>>15
I want to be clear that I’m not backing anyone, just spitballing and trying to get a perspective on the situation. This question or who is a ‘real’ revolutionary or not isn’t very interesting to me because I don’t agree with Marxism. In the 1920s and 30s, fascists successfully mobilized war veterans, unemployed people on curb corners, and took over the streets while their leftist rivals were fixated on factories. I guess you could find parallels between that and the American far right? I don’t know much about them. I’m not endorsing them.

Do billionaires not also conform to your ideal of a “global and roving population”?

Yes but I don’t think that’s new. Marx pointed it out. Capital has always been global whereas labor has been tied down, but that has changed. Colonialism and then globalization are motors that have spun up a whole class of mobile people on the lower end of the social ladder who are diasporic like immigrant laborers, war refugees, part timers, unemployed urbanites, military and ex-military, so-called digital nomads etc. these have a very different class position to the billionaires. What makes them different from the traditional fixed proletariat is their precariousness, they can always be out of a job, deported, loose their home etc. These roving masses are both a necessary source of labor but also a source of fear for those in power. People from this population bracket have been behind some of the major crises of our times e.g. 9/11

is it possible that you are reproducing capitalist logic with an insistence on speed and efficiency and short time preference in your focus on out-speeding the state? I see a focal point of resistance in people who slow down

Virilio warns us about accelerating speed and laments it while Baudrillard seems to celebrate it(?). The dictatorship of high speed compels us to accelerate and those who fail to keep pace get left behind. There’s a virtue in slowing down but turning it into a tactic of resistance can be difficult e.g lazy workers are simply fired and easily replaced, scientists who fail to publish on time perish etc. Now I’m not saying uncontrolled high speed is good (even if it can be fun), but to challenge modern states and armies you have to out run and out maneuver them. I guess the Taliban are an outlier here because they (like all good guerrillas) forced the high tech American army to slow down, controlling the tempo of battle.

I don’t make any claims about an eternal battle between nomads and cities or whatever. The state as we know it today is barely a few centuries old.

>>16
There isn’t a single type of nomadic lifestyle or a single cause for nomadism. Since societies are made up of human bodies in motion, speed has always been an integral element of society. The control and manipulation of speed and motion is crucial to all modern forms of social control.

>>15
I want to be clear that I’m not backing anyone, just spitballing and trying to get a perspective on the situation. This question or who is a ‘real’ revolutionary or not isn’t very interesting to me because I don’t agree with Marxism. In the 1920s and 30s, fascists successfully mobilized war veterans, unemployed people on curb corners, and took over the streets while their leftist rivals were fixated on factories. I guess you could find parallels between that and the American far right? I don’t know much about them. I’m not endorsing them.

Do billionaires not also conform to your ideal of a “global and roving population”?

Yes but I don’t think that’s new. Marx pointed it out. Capital has always been global whereas labor has been tied down, but that has changed. Colonialism and then globalization are motors that have spun up a whole class of mobile people on the lower end of the social ladder who are diasporic like immigrant laborers, war refugees, part timers, unemployed urbanites, military and ex-military, so-called digital nomads etc. these have a very different class position to the billionaires. What makes them different from the traditional fixed proletariat is their precariousness, they can always be out of a job, deported, loose their home etc. These roving masses are both a necessary source of labor but also a source of fear for those in power. People from this population bracket have been behind some of the major crises of our times e.g. 9/11

is it possible that you are reproducing capitalist logic with an insistence on speed and efficiency and short time preference in your focus on out-speeding the state? I see a focal point of resistance in people who slow down

Virilio warns us about accelerating speed and laments it while Baudrillard seems to celebrate it(?). The dictatorship of high speed compels us to accelerate and those who fail to keep pace get left behind. There’s a virtue in slowing down but turning it into a tactic of resistance can be difficult e.g lazy workers are simply fired and easily replaced, scientists who fail to publish on time perish etc. Now I’m not saying uncontrolled high speed is good (even if it can be fun), but to challenge modern states and armies you have to out run and out maneuver them. I guess the Taliban are an outlier here because they (like all good guerrillas) forced the high tech American army to slow down, controlling the tempo of battle.

I don’t make any claims about an eternal battle between nomads and cities or whatever. The state as we know it today is barely a few centuries old.

>>16
There isn’t a single type of nomadic lifestyle or a single cause for nomadism. Since societies are made up of human bodies in motion, speed has always been an integral element of society. The control and manipulation of speed and motion is crucial to all modern forms of social control.