This is a blog page to explore questions about resonance. This can be as broad as your imagination - so see what you can come up with.  WIP ...

 

28/04/2021 The Spiral Bridge 

 

 I have, finally, revisited the idea of creating a useful 'front-end' for resident knowledges, or any other  / heuticulure / etc. 

 

So, a first draft of a spec. for Spiral Bridge.

 

The Spiral Bridge

 

  

A place to see, cite, curate, navigate, branch, jump ship, come/go back, fork, etc. 

on what matters to you on a particular topic, field of interest, etc. 

 

 

 

Rough Specs ... 

  

Worm-hole page (with icon link on every page)

An interactive, zoom-able site, drag, push-able and editable pics, numbers, text, audio, HTML (sorry about the typo) links.

  28.03.21 MM: What exactly should be zoomable, single pictures?
  What is push-able?
  Does 'numbers' mean more than digits as characters within text, e.g. statistical graphs?

  Must audio play in the background or does an embed or even a link suffice?

  Does HTMP mean something else than HTML and HTTP?

 

 

30.03.21 RW: Jenny, thanks for the offer. We will definitely need more clarity of thought / purpose to get something planned, and even more clarity on testing it for real user groups.  

 

30.03.21 RW:

General clarifications:

 

I have two concerns, which obviously overlap. I would like to make 'resonancesofknowledge' more navigable, and accessible.  I know my way around it, but that doesn't mean anyone else finds it easy to use!

 

However:

My main concern is to build a creative commons (non commercial) platform, for anyone to use, and to take it and run with it, as they please. That raises further questions: The best design solution might be to create an interactive navigation front end (similar to your ontology application) which is, firstly, a place to navigate amongst various tools for curation, rather than content. 

 

User profile:

This assumes that the user is an active user / curator, not in any sense what used to be (some years ago), a (passive) 'user' of a site. So, for example, you might have seen that I have created 'blog-like' sites (like this series of pages) within a wiki. That's one solution, but it get's a bit complicated (see the 'minus 2' numbering on this page, for instance).  

 

So there are some top level design questions that need to be answered. If the prospective user profile is an active curator, how much 'similarity' should there be between the sites that different users need? Are we talking instead of an annotated 'smorgasbord' of tools, or of particular types (families) of applications? 

 

My own instinct is to create one or two specific sites, which I would be interested in using, and leave it to others to branch/fork out from there. So, I would start with one site for theoretical issues on knowledge and learning, and another site (there is no reason why they can't be cross linked) for applied learning, particularly for open learning and mastery. 

 

Curators: This in turn would need different curators for different sites. (Question: can this be extrapolated from the wikipedia 'editors' model?)

 

To come back to your specific questions:

1. The terms I used (including 'zoom', which now been taken over as a noun, and a trademarked one too) are neither here nor there. What I have in mind is a screen of nodes with descriptions or tags (words, numbers, pictures) to assist in navigation, and links from each node to content (text, audio, further curation sites, whatever you can squeeze through a HTML link). 

31.03.21 MM Thanks, I think I understand it now, zooming along the detail hierarchy of title -> tags -> abstract -> full text or new navigation page. You might also consider an application that is great at zooming (even though it's the competitor of my own tool): infinitymaps.

                         1.4.21 RW Indeed. I have registered with infinitymaps, and will give it a try.  Thanks. 

 

It should be possible to rearrange (see 'pushable') the nodes on a screen, so that you can focus on particular parts / sections of it, or link to another more detailed (partial version of the) screen. (Audio in the background is, for me, very valuable, but I have used short segments of audio (3 minutes or so, max - long podcasts could more sensibly be linked, and I think they are very different sorts of media - 'presentations' or 'discussions', rather than 'content').

 

31.03.21 MM What usage focus would you expect: people rather ADDing things, or TAKING away things (in the postive sense of curating them on their own site and placing track-back links on your site)? If the latter, 'wiki-like' might create the problem that the section addresses are simply derived from the headings, i.e. very unstable. If the former, which user type would you expect to predominate, readers, contributors adding stuff (and messiness), or curators helping to make it neat? I think some guessing about the users is important for planning of memberships and rights, and frankly, I am quite skeptical how actively people would engage.

