Premediation: Thoughts on defining the future

 Politics Blog  No Responses »
Oct 242010
 

Via Twitter I stumbled yesterday onto an interesting lecture given at a Network Politics event in Canada by Richard Grusin on the subject of 'premediation and the politics of everyday affects'.

With my last post being on the subject of predicting the future, it was interesting to hear how he discussed premediation as a counterpart to the slightly more familiar notion of remediation.

The lecture covered a lot of ground (much of it over my head), but here's part of his definition:

"Unlike remediation's double logic which seeks a kind of real time perceptual immediacy, premediation works to produce an affectivity of anticipation by remediating future events or occurrences which may or may not ever happen."

So for example, as was seen in the run up to the Iraq war, premediation often takes the form of a proliferation of specific possibilities or scenarios. The generation of these possibilities entails the remediation of potentialities out of which future actions, decisions or events might or might not emerge.

The aim of premediation is not to understand the future correctly, but to mobilise orientations and actions towards the future.

I suspect that this is similar to what in politics is called "owning the future".

And, pointing out that such debate about the future is not just theoretical, Grusin said "the virtualities are real in as far as they produce real affected states in the present".

He distinguished premediation from game theory or scenario planning in that the future is not imagined as a pre-determined state that can be predicted or forecast. Instead there are multiple competing and incomplete futures.

There are "multiple actualities which can emerge from any potential present" and which emerge by differentiation and divergence from other, more numerous, potential but never realised actualities.

The video is below (action starts about 12 minutes in, with the lecture starting at 15 minutes).

There is also lots of video of other speakers at the event.

 Posted by at 7.57pm  Tagged with: ,

Predicting the future: How eDemocracy has an impact

 eDemocracy Blog  No Responses »
Oct 192010
 

One of the themes of this blog is that over the coming decades eDemocracy will have a profound impact on the political system.

Yet it is also fair to point out that the internet has been around for a good while now and things still seem much the same as they always have been.

This brings me on to an interesting point about how hard it is to predict the future.

I'm going to leave aside all kinds of difficult issues like starting assumptions and infinite feedback loops.

To me it generally seems to hold that the best predictor of tomorrow is today.

One day is much like the last, an election campaign is similar to the previous one, a new social media campaign is much like the one that went before it, one reform of the political system tweaks what was previously the status quo.

Following this line of logic, you might suggest, it is hard to see eDemocracy having any kind of revolutionary impact.

But this approach means that while you are unlikely to be far wrong about any given point in the near future, you run the risk of misjudging the cumulative impact of hundreds or thousands of small changes.

I suspect this effect is the opposite of a Black Swan outcome. It is not a sudden, unanticipated outlier occurrence like the collapse of the banking system or the 9/11 attacks.

It is the slow build up of forces over time, with each step seeming so small that little attention is paid to the distance travelled from the original starting point. There is no single step that is more important than any other.

This is much like a swimmer who gradually drifts away from the shore without realising how far they have got from safety.

And this gradual build-up means that while no single change on its own renders the status quo redundant, it can still reach a point when it is no longer tenable.

It is this cumulative effect that I think will result in eDemocracy having a major impact on the structures and practices of politics a couple of decades hence, piling change upon change until a point is reached where major reform is needed to invent a new system.

This is also another example of how political change can be generated by external factors; in this post I outlined some of the internal factors which resist such reform and contribute to the eventual creation of a 'moment of crisis'.

 Posted by at 10.14am  Tagged with: ,
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