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Modernization

The substantiation of the infrastructure in the traffic of information is what marks modernization today, and does so in such a way that the description of modernization today already provides us with a theory of infrastructure. Besides the internal techniques of material networks, such as that of water, infrastructures organize each community according to its relationship to information on the Internet. The culture of globalization and technological development forms an integrated culture to the degree that it “identifies” with a new concept of a complex infrastructure. Moreover, globalization is sometimes offered as a vision of this homogenization. Many of us are eager for the unification of infrastructures to take place. The nucleus of the social fabric is sought in a certain technical unification of the sphere of infrastructures: a not productive mechanism which stands up to examination in accordance with the infrastructure. Standing and waiting within the time needed for the homogenization to take place is traced into the depths of every “modernization.” The promise of homogenization has an interesting way of concealing conquest strategies that are devised in the new world. And yet we are holding something back when we think of modernization today as the mere predominance of wealthy regions over poorer ones without considering the particular ways in which different kinds of predominance—often absurd ones—are promoted.

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