 

1.4.21 RW Skepticism accepted. My own experience is that people engage actively only when a clear task is set - fair enough.  So the users I would expect would be:

 

.1 A Single creator / curator, or a small group of people working on a specific task, by invitation of the lead curator, or curators. So, people who add, in this case, and also have some say on overall design.  If one or more people want to branch, or fork, out to a slightly different site, that would be fine too, and they would set up their own curator/s.   

 

.2 Take-away users. People who predominantly 'take away' (as you have defined them, above), for their own purposes. The question of the instability of of links has already come up in my own use of this wiki - so, if I want to refer you to a particular text, I either have to make new pages for each piece of text (which then becomes a headache for navigation), or I have to use the page URL, as well as the date of creation (which I have to specify, as in this text, (e.g. 1.4.21), which is another layer of complication, and a rather inelegant work-around.  

 

Are there any better ways of doing this, or are 'deep links' always going to be problematic? Do you think working with 'track-back' links would do it?  For the sake of simplicity (of process and design) I am tempted to focus on small-group curation, with possible branches or forks, and leave the messy area of (informal) collaboration with (take-away) users for later - but I prefer, if it is at all possible, to think through these issues beforehand. Any ideas?  

 

And ... can an overall 'mapping' function ('infinity maps' seems to hint in this direction) solve this issue, or would it just make it even more difficult to navigate? 

 

The alternative is (always?) to use another channel / back channel, such as email, to point people to a particular section of a site, and to have a separate (off-site) conversation with them before (either person) makes changes to the 'curated' site. So the idea of squeezing all communication - and particularly the messy, exploratory aspects of collaboration - onto one site would  end up being counterproductive. Designing separate 'curation zones', 'user track-backs' and (separate) 'back-channels' might be better, no? 

 

On my wish list? Each would need a topic, with a description, time frame, outcomes, lead curators.

 

 

0. Tools for collaboration and curation

 

1. Learning for mastery 

 

2. Open, hybrid, learning 

 

3. Creation and governance of social media

 

4. Models of social governance

 

5. Resonances and knowledge

 

 

 

With import / export / share options – which in turn have show, show all, show all from …,  (and other filters), that should be available on each screen.

 

Memes

Post-cards from the edge, facilitated story telling (nested narratives), ‘article’ (short, long read, multi-linked/ heavily curated, etc …

 

Sketch pad

For the current page / topic / field

• ·      Curator/s map
• ·      Respondent’s map/s

Mapping out intended agency / affordances for initiatives, collaborations, compliance, certification, commons, courses, MOOCs. And facilities for respondents to add their own

maps, and maps on maps, etc …

  28.03.21 MM: Maps like this hidden one?

30.03.21 RW: Yes, but also others, specifically 'agency mappings', like footprints (of emergence) although these too need to be more flexible, user-based tools, rather than one-off solutions to a particular piece of research. Jutta Pauschenwein has taken these forward, and improved on the software too - as you might already know. 

 

Wiki-like interactive graphic process screen

In principle, wiki-like ‘edit history’ tracking, but also editable, to add other links, comments, etc.

  28.03.21 MM: (Why?) try (?) to edit the history page itself, instead of the comments associated with each page? I think that's impossible.

  What does 'graphic process' mean, more than WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) via a GUI (Graphical User Interface) ?

  30.03.21 RW: Fair point. The wiki history page's integrity has to be left alone.  Comments would be a good start. (KISS)

 

 

Ontology

An interactive ontology page for each topic / field, with something like a 50 -100 word / media / pic sketch of each ontology node.  The number of ontology nodes for each ontology? Variable and emergent.  

  28.03.21 MM: Does 'interactive' mean something beyond clicking some hyperlinks? Should they open in popup windows or hover-texts or ...?

  30.03.21 RW: The more interactive, the better in principle, but probably the more cluttered in practice. A difficult balance. 

 

Creative Commons

In principle, everything is creative commons, non-commercial,  with acknowledged derivatives.  

 

Funding

Contributions: £5 - £50 , or more if it’s worth it to you, p.a.

Crowd-funding.

 

Listings: Free listings, short descriptions, links, added at discretion of site editor.

5% referral fee to charging products/services sites, on each purchase. Contact: roytwilliams@gmail.com

 

 

10/04/2021 The illusion of things and the perversion of understanding

 

 

Or the slippery slope down objectification, to reification, to hubristic denial - and fundamental misunderstanding.  

 

I have been struggling for some years to explain what complex-adaptive systems are. The crux of the matter is the very tempting illusion that everything around us is an (unchanging) thing, rather than a part of an emerging event. This applies, crucially, to politics and sociology, but actually also to physics and astronomy. 

