Why be a lord of time when you are already a Criminal?
A Sequence of essays investigating the crimes we commit, and what we might do about it.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Judicial Murder

Well we do not kill any more- but the great lesson of society - that at some point one individual has to be sacrificed very publicly and possibly grizzily - to serve as a reminder or a threat for the rest of us. It keeps us all behaving. ore that than it forms the limit at which a state can burn itself on otherwise inchoate forces that surround it and genuinely threaten it. what else was a witch trial but the sate showing its power at a time of anarchy (thirty years war)?
The witch of the cosmic version of the conflict that ranging between sates. sates were fighting points confessional struggles in protracted series of violent and disruptive wars - wars that risked anarchy really spreading peasent revolution and the rest). A good witch trial sopped all that - all the fear all the hatred could be worked in a grizzly passio na paly where the shere desperation of the times could be expressed in terms of a voilent conflict of god and devil and in the struggle of neighbours. The connection was not direct so much as inhabited. witch trial always around made sense in the desperate time. A sense then that also burned the power of the judges on the minds of individuals and set limit to anarchy (or rather caught within a certain conflict).
in short even states really do not like chaotic forces. or better they like only the one - the officially sanctioned force the Market. This the one they have been forced to accept and (and actually partially created - fosture/foisture on humanity). The Free market is then a chaotic force that the state runs with and merges with - the two feeding each other - and so expanding to devour otherpossible threats. The free press has been devoured by the freemarket (that is global new organization).
This relationship was of course bought in blood - and written in part across a series of conflict from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth that saw the rise of the market as the force of globalization of the times ( a struggle that included of course the witch trials).
The point of course being that the state (or market) now do not want other chaotic forces coming along. they will take extreme measures: They have then been looking for a long time for a good public judical murder (well after fear failed). a murder to make sure we all behave online and do not do anything too radical (this even as they trumpet the freedom on the internet- by of which of course they mean the rights of the market to use it). What better then then the jucidal slaughter of a sight that sells tittle tattle (and that actually has said nothing one one not assume to the be the case- America has actually come across as a sane super power). No matter. A case like this becomes then a defining point - a state is burning it power- forcing the new powers to conform and behave o the old model. making itself felt.
It is of course right to do so (well from it point of view). The Internet is potentially as disruptive as the free market or the anarchy of peasent rebellion. The only question is - is the freedom on the internet actually powerful in bedded enough to survive as the free market survived the attacks of the state- it was too useful to crush? - or will it buckle and conform in the face of state power - as google has done in China but of course now (when the boot is on the other foot) in America Or what is far more likely will the state and free market attempt to devour it as they have devoured all other freedoms: that is will they comprehend it in their structure (verbal and conceptual) and so prevent it having any other life. This is a legal but also a conceptual battle. the question is then can the state-market model absorb the internet within its existing language and concepts: Watch then for the deployment by the state and the media of the arguments of identity, personal freedom and responsiblity - and all the language commericalism here, and the way via apps via the music industry it becomes the language of the 'other-net')

Make then no mistake- this a is a real conflict for our times.
so where do you line up?

No comments:

Post a Comment