Tag: protocols

protocols are for rich happy fulfilled machines or a poorly paid culturally impoverished mechanised population?

There used to be a certain prevalence to an idea for supporting empires that went like:
Check the flourishing of life/culture in the Mongol empire regions compared to previous and post empire times. The prevalence of central power that normalised life allowed peaceful coexistence among people and hence the time to go beyond mere existence and survival – to flourish in all sorts of life’s dimensions. For example, the transfer of cultural elements from asia to europe via trips by people like marco polo wouldn’t be possible without the empire and the peace it inspired.. Think of that when you eat pasta!”

This is an interesting argument, in my view, because it hides what it attempts to reveal. It attempts to say that protocols/normalisation-of-proceedures might be very beneficial – perhaps ironically – to culture and life in general, yet at the same time hides the very procedures taken to have the said “peace”.
I placed this argument in the context of empires because this, I think, brings the point to the fore, to have the Empire’s protocol, the power to be an empire had to be worked on.. Indeed, the very notion of an empire illustrates that there is a group/organisation/system that is Outside the normalised way of doing stuff, outside the law, and outside the common protocol. It might have its own, but in order to be enable to keep power to make new and maintain current protocols – the power has to be outside the very stuff it attempts to distribute. Like the politician that once said that she took drugs and now she knows why no one else should..

Isn’t this what Agamben is talking about regarding power having its own anarchy so the rest of us can live mechanically under the rules the very anarchy allows the production of?

Indeed, I’d go further to argue that machines, as living beings, as equals to life’s elements, are in need for and of protocols and rules for survival and thrival. A machine thrives by the cultivation of betterment rule following. Indeed, I would argue that any task specific life-form is in need for doing beteer cultivation of following its task specific based life. However, just like we might have certain dependency upon plants oxygen production and its cultivation, so do plants have a certain dependency upon us – organisms like us – that thrive precisely because they are Not task specific.

In that sense the evil and its banality is exactly the notion and practice of people being, treating and imagining others as machines, culminating in factories of death.. However, the evil is in the conflation between people and mechanical beings – not in having mechanical beings in itself.
Perhaps this is my own baka.. (calling X a Y and Y an X)
Its very easy and self-serving/stroking to claim as I did throughout life that we should move away from anything resembling death machines, but my failure is precisely to realise that mechanical activities do HAVE a legitimacy in and of themselves. Perhaps else where in life than in life control – but have the right to Be none the less. Indeed the very attempt to disposes and ignore the mechanic, the rule-based, the automated, enables the continued life in death factory like-inspired-maintaining practices..
In that sense the evil is my own doing..

If humans thrive on search rather than restrictions, it is precisely because the search allows the production of restrictions, task specifics. We attempt to apply these to people because no one else could pick it up. However, aren’t the more palatable candidates machines..?

Is this a techno utopia..?

Some dark elements are missing..?