Disqus - Latest Comments for patkane

Re: Barbarism or Barbarism?

patkane — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 10:39:12 -0000

You should - it's an interesting parallel with the Inventing the Future book you reviewed (and cited me in!) the other week. I think Paul is genuinely interested in extrapolating new forms of organisation (indeed, forms of the human) from current sci-tech landscape.

Re: Barbarism or Barbarism?

patkane — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 11:39:33 -0000

Fascinating as ever. I'm reminded that Stengers wrote a few books with chaos mathematician Ilya Prigogine. The belief in minor knowledge fuelling an experimentalism in socio-scientific-technical forms fits very well within complex adaptive systems thinking, which invites local energy/initiative but warns against confidence about outcomes. Paul Mason invokes CAS in his recent Postcapitalism book, hoping for - like you with the hackers - a "mutation" within the network-capitalist form (and retains your residual faith in information's intrinsic commons-generation). But there's a few t-shirt slogans here: “… it is not a matter of converting us but of repopulating the devastated desert of our imaginations.”

Re: How to Use Artificial Intelligence

patkane — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 09:18:55 -0000

Also: I was looking for your reply to Robert Gordon's piece - did you ever write it?

Re: How to Use Artificial Intelligence

patkane — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 09:18:14 -0000

We want to you post the full piece here, Kevin!

Re: Gerry Hassan: The Art of Living Together and the Art of Dying

patkane — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 15:39:03 -0000

Careful, Gerry. Theoretical excitement leading off into political indiscipline (like I don't know this...)

"The tragedy is that bereft of serious pressure from an influential radical left OR RADICAL RIGHT, too much of Scotland has bought into and believed this set of reassuring, comforting stories".

So you'd have entertained even a challenge from Hayekians and hard-line neo-liberals, punting for independence as a "market state", in order to shake up the "self-preservation society"? You can't mean this. I'm no fan of Scotland's occupational/bureaucratic middle-classes - their current turpitude is something we have to steer around for a Yes vote - but would I have wanted to see their administrative expertise smashed to pieces with a right-wing wrecking ball?

And:

Hassan: "Scottish public life has not embraced democratisation, instead believing in the power of benign experts and authority - but then Scotland has never been a fully-fledged political democracy".

Sarwar: "[Holyrood] is not a democratic place in the conventional sense...It is a dictatorship of one man sitting in Bute house, who will do not what is in Scotland’s interests, but what is in his own or his party’s interests."

I'm scratching my head as to the utility of your first statement (whereas I know exactly the intent and purpose of the second). You yourself have identified the "missing million" of working Scots, needing to be re-engaged with basic democratic processes in Scotland. I get your frustration with the way that Scottish elites have fudged and nudged their way to an independence referendum, in a top-down, even patriarchal way. But don't we need some straightforward democratic excitement about the idea of holding the future of our country and society in our citizen's hands, between 7am and 10pm on Sept 18th?

No, the indy-ref isn't like the full panoply of Latin American participatory democracy, nor the improvisational horizontalism of Occupy/Student movements, or even the language-and-culture-based unity of Catalonia - and we can, of course, use these techniques to mobilise people to get out and vote.

But don't go chucking around blunt statements like "Scotland has never been a fully fledged political democracy", when the simple act of walking up to the booth and placing a cross at "Yes", in a legally-binding referendum, will have enough transformational consequences. In this respect, Micheal Gray's column shows a wiser head on younger shoulders.

Re: The Big Society: Tory detox or ideological smokescreen?

patkane — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:31:16 -0000

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Re: The Big Society: Tory detox or ideological smokescreen?

patkane — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:03:26 -0000

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Re: The Big Society: Tory detox or ideological smokescreen?

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Re: Hack-gate: the latest cultural contradiction of British conservatism?

patkane — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:57:57 -0000

Good point about the Net giving the opportunity to self-organise one's disgruntlement about living in "the damaged life" of capitalist modernity, rather than have it orchestrated by a mass media product. Some the cognitive science Castells pulls together in Communication Power may have relevance here (I've applied some of it here http://patkane.caledonianme...

