http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/11/postpolitical-infrastructures/#.VGyUSfnF-So
“Can the planet be hacked? That might be the question for these times. Can the infrastructure being built out, one which precludes by design old-fashioned ‘politics’, yield to new kinds of engagement? These would seem to be very timely questions. Everybody knows the current infrastructure is not one that can last. In a way, it does not even exist, given that on the longer time frames of the Anthropocene it will flicker like an image and be gone. Hopefully to be replaced by a more habitable one.
Easterling: “Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.” (156) Perhaps neither markets not plans are adequate metaphors for organization at scale any more. Hayek was right about the limits of planning as an information and organization system. We now know that the geo-engineering of freedom, where market signals are legislated and architected into primacy, has not worked much better. There’s some keys and tools for thinking otherwise in Easterling’s book, and that is what makes it so timely and interesting.”
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synthetic zerØ 
Great stuff. I ordered the Easterling book before even getting to the end! Looks fascinating.
be interested in yer take on it, she’s definitely sharp:
While I was out walking yesterday (I’ve taken to going on 4-5 hour walks- sometimes with podcasts in the ear, sometimes attuning to the city) I tuned into Radio 4 for a minute to absorb some smugness and heard a documentary on the relationship between electricity and terrorism in post-(the-latest)-invasion Iraq. In that documentary a number of Iraqi engineers, workers and politicos made the case whoever can preside of a continuous supply of electricty would have effectively silenced Islamic insurgents and Ba’athist nostalgics. One of the commentators even went so far as to suggest that the provision of electricity was simultaneously the provision of modernity. Really here we’re talking about the success of an infrastructure over the success of electricity per se because we’re talking about the physical materials of production, transportation, supplying, as well as the design and contested battles for control of all of these (waged by labour against capital). Insofar as we’re talking about physical and organisation structures that co-enact, complicate and get messy with one another (an infrastructure is never mine or yours, labour’s of capital’s, ultimately open or closed) we are also talking about reorienting analysis away from capital flows, labour composition, or ecological disruptions to viewing each of these as aspects of an ecologistical distribution. Maybe Ranciere has given a form for this kind of practice with his notion of the distribution of the sensible and of the partitions that needs to be liberated from the political aesthetics that remains dependent on an ideal or aesthetic organisation of subectivities?
The question of power and power, of electricity and constituted political power, means grappling with the idea that “the electricity system cannot function without its distribution and transmission networks and the services they provide” and placing this into contact with questions of expropriation and the effects of environmental degradation on those systems. That is, how often do calls for the reappropriation of the means of production take into account the physically distributive and materially networked nature of the infrastructural? To keep the power flowing would we be required to take the factories and distribution and transmission networks simultaneously? To what degree are these functionally integrated and how would we learn to use them, maintain them, and so on (assuming that we aren’t going to allow automation to displace knowledge as well as human labour)? That is, like the green movements have reskilling sessions, should we not also have these kinds of programs (I am very keen on the idea of reactivating the kind of survival programs the Black Panthers were involved with- this also requires the building of autonomous infrastructures…ie. social centres, etc). Caveat of climate change as always- how many parts of the global distribution networks will be eradicated or made less-than-functional by one effect of the impending chaos?
As ever, I’ve more questions than answers 🙂
these problems of expertise, organization, and collective-rule are deep ones that often get overlooked in more bookish conversations and part of why I haunt the good folks @ http://installingorder.org/
but yes we need tool/hacking labs for all kinds of practices/systems, part of the gestalt-shift behind many of our favorite thinkers is about foregrounding the taken-for-granted background/infrastructures/re-sources/etc a sort of making explicit/un-canny if you will and than a bit of reverse-engineering and hacking, part of why I ramble on about assembling proto-types vs peddling/policing arche-types.
http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-2/peer-reviewed-papers/hacklabs-and-hackerspaces/
Building an online library or resource center for hacking techniques would certainly be a worthwhile project! Have you encountered anything of the sort?
not really, thought we should be/build one, want in?
Absolutely!
I’ll email you a link to michael/archive-fire our good host here