Re: <nettime> "California has a lot to fucking answer for."

[XLterrestrials via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hi Cade et al,

Appreciate your essay !!!

Lots to respond to, but just some quik tangents here...

We just watched the archive of Brewster Kahle + Wendy Hanamura last week speaking at C-base in Btropolis ... ( sadly we couldnt attend ). 

https://archive.org/details/dweb-camp-berlin-brewster-kahle-wendy-hanamura-2026-02-28

It's revealing and very disappointing at the same time. 

While we can all appreciate the work of I. Archive for various reasons, there is nothing in this talk that shows any signs of recognzing the massive calamities that we are all immersed in, from all that 'empowering' Cali Technotopianism Inc. Not just the MIC versions, but all that cyberpunk + cyborg enthusiasm / addiction. 

And we should probably not fall into the usual techy trap - thinking that dewebbing the web is our only emergency exit from all this EXPANDING UBIQUITOUS WEBBED SHITE !   

And a bit mystified that no one ever seems to ask Brewster - in public - to what extent he regrets developing and selling the BIG SCRAPING TOOLS to AMAZON in 1999. 

And/or what he really really thinks we should do about the already bloody-handed AI Industry now ( same shite, slightly new brand + religious pitch ) ! i.e. Rop Gongripp from CCC asks him a pertinent question in the Q+A, but Kahle mostly dodges it. 

...

Apropos to Felix Question: what now ? ... 

For those in the Btropolis area, we might recommend the upcoming
Cable of Resistance - April 10-12 ...

https://cableresist.de/

It finally feels like the tide is turning, for the tech adepts to do more than create tech alternatives... but to get a little more aligned to the ways of a world of organisms, and perhaps how we become much less data scrapable + data-tooled ?!!   

...

One more tangent....

Brett Scott has an interesting new piece this week about "Neon Genesis USA" ...

https://substack.com/home/post/p-190730099

the "mecha pilot" has some useful analogies...
but not just as it concerns Agent Mecha Orange + Mecha Ami-land trying to rule ( remotely ) a technologically entangled + globally-netted hyper-violent mess... 

But this is also useful to analyze all of us as - corrosive cyborg'd cogs - trying to wield and exert our own extended powers to keep up with all this pathetic + de-humanizing machinic excess ! 

As one attempt to deal w/ Krapitalism, there are analyses and strategies of Degrowth...

As for Mecha (-heads), perhaps we still need some radical formulations to De-Mutant-ize oursleves, our communities, our neighborhoods, our cities ?! Transplant ourselves back into more nuturing bodies, soils and waters ?

muddy greetz!
XLterrestrials





  

> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:16:23 +0100
> From: Cade Diehm <cade@newdesigncongress.org>
> To: nettime-l@lists.nettime.org
> Subject: <nettime> "California has a lot to fucking answer for."
> Message-ID:
> 	<816fcd15-098b-4a03-9772-cc580e20d9dd@newdesigncongress.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
> 
> Nettime,
> 
> In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the app that would 
> become Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers 
> know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History 
> proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under Meredith 
> Whittaker's?stewardship.
> 
> In this new essay, */Who Will Remember Us When the Servers Go Dark?/* I 
> trace a line from my experiences of that time, through Barlow's 
> Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, and through smart-home 
> forensics, metadata killings, AI psychosis, supply chain madness, and 
> Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: When did we decide 
> that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, and that 
> storage is memory? And what are the consequences of that conceptual 
> sleight of hand?
> 
> The answers involve a boat off Honolulu, Iran's missiles over Amazon's 
> Dubai AWS facilities, and the exilic communities already building for a 
> world where they know the servers go dark. This is an essay about 
> infrastructure, exile, archiving without consent, hubris, and the 
> precarity forced on ourselves and others when we mistake the filesystem 
> for memory.
> 
> We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, 
> fate has come to collect that wager.
> 
> California has a lot to fucking answer for.
> 
> https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/
> 
> Comments warmly encouraged.
> 
> Cade.
> https://newdesigncongress.org
> 
> 
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