He identifies fear, anger and hope as the primal emotions that successful political projects seek to incite, and then exploit through the framing of their discourse. Very briefly, a fear appeal increases anxiety and a search for alternatives, but vitiates agency (eg, poor voter turnout). An anger appeal narrows down cognitive searching and anxiety - you're focussed on the clearly identified enemy that is thwarting your desire (eg, frothing campaigns against various folk devils). I would say your two conservative institutions - New Right and right-wing press - have been fiendishly clever at mixing together fear and anger in their appeals.

Hope has the same cognitive effect as anger - it narrows down your search for information, as you feel there is something clear and obvious to aspire to. Is there something in the fact that the two most notably positive and "hope"-based political campaigns in the West - Obama in 2008 and the SNP in 2011 - relied very heavily on internet mobilisation and consciousness raising?
What's new about the Net is that it gives an expressive alternative to citizens - not just rapt before a top-down spectacle, but actively seeking and exchanging facts, meaning and interpretations among themselves. Yes, the Net can leave you in a morass of relativism. But if your emotions are engaged through the clarifying primary emotions of hope or anger, the multiperspectival riches of the Net actually helps you to construct your own informed narrative, that impels action (purchase boycotts, petitions, etc). I think this is what's happening to News International at the moment - the Net is amplifying hugely the anger felt at the phone-hacking transgressions, and they're toppling by a thousand cuts, as new-media-sensitive advertisers - nowadays always watching the semantics of social networks - pull away from the institution in droves.

Where is the "hope"-driven framing that could redirect this anger towards a great frontier of reform? Well, as Peter Oborne is fabulously pointing out, http://www.spectator.co.uk/..., the amount of collusionist muck smeared over the various escapees from New Labour currently running the party at the moment is somewhat inhibiting their campaigning zeal.

And just a last point - you stimulate the cells! - isn't there something about how cyborg we are with our mobile phones that's giving another frisson here: a boundary to be crossed that we perhaps didn't quite realise was there? To be mucking around with Millie Dowler's voice-mail, while she was in a missing netherland, was to be interfering with something that was literally a gateway or portal to her existence (or possible existence). We seem to be groping towards a "network ethics", building from our discussions about privacy, where we want to be able to discriminate between open commons that empower our sociality, and personal intranets in which our integrity and identity can be protected. Interesting times.

Re: Should the left go Blue? Making sense of Maurice Glasman

patkane — Sun, 29 May 2011 08:54:14 -0000

Brilliantly done, Alan. There is much intellectual convergence going around here - Jesse Norman is just as critical of the disembedded "Liberal" self (quoting Oakeshott, what he calls the "enterprise" self) in his Big Society book. But I am gripped by the surfacing of "Englishness" in all this. Surely one of the lessons that the Southern left can take from the SNP victory is that it's the result of decades of complex wrangling about the "good" traditions of collectivity and "common good" that make up the Scottish national story (or maybe even the "national-popular" story, to be Gramscian about it). It's also, as Tom Nairn never tires of pointing out on these web-pages, a national trajectory that isn't as burdened by the crushing, egoistic weight of being the "first great imperial nation". I watched Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem last year with great fascination - an attempt to posit an antic, rebellious, playful Englishness as precisely a critique of commodification (the incursions of theme pubs, agribusiness, heedless housing development into the lead character's doped-up Arcadia). Such de- and re-constructions of Englishness may seem peripheral to the usual preoccupations of electoral machine-politics among Labourites, as you say. But for all the technical brilliance of the SNP campaign, the long-term momentum of a well-articulated national optimism - epitomised by "work as if you were in the early days of a better nation", Alastair Gray's slogan that's now almost the unofficial national motto - was (in my view) just as important in delivering their constitution-busting majority. But national optimism in Scotland is not the post-imperial hubris (heading towards depression) of current English political identity. I think the efforts of Cruddas, Rutherford and Glasman to stumble towards a better English story are absolutely right. Many of us independistas up here are interested - and of course to some degree self-interested - in the development of a more modest, and tractable, English polity.

