
siècles à détruire."
-Chateaubriand, *Génie du christianisme*

Best,

FN

On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 12:15 PM, John Jordan <artactivism at gn.apc.org>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thank you for your honest and fascinating story /// Makes me think a lot
> about the fabulous chapter on cybernetics and management in the Invisible
> Comitee’s TO OUR FRIENDS
> <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends.pdf>
>
> This of course brings up for me the central questions …
>
> How do we create forms of life that no longer reproduce the machines of
> capital. How do we desert the system that has no outside. How do we refuse
> to become the fools in the palace, providing the progressive masks to the
> institutions whose very life blood is in the corporate military industrial
> realm…
>
> How do we not separate our ethics and aesthetics ( as wittgenstein urged
> us not to do )
>
> Do we refuse to collaborates ?
>
> Can we hack from the inside ?
>
> Do we desert and build counter powers ?
>
> Or do we just cook up the poison mushrooms and feed them to those making
> money from death ?
>
>
> yours JJ
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 12 Jun 2018, at 15:37, Ricardo Rene Dominguez <rrd54 at cornell.edu>
> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Hola Tod at xs,
>
>
> I have been learning a great deal from the gestures and conversations this
> month. And thanks Shulea for inviting me to participate.
>
>
> Rehearsing Networks of E-contagion (the Shrooms Next Door), or from Cold
> War Universities to War on Terror Universities
>
>
> rehearse (v.)
> c. 1300, "to give an account of," from Anglo-French rehearser, Old French
> rehercier (12c.) "to go over again, repeat," literally "to rake over, turn
> over" (soil, ground), from re- "again" (see re-
> <https://www.etymonline.com/word/re-?ref=etymonline_crossreference>) +
> hercier "to drag, trail (on the ground), be dragged along the ground; rake,
> harrow (land); rip, tear, wound; repeat, rehearse;" from herse "a harrow"
> (see hearse
> <https://www.etymonline.com/word/hearse?ref=etymonline_crossreference> (n.)).
> Meaning "to say over again, repeat what has already been said or written"
> is from mid-14c. in English; sense of "practice a play, part, etc." is from
> 1570s. Related: Rehearsed; rehearsing.
>
>
> #Repeat #ToKnow
>
>
> Electronic Disturbance Theater has always already been rehearsing the
> re-harrowing of the digital grounds towards a practice of coming to know.
> Then repeat. This process is one of networks being on repeat cycles that
> are unbound and rebound to networks that prepare the soil and wounds for
> something that will always be a rehearsal. A post-mycelium production that
> is never fully known and can never be fully staged and presented.
>
>
> Rehearsals build on rehearsals that are not strategic (the gaining of
> fully structured performances that no longer need rehearsing) vs. tactical
> gestures that seed networks for more rehearsals to come without any final
> performance on the horizon.
>
>
> #ReCycling
>
>
> About a month ago I was invited to do a “Tactical Poetics” workshop for a
> wide area academic and research communities at Cornell University, where I
> am a Society for the Humanities fellow this year and the theme for the
> groups general research was on “corruption.” In order to prepare for the
> workshop I sent out email asking those who would attending what were the
> current concerns they would like to focus on? The majority sent back notes
> saying they wanted to consider what could be done to stop networks like
> Facebook and Cambridge Analytica from data scrapping and using the data for
> the micro-management of elections and its use of emotion contagion or
> affective political channeling.
>
>
> As I started to think about what tactical gestures could be staged or what
> past tactical actions could be touched on to help the gathered communities
> rehearse the question, “What is to be done or could be done to counter
> these data-capturing networks” After a bit of counter-toiling the question.
> I did some ungrounding the local soil and to find the wounds at home.
>
>
> The concerns of those network-things beyond was residing and were being
> rehearsed right at here at home. Cornell was part of the DOD (Department of
> Defense) research trajectory named Minerva since 2009 that used Facebook as
> a testing ground and collected the data:
>
>
> “The DoD’s initiative is currently funding another study at Cornell,
> called Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions. This study
> will examine the “tipping point” in social media conversations surrounding
> four recent global events — the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the 2011 Russian
> Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi
> park protests.
>
>
> Cornell’s role in the 2012 mood manipulation study is still unclear,
> though a statement released by the University Monday said neither Hancock
> nor then-university affiliated researcher Jamie Guillory, who was involved
> in the study, had direct access to the collection of private data.” (Or did
> they?)
>
>
> https://ithacavoice.com/2014/07/new-questions-answers-
> cornells-facebook-experiment/
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/
> jul/01/facebook-cornell-study-emotional-contagion-ethics-breach
>
>
> Cornell stated in 2014 that because of ethical breaches the studies would
> stop and so would the DOD funding. But of course it has not. Minerva is
> still listed here:
>
>
> Research - Cornell University <http://sdl.soc.cornell.edu/research.php>
>
>
> sdl.soc.cornell.edu
>
>
> We study the interplay between network topology and the dynamics of social
> interaction, using computational models, data from on-line networks, and
> laboratory experiments with human participants.
>
>
> Rehearsing networks of e-contagion marks a shift in the networks of
> knowledge production from Cold War Universities to War on Terror
> Universities. Just as the Cold War university was constructed in what was
> named a ‘strategic alliance’ between scientists and the military after
> World War Two, today universities are being re-militarized and
> re-integrated into the national security state in order to serve the US
> government’s perpetual and unbounded ‘War on Terror.’ The War on Terror
> university is characterized by military and defense-contractor funding of
> research, the orientation of research and teaching to serving military,
> intelligence agency, and corporate goals surveillance of faculty and
> students, and repressive policing of campuses:
>
>
> “The problem, then, was not whether some sub agent of massive government
> funding espoused problematic political designs. The danger lay in the
> monolithic source of funding — always federal, despite its different
> channels. The autonomy of science hinged upon the existence of multiple
> non-governmental funders and sponsors. Academia, much like the mythical
> market place, thrived when guided by an invisible hand.”
>
>
> From the “Minerva Controversy”:
> http://essays.ssrc.org/minerva/2008/12/11/robin/
>
>
> Multiple networks are always being rehearsed and it is always good to not
> only eat local but see what poison shrooms are also being grown next door.
>
>
> Next rehearsal network MAVEN.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-
> bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Aviva Rahmani <
> ghostnets at ghostnets.com>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 12, 2018 8:53:14 AM
> *To:* soft_skinned_space; shu lea cheang
> *Subject:* Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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