datacentre

stiegler -> info/knowledge

marx’s ecology

data center, energy

In “A Factory as It Might Be,” Morris envisioned a socialism in which factories would be set amidst gardens, cultivated by means of the voluntary labor of workers:

Impossible I hear an anti-Socialist say. My friend, please to remember that most factories sustain to-day large and handsome gardens; and not seldom parks and woods of many acres in extent; with due appurtenances of highly-paid Scotch professional gardeners, wood reeves, bailiffs, gamekeepers, and the like, the whole being managed in the most wasteful way conceivable; only the said gardens, etc., are, say, twenty miles away from the factory, out of the smoke, and are kept up for one member of the factory only, the sleeping partner to wit, who may, indeed, double that part by organising its labour (for his own profit), in which case he receives ridiculously disproportionate pay additional.’

(pg 237, marx’s ecology) detourne it?

Let us posit that this dynamic system, the idiotext, which is a living system, is also an interpretive system – more precisely, an open system that interprets, from within the functional instability and infidelity (in Canguilhem’s sense) of its exosomatized milieu, the condition of its maintaining itself in this opening, namely: truth as the power to bifurcate possessed by a system that, without this knowledge, would ineluctably become closed, that is, be bound to destroy itself due to the inevitable increase in the rate of entropy within the locality in which it consists, eventually leading to the obliteration or effacing of this locality. (pg 88, Nanjing Lectures)

Or consider some other sorts of events: I may, for example, be in the process of ‘surfing the net’ (or rather, the Web, and, through that, the net). I go to the Google website and activate the PageRank information algorithm by making a request: I complete a task, as ergonomists put it. Then I come across something completely different from what I was actually looking for: by ‘browsing’, I happen upon – by accident, by chance – something utterly different from what I was expecting. This different thing, which is a little accident, a little event – an accident is always an event that occurs in the stream of micro-actions or macroactions, or, as we say, ‘in the course of action’ – this thing that happens so suddenly, and was therefore not planned or foreseen, no doubt resembles information.

This thing resembles information that comes along to disturb an existing system (me), which means that the informational system with which I interact, in the classical model of information as object of calculation, comes to disturb the informational system that I am myself, and comes to disturb me because I did not foresee, in my own calculations, the possibility of such an event, and, from this fact, I learn something through this unforeseen thing to which I then adapt myself.

Now, the unforeseen aspect of this serendipitous accident that occurs during my browsing Google with PageRank is not unforeseen in the sense of something not anticipated, that is, calculated by the dynamic system that I am – calculable by it, anticipatable by it. But that unforeseen-ness, that unexpectedness, which is not anticipatable, which was totally unexpected, perhaps proceeds nevertheleess from what was most expected, expected as the unhoped-for (anelpiston): the improbable, the incomparable, and the inestimable – the bifurcating. (pg 89-90, Nanjing Lectures)