Re: Independistas need to listen to the silent half of Scottish society

patkane — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:28:11 -0000

I like the idea of the "i-Gen", may use that elsewhere! I hope I'm making it clear that re-industrialisation on a green basis does not mean going back to the kinds of patriarchal severity and male extremism that so often disfigured working-class cultures of solidarity in Scottish life (remember Jimmy Reid's "there will be no hooliganism, vandalism, bevvying...") I'm interested in a different kind of productive Scottishness - "Zen and the Art of Sustainable Energy Maintenance", you could say. I have a daughter graduating as a development engineer from MIT in a week's time, and she wants to make useful stuff for the world that she has a real emotional investment in. Remember Reid's great essay on "alienation", that Salmond made available to all schoolchildren? http://www.scottishleftrevi... We want a new industrial Scotland to stay close to that inspiring vision of human potential, creativity and the right balance between work and leisure, necessary labour and free time.

Re: The juggernaut of joy – a cognitive theory of How The SNP Won

patkane — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:15:27 -0000

I wonder whether this was an "anger" vote against the Liberal Democrats - negative campaigning can win if it identifies and personifies an obstacle - ie, Nick Clegg.

Re: The juggernaut of joy – a cognitive theory of How The SNP Won

patkane — Fri, 13 May 2011 10:32:21 -0000

I quite agree - and my next post will highlight what's wrong with this kind of "emotional politics". I'm describing a manner of victory - not necessarily recommending it. But Castells' point is that if we don't understand the subjective mechanics of how people in media-saturated societies actually vote, or take democratic action, we are being naive. I haven't dealt with the new-media aspect of the victory - I think that has much more potential to make political particpation much more extensive, rather than people just enjoying a spectacle and then voting in a feel-good way. Yes, Bernays is a total creep - but his power has to be engaged with, before being rejected.

Re: The juggernaut of joy – a cognitive theory of How The SNP Won

patkane — Fri, 13 May 2011 03:14:10 -0000

Yep, I'm only using one of my favourite thinkers to shed some light - as you say, shot in the dark - on a remarkable result. I also know about the whole history of Edmund Bernays, Freudianism and political advertising http://en.wikipedia.org/wik.... But thanks for these references - no hints, full references please, we're all children of the democratic intellect here! Hoped that it would flush out those more expert than me on this.

Re: How the horrors in Japan connect with concerns closer to home

patkane — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:13:58 -0000

Isn't that an extraordinary prospect - that a Labour government in Scottish parliament, consistent with its UK party's commitments, would promote the construction of a nuclear power plant on the Galloway coast? As Japan scrambles to save its society from a Chernobyl, is there any better reason to direct your vote elsewhere?

Re: Sharing the Pain: The emotional politics of austerity

patkane — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:21:04 -0000

Brilliant stuff. But I would just draw you to the sneaky usage that the Big Society thinkers are making of the "capacities" literature of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (see Jesse Norman's book). They evoke a self as a "fizzing bundle of possibility", seeking social institutions to express their energies in - as oppose to the robotic, maximising homo et femina economicus, a market consumer-producer repaired by recreation and state services, at the heart of neo-liberalism. (Not my words, Jesse Norman's - see my recent prez to Young Foundation http://www.theplayethic.com.... And Norman goes back to Hobbes, too, as the source of pleasureless bourgeois individualism). My take on it, from play theory, is that they are just too constitutively individualist to understand the "ground of play" that might support your model of "an expansive capacity for collective becoming and collaborative creativity".

There's something vaguely intelligent stirring in the head of Ed Miliband's new consigliere, Stuart Wood, speaking of the time coming "for a post-material wishlist. People want more time, neighbours they know, and open spaces.In a sharp break with the past, he says Labour must rethink its old mantra on equality. While it remains “front and centre”, fairness is no longer just about income inequality but (a nod to another Ed M guru, Lord Glasman here) about “access to things that matter” – presumably libraries, forests and so on, as well as decent schools and hospitals" http://blogs.telegraph.co.u... "Access to things that matter", rather than privatised ownership, is the beginnings of a new conception of what the "securing" of society might mean. The question is whether protest movements can sustainably enact that militant conviviality, those carnivals against cuts, that give us a taste of what that post-material life would be like. And on that point, you're right to point to past precedent, and the energy and exhaustion gaps that such activism can open up.

