<nettime> Fwd: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance

[Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>]

Dear Brian, 

This is twice now that I have read your posts and you speak of fear. Are
people really scared shitless? I have to take, without reducing nettime
to a discussion of US presidential race some succor in the youth voters'
enthusiasm for the crisply spoken, critical voice of Bernie Sanders.
Would our plight on the planet be changed by a president who, at least,
does not deny climate change? Probably it would. At least there would be
hopeful directions, stalling, regulations on industry. 

But to social theory...I advance the propositions that we have three,
maybe four catastrophic  global concerns which endanger us as
societies--they are: environmental collapse, concentration of wealth,
growing numbers of displaced "migrating" peoples...and environmental
collapse could be broken down into a few parts which might contribute to
species collapse (sea level rise, loss and hoarding (privatization) of
fresh water supplies,  possible natural adjustment via die-off, hearing
up or eventual overheating of planet causing weather changes to static
to keep up with or resolve.
 
I suggest that a) social theory include young people, who have the most
to lose; who operate on a survival instinct which may not be apparent b)
we can only hope that what young people are learning they will be able
to use and have the opportunity to use to improve things; that they
haven't inherited something bigger and aren't being taught how to
continue to work against the species for their own personal gain in a
time of corporate control in us of public Ed? Reading yesterday about
networks in Greece where unemployment is at fifty percent or more
especially among youth yet where social networks have formed for
surviving c) proposing alternative models for banks, accountability
regimes, problem solving as social theory, not just or simply abstract
analysis although this is a way in.

How can communities come together to make decisions about which or what
problems to work on? How can privatization be resisted, inside systems,
which are already failing to work with it for us? Is it necessary to go
outside these structures? 

> It seems to me that the hard thing about understanding social change
> is that there are so many things to see. Felix sees lots of solar
> panels on rooftops and no market. You see a whole lotta
> government-oriented security technology getting lots of private
> investment. John sees effusive middle-class idealists driving Priuses
> and talking fooolishly about French wine. I see a huge gap between the
> people who used to live in my decaying neighborhood and those who are
> moving in. We are all catching something about society right now. And
> yet the many things it will become under the pressure of what is
> happening right now seem to escape us. This is the real difficulty of
> social theory. The beast in the cage is too damn big. You might think
> you were seeing the whole animal, then that turns out to be just the
> foot and it's stomping you.
 <...>

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: