9/11, as everyone agrees, was a terrible atrocity, maybe the worst single terrorist crime ever. Undoubtedly had major consequences which we are living with. It may be useful to carry out a thought experiment and ask how bad it could’ve been. It could’ve been much worse.
No one is in control. That is the major source of contemporary fear. The fears are scattered. The fears are diffused. We can’t pinpoint the sources wherefrom they are coming. They seem to be ubiquitous.
What’s most significant about September 11th ten years on I think is the illusion that it created of the end of politics. By the end of politics I mean the notion that force could rule. That terror could effectively…be sufficient for power. And this was an illusion I think that was recognizable at the time of September 11th but almost impossible to say. Almost impossible to say because of a variety of conditions of the dramatic nature of the event, and also of the forces of power that are arraigned with it.
Ten years of the War on Terror I think has to be located also in the context of more than ten years of liberal welfare since 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War structures.
For me…human security is saying an Afghan life is equal to a British life. And our security is guaranteed by contributing to a global security that treats all humans as equal. That’s something very very difficult for politicians to grasp. Partly because they still live in an old-fashioned world where they’re afraid if they use words like “human security” they’ll sound soft.
Few concepts have seized our political imagination in the last decade like security. Few concepts have mobilized us to engage so many extraordinary measures, to dedicate so much money, and to change the lives of so many people as security. And the concept of security has not at all remained stable. It hasn’t remained at all aloof or untouched by this process.
A decade on, the violence of September the 11th, 2001 still haunts the liberal imaginary of threat. And I guess by this what I mean is that the violence of that fateful day now underwrites all forms of liberal security governance, globally. And I think this in many ways is of course understandable. I personally find myself sometimes deeply troubled by that fateful predicament faced by those people who decided to take their own lives on that horrifying day. However in spite of this, I think our response represents nothing short of a profound failure of the political and the philosophical imagination.
The breakthrough moments were the moments when you succeeded in establishing communication. To a person in our field it’s a bit like the moment when Marconi tries to establish communication over the Atlantic. And you’re personally reenacting it in your own life, doing it in a different context using a technology.
Pay attention. You can’t leave it to others. You have to pay attention. That this is…while it’s in the political sphere, it is politicians talking to politicians, trying to figure out how to control this thing. It’s in your future. It’s in all of our futures, but you’ve got more of a future than I.
The things that I designed made it so that the network would…you know, be self-fixing and self-organizing. There’s a lot of things that other people designed that are fancy features that work if you’ve configured them exactly right but if you make mistakes it just will be horrible. And so I’ve tried to talk to people like that sometimes, and they claim their customers love to configure things and they never make mistakes.
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. This... Read more →
At the core of who I am as far as my practice I've always identified as an artist and have found that design and creative technology are really great vehicles for me to use to continue expanding the possibilities of art. Read more →
One of the things that seems to be a common theme, at least among some of the more thinking journalists, is that the US response to 9/11 over the last ten years has been a dismal failure. The US has not succeeded in its own policy goals. It hasn't succeeded in making life better for the people upon whom its imposed its violence. In short, violence hasn't worked. And so the question becomes not simply how ought we to have responded—that's one question. But the question of what ought we to do now. Read more →
So much of the work that is being done by the government is actually being done by third parties, and it's a very lucrative business. So I went to this office park and kind of just walked around it, and it's boring. It's really kind of weird and boring and it's weird to think about the fact that these companies that are enormous and involved in pretty unseemly shit appear like this, like this kind of crappy building with this kind of crappy public art. Read more →
I've been trying to get as many weird futures on the table as possible because the truth is there are these sort of ubiquitous futures, right. Ideas about how the world should or will be that have become this sort of mainstream, dominating vernacular that's primarily kind of about a very white Western masculine vision of the future, and it kind of colonized the ability to think about and imagine technology in the future. Read more →