Christian Swertz via nettime-l on Tue, 4 Mar 2025 09:51:19 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Stealing the spotlight 

Hello,


On 2/27/25 17:09, GM - tedbyfield via nettime-l wrote:
> The impulse to psychologize everyone and everything is baked *really*
> deeply into the liberal imagination.

Am 01.03.25 um 20:02 schrieb Felix Stalder via nettime-l:


The wheels fell off in 2008 and contradictions mounted. 
Geopolitically, China and Russia became strong enough to push back 
against this unilateral perspective, demanding a multipolar word.

Quite right. And within this ideology, it looks like an oligopoly: 
Russia, China, Europe and the US. This might be understood as a side 
effect of the fact that nations have allowed international relations to 
be shaped like economic competition. And as far as I remember, there was 
a theory that markets, left alone, create oligopolies or monopolies. 
Still no falsification of that thesis.

As ever, you win this unsupervised competition through the use of brutal 
force. As a European, I have to admit that Europe is a bit slow in 
developing the military-industrial complex. Maybe we should go for civil 
defence? There were suggestion for something like this in the 1960ies.

In this respect, Ukraine seems to be closer to Europe than to the US. In 
the media event between Selenskyj and Trump, Trump talked about 
resources, business and deals (well - capitalism), while Selenskyj 
talked about kidnapped children, religious freedom and human suffering.

In terms of media theory, the discussion between Selenskyj and Trump 
reminded me of McLuhan's discussion of the "red telephone" between the 
Russian and the US presidents. He argued, that this was (and certainly 
is) pretty dangerous, since the meaning of oral communication in the US 
has a completely different meaning than in Russia. And this still seems 
to be true: Selenskyj said that Putin is not interested in taking 
contracts seriously. Probably true, because in oral cultures, contracts 
don't matter much - but in written cultures, they do, especially when 
they're backed by religious fanatics like the Protestant sects in the US.

All in all, it's certainly better to sit in the audience during this 
show. Maybe moving to Africa is a good option for that?

--
Liebe Grüße,

Christian Swertz
http://www.swertz.at

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