IN CASE WE DON'T DIE

The Politics of Love

by ICWDD

’People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love.’ - Michael Hardt, ’Multitude’. Michael Hardt is a professor of English at Duke University. His recent writings deal primarily with the political, legal, economic and social aspects of globalization, and he is a key figure in cultural theory and anthropology. In his books ‘Empire’ (2000) and ‘Multitude’ (2004), written in collaboration with Antonio Negri, he has analyzed the functioning of our current global power structure and the possible democratic alternatives to that structure. In an interview by Leonard Schwartz, published in Interval(le)s II.2-III.1 2008 / 2009 and titled ’A Conversation with Michael Hardt on the Politics of Love’, Schwartz begins the discussion by quoting the…

Viva Ultra

by ICWDD

“The Singularity: prepare to be unprepared ... ... In technology, things get faster. It’s called hyper-exponential acceleration and it has profound implications. Soon, there will be a concatenation of globalization, biotech, climate change, AI, robotics, discovery of life elsewhere, nuclear fusion, maglev trains and carbon nanotubes, all technologically enabled. The hyper-exponential curve that we’ve been riding is going vertical. More change will happen in the next generation’s first years than in all of human history including the Stone Age. The speed of history is tied to the pace of innovation, so society has a problem. No one is going to be able to keep up with their own history or with the succession of technologies. Science fiction writers won’t be able to imagine the future fast enough to stay ahead of it. The point in time when the rate of change exceeds our collective ability to deal with it is named after the bit of a black hole where nothing makes sense anymore; the Singularity.” - Alexander Cartwright, p. 7 in Garageland magazine, issue…

After the Future

by ICWDD

It’s such a clever trick of the mind. We think we’ve got access to all the information in the world, and in theory we do. We think the world has never been more open to us, and in theory it is, but in reality the opposite is true. The overwhelming complexity and our paralyzed state of being makes it impossible for us to choose, edit, make decisions and be present enough to experience the vast landscapes of information and possibilities ‘available’ to us. Italian critic and media activist Franco ’Bifo’ Berardi has been described as a ’master of global activism in the age of depression’. In his book titled After the Future he traces the genesis of future-oriented thought through the punk movement of the early 70s and into the media revolution of the 90s. Cyberculture, considered by many to be the last truly utopian vision of the future, has ended in a meltdown, or as ’Bifo’ puts it – the future has failed us. What’s left behind is an ever-growing system of virtual…

The Post-Social Condition

by ICWDD

We seem to have forgotten how to be social beings. And the question that keeps popping up when you consider a society that has forgotten about its most basic social values is – how is this even possible? How can this be a ’society’? The complexity of the ’social’ structure in which we live goes beyond our grasp and it no longer appears to respect human needs or basic human rights. "Solitude matters, and for some people, it is the air that they breathe." - Susan Cain, author of Quiet – The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. Solitude is not the same as loneliness, but it can be a stop on the way to isolation if you’re not careful. The word ’solitude’ definitely has a more positive ring to it than ’loneliness’. Solitude tends to be something people choose for themselves – it’s got connotations like: peaceful, quiet, alone time, concentration, romantic, contemplation, inspiration and so on. Unlike loneliness it doesn’t describe a painful state of not having…