Sure, it would be worthwhile to post some photos now (yes, these meetings have their most enjoyable beauty – watch from ca minute 5:32), (though I remember a more exciting performance I visited some years back, Tan Dun was the head behind some “organic compositions“) or the first reports from the Hangzhou-meetings …,
But it is usually clear in advance what happens – and critique was raised earlier.
And anyway, something else comes to mind .. and came to my mind these two days. It is so often that we talk about these big institutions, and is so often that we talk about checks and balances …, and indeed, I would not be as optimist as others when it comes to the diminishing power of the IMF … there are surely these centers of power, machine like, making individuals functioning like cogwheels (and earning pretty well by doing so). And even the big shots are very much only representatives. Or as we read in the Economic Manuscripts.
… here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.
Still, we should not forget that the power is not least with real people. Sure, there are networks, there are academics involved and there are even spaces for open debate .. but at the end it is a small number of of people who control all this. Obvious in the economy and in politics.
And there is in exactly this context something else that is interesting – and that is easily forgotten. Yes, there is all this hype about technologies, gadgets and the control by algorithms. And although we know that the control is “owned”, that there are real people making money out of it, we easily forget this over the fear, thinking about a data-octopus, being uncontrolled and gathering all the data, data then controlling themselves …, and us, selling friends. Yes,
And although the article is already from 2016, and thus many things changed, it is still worth reading, nicely showing the actual faces of the authors of Facebook … – or should I write: the faces of the actual authors of Facebook.
Yes, all these algorithms have authors, as much as all these political institutions have heads with faces and brains ….es, with complex networks, protecting their ambitions:
Even as Apple became the nation’s most profitable technology company, it avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen, Congressional investigators disclosed on Monday.
… but that is not least something for tomorrow, back in the classroom … (as it was for yesterday)
PS: Yes, and not only Merkel made a photo with her mobile — though I am not sure if it was posted on FB 😉
COMMEDIA DELLA VITA OR PÁNTA RÊI'S FIRM GROUND 