 

It's the reason why reification determines the (illusory) ethos of our times, and why we have been trapped in hubristic denial for millennia. And it's even the sign-off meme in the Lord's Prayer, which freezes us all in God's gaze for eternity: "for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, amen".  Or as the good lord might have said with a shrug: "plus ca change ..."

 

The alternative to this rampant reification and hubristic denial can be understood by the simple statement that: 

 

What’s really fascinating about a giraffe is not that it is a giraffe, but that it became a giraffe, by change and adaptation. It depends entirely on whether you filter out the context of  ‘time’, or not. 

 

This is a powerful example of the difference between the illusion of getting to know a giraffe (or anything else) as a static thing, and the altogether more comprehensive process of getting to know a giraffe as but a stage in a dynamically emerging, ecological process. 

 

And the invisible context that is filtered out is the one that is so obvious that you never think about it: time.

 

When you filter out the dynamics of time, particularly geographical time, let alone galactic time, your whole epistemology gets so cramped that you can only see a tiny fraction of the ontological and existential landscape that you and your descendants will live in. Our comfortable, but deceptive cultural amnesia / evolutionary amnesia is key to the our self-made hubris that is about to eat us all up. 

 

As soon as we put time back into the picture, particularly on the millions of years scale, giraffes suddenly become dynamically evolving events, (with an anatomy closely resembling our own), rather than just (illusory), static, things, very different from us - or any other things.  So what is most interesting about so-called things, like giraffes, is not that they look the way they do, but rather the how and why of their changes from what a giraffe looked like two million years ago. 

 

So the interesting difference between (Newtonian) physics on the one hand and biology and sociology on the other hand is perhaps not best explained by resorting to long-winded and inaccessible theories of complicated v. complex adaptive systems (as I am wont to do), but rather by adding a pinch of ‘time’ (excuse the bad pun) to the giraffe story. 

 

 

24/10/2020 Classism and Accent Prejudice in Universities. 

 

Not so fast ...

 

It is all very well to object to the negative discrimination against people with, let's face it, non-RP accents. (RP: 'received pronunciation' - what used to be called "BBC English").

 

But there is another whole layer to this.  Although accent is (often) used as a tool to discriminate against 'other' students, there are two separate issues here: speech and writing. 'Accent' is the difference that is most obvious, which makes it the easiest place to start if you are in the business of emphasising differences between 'us' and 'them'.  But its not the one that matters most in education. Writing is.

 

Some people manage to keep their 'atypical' spoken accents, and still succeed. But writing is the unforgiving straightjacket. 

 

In education it eventually all comes down to assessment. This is validated, in the final analysis, by a second level of 'blind' checking (by external examiners) i.e. by someone who does not know who submitted a particular assessment. That in turn requires standardised assessments, written in a standardised style, and read / examined in that standardised style (RP as it happens).  So ... unless the student can fluently produce a written assessment in RP, they are bound to be disadvantaged.  And that is not about spoken accent. (And besides, graduates are also expected to be fluent in writing documents, in their future careers, in RP).

 

It is about the ability to write in RP, and write for an RP reader, i.e. for someone who will read the assessment 'as if' it was written by a speaker of RP. That requires all students who have an 'other' accent to write in, in a style, a dialect, a discourse (in critical discourse analysis terms), which is foreign to them, and which is not their own.  In fact not only are they obliged / condemned to write in a foreign dialect, as there is no standard orthography for them to write in, in their own accent, even if this was accepted at universities. The only standard orthography is RP. Period. 

 

So although they are likely to be differentiated (and/or marginalised) by their accents, they face a much more radical 'othering' when it comes to writing.  There is no standardised way for them to write other than RP, which is a 'foreign tongue'. This is a pass/fail issue - there is no way round it. 

 

And informing students who do not write in RP that this is an (unstated) requirement for passing, let alone doing well at, university, and they had better learn it or give up on tertiary education, is a very tricky and delicate task for academic staff (like myself - although I have done it). Besides, many of them may not have the applied linguistics tools, or knowledge, or support, to do this.   

 

 

22/09/2020 Strategic Chaos.

 

There was a time when 'chaos theory' was all about unpredictable consequences and connectivism.  You remember the one about the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the planet?

