Rob Van Kranenburg: An Excess Of Stillness Is The Cause Of Civil War

Rob van Kranenburg is the Founder of Europe based Council_IoT and #iotday. He is among the Top 100 #IOT Influencers list. He wrote The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and votary of transparency based on open-source internet, he is a global evangelist. This article is with a special arrangement with the author for GoNewsIndia.com exclusively:

By 2022 the term civil war will be used widely in the current news channels. Throughout Europe and in other regions of the world, small local movements refusing to pay tax to national governments scale horizontally rapidly as the current protesting idiosyncratic item-based projects find each other in the realization that the governing actors not only have lost legitimacy but the actual concrete capabilities to act at all. The process is already started and cannot be stopped.

There is only one solution that I will describe towards the end of this short text. Even this will not be able to halt the fragmentation and/or stop these movements, but it would buy precious negotiating time.

Paul Du Gay relates, in In Praise of Bureaucracy, how entrepreneurial governance became the magic word in the 90s era’s New Public Management adopted in every OECD country, and the EU It has ten essential principles:

“Entrepreneurial governments. promote competition between service providers. They. empower citizens by pushing control out of the bureaucracy, into the community. They measure the performance of their agencies, focusing not on inputs, but on outcomes. They are driven by their goals – their missions – not by their rules and regulations. They redefine their clients as customers and. offer them choices - between schools, between training programs, between housing options. They prevent problems before they emerge, rather than simply offering services afterward. They put their energies into earning money, not simply spending. it. They decentralize authority, embracing. participatory management. They prefer market mechanisms to bureaucratic mechanisms. And they focus not simply on providing public services but on catalyzing all sectors -public, private and voluntary - into action to solve their community's problems.” (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992, 19-20)

Reading this list of requirements, we can quickly testify to its enormous scope of success. It literally has captured the entire world:

“Because this approach presupposes that no organizational context is. immune from the winds of change, it naturally. assumes that all organizations - whether hospitals, charities, banks or government departments - will need to develop similar norms and techniques of conduct, for without doing so they will lack the capacity to pursue their preferred projects. As Kanter (1990:356) forcefully. argues, all organizations - public, private and voluntary - must either move away from bureaucratic guarantees to post-entrepreneurial flexibility or....stagnate – thereby cancelling any commitments they have made.”

This program has left me, a citizen, quite orphaned. I still happily pay my taxes as a good member of society. Before the entrepreneurial program I had a small stake in society, as I helped to contribute to common services. In 2020 I pay taxes to an empty shell for a nation ‘state’ (Emperor’s clothes) that has no more money of its own (euros), no more law of its own (over 90% is from Brussels), no more instruments (privatized), no data (in the hands of GAFA).

What is the trade-off for the civil servants and politicians who are willingly carrying out these operations? Why would an actor coherently dismantle itself, and aim to hide each step from the participants in the model?

The reason is that the next phase of a global underpinning of power has already begun to instantiate itself as CPS, Cyber Physical System outsourcing the security and stability of the assets acquired in the last thirty years fully to what is left of state actors – military and especially steadily militarizing police – and the operational capabilities to large private alliances of services (that are increasingly independent of specific brands and/or companies). This is the new program that we see carried out globally, as all ‘systems’ begin to look like each other. There may be some minor cultural sensibilities but that is all. The short emancipation of the individual in a democratic state has come to its (logical) end. From now on ‘it’ (yes it) will be approached at the level of capabilities just like any other good, machine, robot or script; an entity among entities.

COVID-19 testifies to both the rehearsal – an effective lockdown creating all actors to be still (or die and then be still) combined with the last resort of the ‘authorities’: to manage behavior with repression and consensual hegemonic fostering of false solidarity that it has spent centuries to break. There is no need to look into “intent’. We just deal with the effects and these are the hyper-normalization of the in itself un-natural orgasm of automation: for every actor to be ‘Gestellt’ – to be at hand and to be ready – to become part of an ‘efficient’ structure the blueprint of which is developed by the blueprints of the notion of automation itself. As such it has managed to fully become the norm and normal – has become integral to reality – and has created a hegemony that sees all data, information, sensibilities, sensitivities, intelligence that is not fully compliant as treason pure and simple, leaving anyone in doubt, in pain, in need to express that one cannot breath no other choice but to either step outside of the boundaries of the real itself or be quiet and…still. It seems quite amazing, but in a world in which Bill Gates is seen as a ‘thought’ leader this becomes mundane.

Slightly altering the Transnational moments of Change as outlined in Horn and Kennedy (eds, Bowman 2004), 1945, 1968 and 1989, I add 2022. 1945 saw the crumbling of the warrior of old. The hand over to the engineer in shipping von Braun to the US did indeed foster a banality of evil sinking deep into what became the continuation of the war but now on the plane of infrastructure and service business ecosystems organized in similar army style. 1968 saw the crumbling of (remnants of) real sages and magicians as they flared up one last time – a sorrowful mourning of life that questioned libido itself in its new home: the factory. 1989 saw the crumbling of ideology, dreams and vision as driving forces to create a framework for everyday relations. The cold war becomes a cold peace as it starts to long for and facilitate the requirements for stasis; a sense of calm, ah a gentle predictable rhythm and above all, above all… no fireworks, no fireworks, no not even on New Year Day. Imagine an accident. Imagine that!

2022 will see the crumbling of this everyday façade of stillness as excess in any kind which could always have been negotiated strife, erupts in various ways of violence. If blame is to be found, but who cares for bygones then – it is fully on the side of the ‘authorities’ who instead of negotiating real participation, sharing and transparency have chosen to protect their entrepreneurial government program by moving all current capabilities into cyber-physical system governance equating the notion of human itself with dynamic object descriptions and sub set functions.

Not to fight this would be a-human.

It is therefore the duty of every human to rethink participation to this model gone rogue (or in effect gone ‘pure’) and organize along these new lines of poetic sensibility. In these days there is no need to call for a general strike. It has been called by a virus. This is the time to organize from lockdown into new forms of solidarity.

I spoke of a way out, or rather a way of buying time. As it so happens, we are now witnessing the final act in the transition of the models. If you re-read the above quote you will find: They decentralize authority, embracing. participatory management. Remember that ‘participatory management’ in this framework does not include you or me or any citizen (only as customer). But yes, all your EU national governments are selling off digital identity models. Your passport is on the market (as the very last step). It will become – as it is now – a digital attribute – a laissez passer – in your smartphone wallet as a Verifiable Credential. (see W3C for this). Your civil servants who supposedly work for you still, you assist greatly in funding their work – are – as we speak – handing over the last public capability that they have – in full daylight – to fully private actors that no will not fund a school, a hospital, will not fix a road or a sewage system and will make you pay twice or three times over for the very privilege of using their most convenient system.

If this were not serious, it would be a comedy-capers. In a way it is and to pull it off means to address this final step as utterly logical, realistic, efficient and normal. It is just the market doing its job, stupid!

I guess by now you realize what that means.

The solution is simple. The EU ID (or India ID or…) will be a framework of 500 million or a billion people who organize their SSI, Self-Sovereign Identity assisted by a large variety of custodians harnessed in a secure architecture from the (full EU) chip up in a wide variety of wearables and phones that follow guidelines hardcoding social, cultural and a wide range of democratic value methodologies. This brings the digital transition home to every single individual. It demands that the outsourcing of everyday conflict stops and become part of the overall design. It will lead Europe, any region, to a bright future.

The cloud becomes the edge as we do AI and Machine Learning on the devices themselves.

The cost of not doing this is outlined in the title.