square white world

– a Julian Assange link: Woman A is only technically happy

So much of the world is advertising, and because of that, individuals feel that they have to present themselves as a package.

– Jeff Koons

I’m basically the idea person. I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.

– Jeff Koons

– Efrem Lukatsky

Borrowing from Metcalfe’s law, we might conclude that the power of a network grows at an *increasing* rate with its size. But the reason that network value will increase at this increasing rate in computing is that each addition of a new computer to a network results in a greater-than-proportionate increase in possible connections within the network. It may increase at an increasing rate, but we cannot make this claim universally, as new additions to a social network may not uniformly increase network activity. In some cases, the power of a standard may grow exponentially in proportion to network size. But the rationale for this exponential relation is that each new node added to a computer network increases exponentially the number of possible connections with it. With computers or technically compatible systems, the claim is more plausible than in social systems, where the addition of another English speaker, say, no doubt adds value to English as a standard that outsiders want to adopt, but does not necessarily do so exponentially, particularly as all network members are not connected to one another except potentially. Furthermore, the social position of the new entrants must be considered in social network analysis, unlike in the analysis of networks in which the nodes are all uniform, as with machines.

– David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008, p. 305, n. 17

check out the business profile by clicking/touching these words

and please contact me with suggestions, recommendations, advice, offers, flowers, flight tickets, invitations, referrals, connections, cheques, introductions, sponsors, investors, angels, angles, how-tos and who-tos

The quote comes from a description here of commercial spaceflight.

What is an entity other than government? There is surely more than one. If the predicate remains other than government, is a taxonomic survey possible of such entities? What then are these entities?

Are they simply corporations? Do they reside along the continuum of extragovernmentality? Governance tends to be the term used most often to refer to the governing of corporations. The reference of government is usually the nation-state. But other-than-government also implies an ungovernability or an inability to be governed by nation-states or an intractability to the government of nation-states, because here again there is surely more than one.

Does the sphere of corporate governance exist outside and beyond government by and for nation-states? Entities would suggest it does, since by implying self-governing it also connotes self-serving.

The social responsibility of coporate entities – ungovernable by nation-states – reaches titanically inflated proportions in Facebook. Social responsibility is Facebook’s sphere or wartheatre of operations: its strategic field of deployment and enwrapment or incorporation; the mine from which it extracts money in order to survive as an entity other than government (or indeed, its pathology). But this entity in particular only shows in exaggerated form what may be said of all such entities as they are other than – the beyond and outside of – the governments of nation-states.

The essential internal impulsion to survive extragovernmentally links social responsibility to sociopathology in corporate entities. Since heads of corporate governance, directors, boards, are only useful, as are programmes offering positive or negative social outcomes, connectivity or rape and anomy, in so far as and as long as they support the survival of the entity. (Witness the legendary expendability of CEOs.)

The question remains as to whether corporations are the only entities other than government. Surely they are not. Surely there is another entity, perhaps semiocapitalism itself as the immanent substance of both governments and being outside and beyond government.

In the interests of what is existence outside and beyond government conceived? Is society a function of the nation-state? or do the governments of states arise from societies? What about peoples?

A people yet to come must be conceived as other than government, as an entity beyond and outside the nation-state. The question could be rephrased: What is an entity other than government for?

Does the being-for-themselves of corporations indict the whole outside and beyond of nation-states with selfishness? Then again, an entity’s being-for-itself has less to do with keeping body and mind together than ensuring the survival of the body on an and as an ongoing basis for its perpetuation alone into the future.

Societies, peoples, governments, nation-states, civilizations become extinct. Can this be more adequately expressed as the body makes up its mind, a mind or governing principle, which is only useful in so far and as long as it leads to the perpetuation of the body? The entity other than government is exactly that which continues.

The entity without identity.

– portrait by Sylvia Shap, 1981, I inverted

the promotional video is here

while what I suggested is here

This journal had a soul—a passionate soul which tried to absorb everything in the
world around it which offered theoretical interest, a political choice, an ethical
dimension, or simply a joy of life. The soul of a journal is its radical determina-
tion to give meaning to everything it touches, to build it into a theoretical ten-
dency, to embrace it within a mechanism of practical activity.

– Antonio Negri, quoted in Nicholas Thoburn’s article “Is there an Autonomist Model of Political Communication?” Sage Publications, 2011