 

Well most of that has been pushed aside by the new agents of chaos. In a nutshell, it's a continuous storm of dead cats being strewn across everyone's dining-room table. Chaos for its own sake. And a resonance of the strangest bedfellows - the totally anal control freak, Putin, with the politically-tourettes Donald (Duck). Both like nothing better than spewing chaos (preferably on other people's doorsteps) to maximise power. And Donald (and Boris) don't even seem to be that bothered about losing power - it's just another roll of the dice to them. Putin on the other hand is edging towards Xi's power-for-life, from the dictators 101 play-book.

 

Either way democracy as we know it is dead, and it smells funny. It's not even a matter of tightening up those checks and balances. A major (or even a majority?) proportion of financial deals are now done 'outside' of the control of all national 'countries'.  All the 'people' are left with are the crumbs, and the worthless simulacra of 'political control' and the rituals of empty voting 'rights'.

 

But the media thrive - every morning we get the news that there is a new storm of dead cats for the petit bourgeois chattering classes to complain about. And morality is defined as joining the new 'pledgers' - who give away half their billions (although, just in case, they keep the other half). 

 

 

06/09/2020 Fractured Narratives or Parallel Universes.

 

When I started this project, I thought it was about about different ways people (could) resonate with each other.  But the reality looks turns out to be quite the opposite. It's about ways for people to ensure that they differ from other people.  Or, how they can exist with total disregard to everyone outside their bubble / narrative / pop-up diaspora. In other words, how they can hide in plain sight from everyone around them.  

 

This applies to lots of people (not only 'criminals').  In particular for our purposes, these are the members of the new bourgeoisie that I wrote of earlier, which has now become invisible - they are no longer seen or known - nor are their private equity firms' dealings anywhere to be seen (we won't even start on discussing how they are 'nowhere' to be taxed). 

 

And they are completely legal - there's the rub.  Tax havens, US company tax-free States like Delaware, not to mention the mother of all deception and squeaky-cleanness - Switzerland, UK "Euro-dollar" markets, Silicon Valley and Russian oligarchies, etc. are not just a separate domain of the new billionaire bourgeoisie, they are the foundations of the new invisible bourgeoisie - hiding in plain sight, giving 'generously' (half their billions, in the new club of 'pledgers') to charities, and shorting the global stock markets and financial markets to make sure that as the world dives into the covid recession, global stocks soar or at the very least keep their 'value'. Free-floating global (non-/multi-) citizens. 

 

And then there are the rest of us - the billions who as Gideon Osborne said, "he has no time for" as we are "too lazy or too stupid not to work out how to pay no taxes".

 

31/08/2020 The (next) Third World Slaughter

  

 Talking about what the future holds for a young child today, it struck me that it's a little bit worse than in my time.

 

In my childhood, the 1st and 2nd World Slaughters (1914-18 and 1939-45) were done, and we looked forward with increasing trepidation to the to the 3rd (Cold) World Slaughter.  It never happened, and might still never happen (cross your fingers).  So, relief. 

 

But for a child born today, the 3rd (Hot - sorry) Climate World Slaughter (a mixture of starvation, drowning, loss of global habitat, and bloody migration/border wars) is increasingly looking like a certainty.  Not 'if', but just 'when'.

 

The alternatives are starting to vanish. Poor children. That part of their future looks certain.

 

And we could prevent it, no? 

 

22/08/2020  Power and Resonance / Patronage and Dynasty

 

Nick Cohen writes that "there is a danger in over-intellectualising the lust for power. Often, power is its own justification and sought for its own sake".  Very true.

 

Power and patronage are often extensions of the ego in ways that even Marshall McLuhan did not envisage.  Which is why all political constitutions need rigorous checks and balances. Nothing can be "taken in good faith" when it comes to power. In case anyone has forgotten: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, which Lord Acton then followed by the simple, but even more telling aphorism: Great men are almost always bad men. 

 

So we need checks and balances, or to paraphrase Wolfhagen, greed brakes (Gierbremse).  Which is direct and to the point. 

 

There is no reason why everyone should not want to be secure and comfortable, but equally, there is no reason why anyone should be greedy - and accumulate obscene amounts of security or comfort for themselves at everyone else's cost.  Patronage can be uplifting; dynasties are just nasty, and the borderline between them needs to be carefully monitored and policed.

