[ICTs-and-Society] Pre-Conference Online Discussion

[Louis Suárez-Potts]

Thanks for the reminder of he City…. and, to address for now your
direct question:


On 20 January 2012 01:48, Gilson Schwartz <gilson.schwartz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is the iconomic paradigm a post-liberal ideology? Should we replace "oikos"
> for "eikon" if we really want to understand the differences between
> machines, animals and human beings?

It's as much about the ghosts in the machines as the animals we're
exterminating as the people we're starving or not, which is to say,
it's not simply a replacement of oikos with "ikon" as simply
calculating the cost of actions without necessarily giving special
value in that calculation. So, if it used to be that "we" were lulled
into the belief we could ignore the cost of polluting a river (dead
fish, dead jobs, slowly dying people who could not even afford the
house they rented, so no matter….), I'd argue that the situation has
been proven, even to the most obdurate (okay, not to them) that we
cannot. That the cost of the river's pollution is a debt that cannot
be forgot and must be paid, else the human citizens making up the
society and even community of which one might claim to be a part (the
oikos), actually suffer in a way that raises even the most insular
gated community's inhabitants' costs of living.

But that simple claim for a rich calculation of effect and a better
understanding of cause, is hardly in practice simple, as any causality
tree must be pruned to get sense and not nonsense….

Ciao
Louis