- Another software trend championed by O ’ Reilly is Open Stack, a set of tools that allows for, as it sounds, an open source Stack architecture (in a delimited sense). It also claims to work without the governance of a Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL). Many Users may be surprised to learn that many of the open source software tools they use every day, perhaps without knowing it, such as Linux, Python, Perl, Drupal, and PHP, are not communitarian anarchies but rather — at least in the last instance — formal monarchies. I raise the point not so as to recommend that platform states function as Cloud-based monarchies, but to underscore that the reality of order-giving force and decision making is not a design problem that can avoided by leaving it to the everwidening dining tables of horizontal relational “ consensus. ”
- Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
- Jean-Luc Godard, Ici et ailleurs (Paris: Gaumont, 1976).
- It will prove confusing to the left and the right that there is no necessary correspondence between planning an egalitarian economic system and a sustaining governance of the Anthropocenic ecology. We could have one without the other. With legacy state communism, we can have strong planning toward egalitarian economics that is also based on ecological devastation (such as Chavismo), and so it is possible that postcapitalist, postscarcity platform economics providing a “ universal service level ” may feature the stark absence of communitarian deliberation and consensus in any sense of vox populi mimesis. Comparing emergent systems to legacy systems (e.g., autocracy, anarchy, liberalism) may simply clarify less than it obscures. One would hope, and one would design on behalf of that hope, for a Stack that unleashes better models.
- Quentin Meillassoux, “ Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory, ” in Collapse, vol. 3: Philosophical Research and Development, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2007), 63 – 107.
- Or perhaps soft and hard are not the operative distinction when, for example, soft animal bodies and hard mechanical bodies are understood as together more natural than the nonhuman machines absorbing and expressing computation. (Perhaps it will shake out in some way that this constructed mismatch between physical topology and conceptual topology reflects also how information technology is associated with virtuality and apparition and mechanical technology with materiality and physicality.) It would appear that the actuality of computation is not only difficult to imagine but sometimes offensive to afterimages of naturalistic humanism.
- See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark\_Side\_of\_the\_Rainbow and https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0gXvVUg-VAE.
- During a visit to the University of California, San Diego, Ed Keller bought a book from the campus bookstore that catalogued various forms of exotic psychopathology. As I recall, we spent much of the afternoon issuing diagnoses to various societal trends. Among these was “ apophenia, ” the phenomenon whereby someone perceives a direct correlation between two sensory inputs where none actually exists, such as between an image and sound that are not really in synchronization but which we perceive as such (such as the old iTunes visualizer that presented swirling lines supposedly pulsing with the music, but was really just swirling). Dark Side of the
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