 

There are many things to be said for an 'unwritten' constitution, such as the UK, but when either the UK - without a constitution - or the USA (with a much flouted one - in more than one sense) constitution, provide affordances for accumulation and centralisation of power and patronage (in either its left wing or right wing forms), then something has to change. 

 

What the SARS-CoV2 virus pushes to the top of the global agenda - along with global warming - is that we are all in this together, and there is no Planet B.  Therefore, no-one can be allowed to accumulate massive/absolute power - whether political, financial, or propagandist (e.g. unfettered social media, or monopolistic state media - they do the same job).

 

Balance is all, and we live in unstable times. 

 

01/07/2020  Being a person: what cards are you dealt with, and how do you play them? 

 

From the analysis below it follows that we each have decide which, if any, of the particular privileges and affordances we are dealt with (from birth onwards) we are prepared to forswear; so that we can self-identify (to ourselves, primarily) just who we want to be, and to decide how we are going to deal with the challenges of being that kind of person.  It contextualises the idea of 'agency' in very different ways ... 

 

26/06/2020  Black Affordances and White Affordances

 

I can't explain the differences between 'being black' and 'being white' clearly, without using the term 'affordances'.

 

See Trevor Noah, talking about Black Lives Matter for more detail.  He cites the case of Amy Cooper (a white woman who called the cops on a black birdwatcher for asking her to leash her dog) as core to the whole debate. And it sure is. 

 

Not because Amy Cooper is always racist (she might or might not be) but because she is white, she knows she will always be white, and she knows that 'white folk' can always call the police to deal with 'troublesome' 'black folk'.  The police in her area might also have a well established reputation for beating up black folk on the say so of allegations by white folk. 

 

And that's the difference.  Amy Cooper has 'affordances' which she can call in, at any time.  She does not have to call them in, and she might not do so for years at a time.  But she knows the affordances are there for the taking. She knows she can choose to act against a birdwatcher who is 'black' at any time she likes, merely by 'self-identifying' as a 'white' (person). She knows, too, that the 'black' birdwatcher knows that she can do this, and knows that the consequences are likely to be bad, if not catastrophic, for him if she does so.  It's a button which she can always push, which enables her to change - in an instant - from being a 'person' to being a 'white racist' (and back again).

 

The black person (birdwatcher or otherwise) in that same community does not have that switch, that affordance - that's what 'being black' means. It might never be used against him (or her), but there it is - it lies sleeping, just beneath the surface of every black/white encounter in that neighbourhood - until everyone becomes just a person - and forswears the discriminatory privileges of their particular race, gender, class, etc.  Race is the easiest to recognise, it's colour coded - and yes, the offence is meant - class is so subliminal in comparison that one might almost think we live in a class-less society.

 

It is no different from the question 'Waar is jou pass?"  ("where are your papers, entitling you to be in this urban area?") that any policeman (white or black) could ask any black person they encountered on the street, and arrest and lock them up them on the spot (unfairly as it happens, but that's just adding insult to injury), under Apartheid.

 

So 'whiteness' can be put into effect by blacks or whites - it's fundamentally structural violence, even though it can - also - be personal violence. The converse is also the case. A friend, Charl, attended an ANC Women's League meeting some years back.  The meeting was asked whether the group included 'whites', and the answer came back, "no", none.  At which point someone said: "what about you?" (i.e. my friend?)  To which the answer came back: "No, she doesn't count as 'white'". 

 

So whiteness is as whiteness does. 

 

To be a 'black' person walking down the street in either of these societies is a fundamentally different experience from being a 'white' person. The existential threat (and it is a threat) is entirely implicit, and may never be actuated - but you just don't know - you just have to live with the fact that it might jump out at you, unannounced, around every corner of your life. That is what it means - 'being black'.  

 

What George Floyd's murder makes us all realise is that being murdered, by police, on the street in broad daylight, is always a real, implicit, existential threat for Black people - you just never know if it's going to be you. Whites, not so much ...

 

We all need to understand this, and deal with this existential difference, or come clean, and 'self-identify' as white racists, who refuse the toughest challenge of all - the clause in the US Constitution that says "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (/people) are created equal".

 

And we need to think very carefully about all the other discriminatory privileges each one of us enjoys - as part of our particular birth 'right' - whether we are conscious of them or not. 

 

 

16/06/2020 Smartypants is as smartypants does ...

 

The difference is whether you use community level/ community based methods for test, trace, treat, or you use centralised/privatised ones.  The consequences that follow are to be seen in how nimble - or how cumbersome, and in/effective - the method that applies to you is.  

