Fancy phrasing for a simple question.

Local technologies gaining traction and being positively viewed. So is the global mechanically depreciated? Or was it ever appreciated at all?

And I see a kind of light paradox within the current interest in local knowledges. One one side, we value local knowledges, but on the other side, we broadcast these local knowledges globally.

So what is the value of globality, particularly in the context of information technologies?

Not just to refuse a thing, but to refuse the value ascribed to a thing.

This is in the spirit of Donella Meadows's Places to Intervene in a System. The point is not to refuse smaller parameter adjustments, but rather to look at sets of values that guide the judgment of said parameter adjustments. The power to transcend paradigms, as she calls it.

So to think about distance, I'll first look at what technology does to distance.

Then we'll discuss this concept of neganthropy, and local production of knowledge.

Then I'll propose my personal re-valuation of distance, which is absolutely open for discussions.

The exoticism depended on technological renderings of the other, of the further (orientalism is very much stemming from media). Or obstacle implied that space had to be conquered (where it was no longer a problem, such as with the establishment of railway networks and maritime routes).

This is how we made sense of things, people and places on the other side of the planet might mean we just fantasize about them, or making them immediately accessible, both through technological means.

Both of these are somewhat frowned upon today, again with a preference for the local.

Do they only exist by virtue of being part of a whole (kind of Gaia thinking), or do they also have a specific virtue of not being there? Of being from somewhere else?

Both of these conceptions were changed through the speed brought about by technology.

Technology has a particular relationship to speed. It evolves at its own pace. It changes our conditions of living. With industrial and digital technologies, it goes faster than us.

Here I'm thinking of the work of Harmut Rosa, or Paulo Virilio.

But what is speed?

And speed the relationship between space and time.

And what happens when time decreases?

If time is of the essence, the instant negates the distant. This is the effect of same-day delivery, that distance is erased, and only time matters.

And time itself is tending to a limit towards 0. Mathematically, it doesn't matter anymore what is the value of d.

Technology affects to distance in at least two ways.

Technology contracts distance, it reduces it through speed and reduction of dimensions. Robots are about linear planning, justice is about unidimensional legal readings (see the mixed feelings about legal trials over videoconference).

Another obvious part is in urban planning. We can see that in the evolution of urban planning, which has been argued is correlated with the amount of time humans tolerate for commute. If you commute for thirty minutes on foot, you have Florence. Thirty minutes on horse, you have Paris. Thirty minutes by car, you have Atlanta.

Technology also homogeneizes landscapes. But we need those landscapes in order to make sense of where we are, so if everything looks the same, we might not have been travelling at all (see digital nomads).

And this happens through technology-enabled lifestyles. They establish standards which subsume distances.

In particular, the computer as a so-called universal machine, cares very little about meaning. It is all syntax, and no semantics. Maps are syntax, spaces are semantics.

Beyond the steam engine, or copper wires, that particular machine has a particular relation to distance.

So there seems to be a good case for less transportation of good. But I find it a bit more complicated to argue for a refusal of the long-distance transportation of ideas.

The anthropocene as the expansion of human footprint, and the disolving of energy through the concentration of resources.

But it is also acccompanied by the dissolving of ideas, due to this same concentration of focalization. There is an impoverishment of the noosphere because we are:

• focused on niche research fields
• focused on technoscience
• focused on operational results

Revitalizing knowledge, through local communities.

Stabilizing and maintaining production of ides through appropriate, locally developed.

Stiegler heavily criticizes computerization as responsible for noetic deskilling and entropy.Its so-called universal properties are ones that make distance disappear.

So is it as simple as discarding one, and to prefer to concentrate on the immediate vicinity?

E.g., in the face of local communities, or local knowledge, what to make of global communities, or global knowledge?

Perhaps another way to look at it is through the confederation, the assemblage of distant things in an articulated whole. A bit like what the Internation collective proposes in the context of bifurcation. But then what is the technological pendant to this political structure?

The question of local knowledge with telecommunications networks is a complicated one.

There is an argument that could be made that:

• the internet is knowledge produced with the local community of the US military/academic complex?
• the tcp/ip protocol, like any protocol, works by getting rid of any specificity
• anything transmitted over the internet are, by definition, deterritorialized?

A less dramatic version would be to consider Mastodon rather than Twitter. Still, they both rely on a sort of universal network.

But this blanket position seems to me limited. Are all things coming from far away bad? How should we qualify our refusal of distant things?

So, again, this is what I am trying to do here.

If the local has the virtue of being of little consumption and expansion, what is the virtue of something being distant? How do we requalify global communications? Because it doesn't seem that it should be avoided at all costs. Otherwise we would not be there today.

So we need to make it a productive concept in the structuring of post-globalization knowledge (a neganthropic knowledge).

Abstand is a word I first learned about during Covid in Germany.

Literallt, it means "stand away/from". Superficially, it translates to distance, but etymologically, it is related to the english abstain.

Interestingly, it bridges physical distance (imposed obstacle) and spiritual distance (self-imposed obstacle). The thing that is far, and the thing that is kept far. The word has an undertone of agency that is not found in the roman equivalent.

So it might be interesting to consider distance from that angle.

Distance starts as a given, then gets subsumed. We could extract it again, as a chosen.

Rather than saying a blanket "no", this involves saying no within a system of justifications, and that system of justification necessarily also frames subsequent positive actions. Abstaining is the broader moral gesture which materializes into a refusal.

That moral framework would be one that aims at preserving diversity.

The production of neganthropy (localized knowledge) is a kind of différance, which can only take place from a comparative point of view. There needs to be multiple localized knowledge, otherwise all knowledge passes as being universal, as a sort of cosmology.

This temptation of spreading ideas at the speed of light might always be there, if we keep digital communications network as they are. But knowing that the temptation is there is also a way of reinforcing the reasons for refusal.

Latour, just like Ellul, were Christians. So maybe religion also has its part to play in technological refusal.

There is also a lot of work in anthropology on the complementarity of religion and technology, and I wonder if there could be a way to think of our modern relation between religion and technolog beyond the dominant "technology as religion".

Faith can also be considered as a kind of maintenance of neganthropic system. It can be a justification to continue to preventing the dispersion of energy and ideas.

This also means shifting from choices to judgments, from quantitative assessment to qualitative ones. How do we assess that an idea is too far removed, or that an idea is close enough?

That is the political question. How do we understand, appreciate, empathize the the reality of the far away?

Or at least with different technological means?

Particularly in terms of technoscience. If information can be transferred over very long distances almost immediately, how do we justify local knowledge, and how do we address the need to reinvent the wheel?