Re: How the horrors in Japan connect with concerns closer to home

patkane — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:23:13 -0000

I'm not going to get into an energy-tech discussion with you lapogus, because I'm sure I'm not qualified. But aren't you underestimating 1) the extent to which we could retrofit Scottish housing to conserve heat and energy, 2) the possibilities of microgeneration of local power on a smart grid, 3) the kind of constancy of power that we could get from the same kind of green-light investment in tidal power (ie Pentland Firth) that England currently accrues to nuclear, and 4) the possibility that our current trash-consumerist lifestyle demands too high a baseload capacity in the first place? And don't you get that moving to a greener energy model in Scotland might provides work and jobs for people in new, high-skilled export markets? I read your complex reckoning of the methods of nuclear facilitiation, and I wonder whether all that ingeunity shouldn't be directed towards a better set of energy solutions.

Re: The Big Society: Tory detox or ideological smokescreen?

patkane — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:24:19 -0000

Or 21 hours anyway - see NEF report.

What are normal social relations, in any case? Isn't the upheaval of
social media & the net rooted in the way it extends & amplifies daily
reciprocity? Is money & markets part of this normality? I think it's a
bit naive to think that there's a spontaneous realm of sociality that
isn't mediated by systems of power & money. Therefore it's about how
you shape, regulate and legitimate those to the greatest benefit.
Don't you allow for a social democratic discourse of the enabling
state? Don't you think that sits well within Scottish society?

Re: The Big Society: Tory detox or ideological smokescreen?

patkane — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 11:26:11 -0000

not much of an engagement with the prose, Olrobbie. try again.

Re: The Big Society: Tory detox or ideological smokescreen?

patkane — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 11:25:26 -0000

AJMcc, any idea why the state grew in strength over the 20th century in Scotland? Perhaps as a mitigator of the upheavals of the market? And why do you think - with the rise of the BRICS, with various peak-energy scenarios upon us, with technological innovation not looking like slowing down - that nations need any less of a buffer-zone against tumultuous change, rather than the same or more? I don't think the Big Society is necessarily ludicrous. But it is deaf and blind to the way that a consumerist- and high-growth-oriented economy, plugged directly into globalisation, simply does not allow the time and resources for "meaning, mastery and autonomy" to flourish. And it's not even as if the Tories haven't already thought about the solution: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...

Re: Why party-politics is failing Scotland

patkane — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 06:09:22 -0000

Fascinating that the kind of left social democracy, based in protest and community empowerment, that I can still argue for in Scotland is rendered as a "violent communist takeover" by Glenn Beck in the US http://dissentmagazine.org/... . Sometimes, worth counting our blessings.

Re: Remembering Ian Docherty

patkane — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 06:59:19 -0000

Dear Graham

All power to Google for bringing me to this blog. I just attended a characteristically disputatious and bibulous wake in Edinburgh's The Oxford Bar for Ian. I worked with Ian for about four years in the mid-nineties, as a presenter both on the regular and expansive arts-and-ideas series, the Usual Suspects, and on two major series on America, Kane Over America and Dollar Signs (the former winning a Sony Award for Radio Journalism). It's not an understatement to say that all of these projects were centrally driven by Ian - his super-sharp intellect and anti-establishment sensibilities; his extremely high standards for, and belief in, the power of serious radio; and his combination of infuriating irascibility and strong personal loyalty to those who shared his vision for the medium. Like everyone else here, the news of his loss induces a particular jab of pain. We call his type in Scotland a "makar" - someone who makes great cultural opportunities possible.

Your story about Ian's prescience in August 2001 about terror threats from Afghanistan I can echo. When we did our show Kane Over America in late 1994, Ian was very keen for us to push hard on an NRA representative in Oklahoma - "try and find out their militia ambitions, what their attitude to the Federal government is". I duly did a particularly chilling interview - and a few months later, at the government buildings ... Partly through background and through interest, Ian had one of the best geopolitical sensibilities I've ever known - many people confirmed that at the Oxford Bar wake.

And one last, sad-sweet synchronicity. I was bemoaning the poor quality of post-Docherty Scottish radio at the wake, and praising a show that I have on twice daily pod-cast from WBUR, with a focussed and commanding presenter called Tom Ashcroft, called ... On Point. A chorus replied: Ian founded that show!! Which you now confirm here. We'd all want our legacy to demonstrate that kind of persistent quality of approach, inspiring others to do the same or better. Rest in Process, Mr Docherty.