 

So, it is possible to spend millions on test, trace, treat, and crow about it on national media every night, but still screw it up big-time/"spaff it up the wall" - as Johnson famously said.  Just depends on how much of a smartypants you are (see Johnson, Cummings, Gove, Bolsonaro, Trump, Ordogan, MBS, et al et al et al), see: 

  

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/germany-vietnam-test-trace-england-coronavirus?CMP=share_btn_link

 

So, resonance cannot be achieved by outsourcing/contracting-out nepotism.  Its based on engagement and trust and collaboration.  

 

 

29/05/20 Anti-politics and Anti-resonance   

 

Johnson has reached his Blair moment.  Once you're well and truly caught with your pants down (the war on terror/war on the virus) all you can do is try to blag/flannel it out till the next election.  But the mooning remains, and it's not a pretty sight. 

 

It's the rise of the anti-politics machine, again. Once you dis/claim any attempt to find resonance with the majority of the people, you enter the discourse of anti-politics.  Essentially, you dis/claim that nobody really understands you, and nobody really understands that whatever you have done (however many people have died in Iraq, in the NHS, in Care Homes, etc) has been done for the right reason. All you have to do is to remember is that you are sure that you are doing the right thing at the right time (preferably backed by 'the science'/ 'the intelligence'), and repeat that as often as possible. 

 

Sadly it's a return to the lost lessons of James Ferguson's 1994 classic "The Anti-politics machine", as well as the more recent book on charitable billionaires (that new oxymoron), "Winners take all" (- from you, and then want you to thank them for giving a tiny bit back).

 

Marx got some things right, particularly the idea that the global millionaires / billionaires are comfortable confining as many people as possible to just (and only just) reproducing themselves - i.e. reproducing the bodies needed for maintaining the 'social' workforce. Anything beyond this most basic 'social reproduction' - in the economic and biological senses - is 'surplus value' and is 'fair play' for the global billionaires/bourgeoisie to deny to working people, so that they can slice it off the top, and accumulate it in hyper-national (aka 'offshore') funds - outside the reach of all tax offices. 

 

What all of these examples have in common is disconnect - a politics that prevents political engagement (let alone resonance), and above all ensures that 'the more things change the more they stay the same'.  It's more than the impoverishment of politics. It actively and vigorously fills all the political space/media with meaningless, distracting PR.  It begs for satire, for example: "if you are so convinced that you are doing the right thing at the right time, does that also mean that you will also do the left thing at the left time - or is there more to it / not?" 

 

 

12/4/20 It's not the Anthropocene, it's the Partyscene  

 

It's unclear whether naming the present era the Anthropocene Era has enough 'edge' to it to concentrate people's minds sufficiently in the time of Climate crisis. Quite simply, it could be interpreted as meaning that we are now 'in charge' of 'our' era, and therefore can do what we like (outrageous as that might be). It could even be seen as a reason to be 'proud' of what we as a species have achieved!  

 

Perhaps it would be far better is to call our present era the Partyscene, in which all H. Sapiens has been doing in the recent past is to indulge in a hedonistic, short-sighted, solipsistic and disastrous disregard for the consequences of a hyper-extractive economy, a hyper-consumerist social life, and an economy riddled by 'externalities' that have nowhere left to go. See the aptly named "off-shore" extension to billionaire accomodation in Monaco (at just under $100,000 per square meter).

 

If we are honest enough to call where we are, now, the Partyscene, that might focus our attention more pointedly on the industrial and digital ages, and leave aside earlier historical periods, in which we had not yet reached the kind of scale that so comprehensively impacts on the viability of every aspect of the (once?) blue planet. 

 

12/4/20 Resonance v. Freedom: Kerala

 

The coronavirus / covid19  pandemic shows up, and exaggerates, many of the fault lines in our socio-economic systems.  It's just not possible to ignore them anymore (Trump, Bolsonaro, et al to the contrary). Key to this is the fault line between east (e.g. India) and west (e.g. America) which surfaced briefly in the nice-white-liberal discourse of the post WWII discourse and the establishment of the liberal UN's Universal Declaration of Individual Human Rights.  (Which took place despite the pointed dissent of political leaders like Gandhi, who said Human Rights was a ridiculous idea). 

