Technopolitics

This diagram is rendered by graphviz using the dot language. It tries to reflect key elements of the dominant paradigms in the 20th century regarding accumulation regimes, developmental models, political constellations, scientific breakthroughs, artistic movements and social movements. The current version is still experimental and not very strict in its interpretation of the model, which means that the diagram is imperfect on one hand anyway, but also has deliberately avoided becoming too linear, i.e. certain new terms are brought in while others get dropped.

The first full seminar of the series "Four Pathways through Chaos" was held in Toronto on May 1-2, under the auspices of the European Graduate School, with about 10 students attending. It was a great success, very interesting! And very directly related to the research into Technopolitics. What I did was to transform the Introduction on methodology and the lectures on Assembly-Line Mass Production into stand-alone PDFs, consisting mainly of quotes from books accompanied by images and transitional comments.

This text is a methodological outline linking categories of the Technopolitics research project with the PhD research project on "Moves in Media Art - Paradigm changes in art and technology". While mainly sketching out a work program for the coming months, the notion of "creative norms" is proposed here for the first time in an English text. It therefore would be nice to get some feedback on this.

Why is that each of the Industrial Ages identified by the technological innovation school (Mensch, Perez, Freeman, Soete etc) is marked by major innovations which are not considered to be among the mainstays of the period, but which do play a great role in it, to the point where they leave just as much of a stamp on popular memory as the dominant industrial process of that Age?

Excerpted from Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, by Carlota Perez (Edward Elger, 2002), fig. 5.2, p. 57

Excerpted from: The Economics of Industrial Innovation, 3rd Edition, by Chris Freeman and Luc Soete (MIT Press, 1997), table 3.5, pp. 65-67.

This publication brings together two reference works by Angus Maddison: The World Economy:
A Millennial Perspective, published in 2001 and The World Economy: Historical Statistics, which was released in 2003. The first volume provides a comprehensive view of the growth and levels of world population since the year 1000, when rich countries of today were poorer than Asia and Africa. In the second volume, Angus Maddison offers a rare insight into the history and political influence of national accounts and national accounting.