Manifestos

Today we mainly talked about two topics. First, we picked up a topic that we discussed a few times. Mainly because of Daniel. In his opinion, we don't talk about politics often enough. I do understand him to a certain extent. It's not like the school is particularly forcing us to engage in political movements, but they also don't stop us from doing so.

In my opinion, we're just not interested enough in politics to debate day in, day out. Or at least I'm not. Still, I would never prevent Dani from discussing such a topic. It is his free will to talk about politics but to be honest, I don't mind that the Interaction Design does not push us in a more political direction at all.

The invisible Committee

Björn started a fairly quiet discussion when he talked about the Invisible Committee. They're an undefined group of French authors that have written lots of radical left and anarchist books.

It is hard to say what exactly they want to blame. We agreed in the discussion that throughout the many pages that Björn handed us to read, there were numerous criticized topics. Some were more drastic, some less, but it kind of felt like they tried to write the books in a way that everybody could find some statements that he can relate to.

Later on, we talked about a specific passage of one of the texts. The main proposition or rather question was if humans were ever going to be unnecessary due to the technological automatization. What if the machines were to do all of our jobs and were constructed by other machines leaving us no other purpose. What if there was no purpose in the working world anymore for the human? Those questions are obviously hard to answer, we can only speculate. I feel, there will always be purposes for humans, even more, if there are machines that do our lots of tasks. But I guess we'll never find out.

References:

  • Michael Schindhelm, Solution 262: Lavapolis (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), excerpt.
  • The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009), excerpt.
  • The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015), excerpt.
  • The Invisible Committee, Now (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2017), excerpt.