 

Gandhi said that on the contrary, what we do have are universal human responsibilities (based on the notion of ahimsa, or 'do no harm').  We don't naturally have any 'rights' - we have to earn them - and continue to earn them, by fulfilling our social responsibilities. The idea of unfettered freedoms and individual rights most often leads to distortions of all open systems, and the asymmetries of unfettered accumulation of financial power (aka wealth), political power and, in the US for example, '2nd Amendment' firepower. 

 

Social resonance (not compliance) has very little - if anything - in common with unfettered individual freedom. It's hard work. You have to talk to everyone (and not just 'let the money do the talking').  If we are talking about the problem of shooting up with disinfectants, (see Donald Duck II), we should first start talking about the de-financialisation of social discourse. The problem is not 'dirty money', the problem is that all money looks the same. It is almost impossible to distinguish between 'dirty' money and 'clean money' - in fact, in common parlance, there is no such things as 'clean' money - and that must be telling us something too. 

 

So what's the alternative for pandemic management? More money or more testing and tracing?  The Indian state of Kerala has, relatively speaking, no money (per capita GNP is something like £2,200 p.a), and yet they have a total death toll for the 'rampant killer virus' of 4 (four). But they structure their society differently, which provides different affordances for community based social intervention, which is not just left to apparently benign 'market forces'. Simples.  See here ... 

 

 

23/4/20 Some people just get it ...  

 

"Perhaps most striking is South Korea’s ability to tame the coronavirus without resorting to lockdowns of the kind imposed in (+) ... the UK, Italy and France. In contrast to the panic-buying witnessed elsewhere, South Koreans for the most part stayed calm. There were no reports of hoarding, and the only people queuing were waiting to be tested or to buy face masks … or to vote".

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/test-trace-contain-how-south-korea-flattened-its-coronavirus-curve

 bvc

The devil could, however, be in the detail.  

 

But I strongly suspect that Korea instinctively recognised the unique affordances of a health/communication/social media ecology, which could all work together as one.  I have said for some time now that the answer to Lenin’s “what’s to be done?” question is no longer the ANC youth league answer (you can't change a light bulb, you have to destroy it), but rather the internet society answer: you no longer have to fight the traditional answers and structures of the world, you can just bypass them. 

 

Or: who cares if Trump is Nate Tate's new Shakespeare of Shit (love it!) … in a few years time people will ask: Donald who?

 

Or: the new/age old semiotic answer: meaning is as meaning does.  (And Andrew Cuomo does …)

 

 

12/4/20 What's the question? The secure world, the security state, or what? 

 

The revisionist media (sorry, my roots are showing) and the chattering classes are furiously debating the future of the state. Wrong question (for everyone but the media and the politicians, all of whom have all their skin in the wrong - 'national' - game). It's the planet stupid. There is no planet B, and the 'state' is part of the problem, not part of the solution (my roots, again!).  Ironically, we don't need to get rid of globalisation, we need to get it right (for the first time). 

 

We need a new round of international organisation (probably not international organisations) - i.e., distributed accountability, not centralized autocracy (aka 'democratic centralism')- and not diplomatic window dressing, which is what most of our existing 'international organisations' have become. We need a workable, accountable version of Knorr-Cetina's micro-global networks. (We certainly don't need a new version of the WHO with Trump - or Xi - stomped all over it).

 

But just to get the chaff out of the way first: The 'liberal' or neoliberal or neo-con state got lost in the Fukiyama hubris many years ago (RIP). The security state on the other hand is both a nightmare and a straw man - the crimes - plural - against humanity in the west of 'China', not to mention the Orwellian denial of the existence of 'Taiwan' in the east notwithstanding. The 'South Korean' model might (?) come closest to the new, secure, digital/fusion/democratic state', but it's still a (reasonable) answer to the wrong question. We need a planetary (not inter-'national') version of something like this.  

 

We did have a brief (and probably far too frenetic, confused and paranoid) opportunity - oddly, during a precious few days of 'Easter' in 2020 - to stand back and ask some fundamental questions - how do we want to put Humpty Dumpty together again - apart from the 'convenience kindergartens' of reopening schools - as we eventually gear down from Corona lockdown?  (Enter Keir Starmer, stage centre?) 

 

But plus ca change ... is probably the best/worst we can hope for.   

 

Alternatively we can try to reimagine globalisation, and agency, in a networked, micro-global planet, Kerala style (see above). 

 

To ... WIP ... 

 

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See here ... for page minus 1