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

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

Cade, it's a great text.

Interesting for me to read it after saving some friends' website from some
fool who didn't pay the server bill. I was pretty surprised to find that an
entire website, including db, can be scraped from archive.org and
reconstructed. While glad that I could do this for my friends, it brought
home how much none of this computerized memory and speech belongs to those
who speak and (struggle to) remember.

I am an estranged American. Long ago I identified a military-corporate
personality without any sense of tragic fate, therefore no empathy, no
capacity for self-critique, no regrets about the exercise of power, but on
the contrary, a conviction of American virtue founded in post-WWII
nationalism, merged with and elevated to religious belief. In short, the
people you met on the boat. Throughout the 2010s I tried to convince my
friends here that they live in an empire, that the type of person I have
described is the ruling class, that they this class is murderous, and that
our entire way of life is based on their actions. But social media, you
know, was apparently a lot of fun in those days. No one wanted to hear
about this until today, when the Christian Nationalists have made it
obvious.

For this reason, the key line in your text is not "California has a lot to
fucking answer for" (though we all agree, and I sure am glad I got out of
there in 1990). Instead, the key line from my point of view is "We condemn
AI today for making shit up, but *what about us*?"

Yes, despite ourselves, we were the useful fools of the corporate-military
order. Btw, that type of statement has not been very popular on nettime
either.

A few years ago we had a discussion here about what used to be called "the
immanent critique of the networks." My position was that the networks of
the Nineties had given rise to a networked society, and therefore, a
critique that stopped at the limits of software and online interaction
formats was useless. You have to undertake the critique of the society in
which you live - and open yourself up to the tragic consequences of your
own participation in it.

For me, you have written a great text, because among many other things, you
proved that by putting your full self and experience into it.

best of luck going forward, Brian

On Thu, Mar 12, 2026 at 11:17 AM Cade Diehm via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 
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