Nabble - NetTime-l

Re: Google officially released the open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system

2009-11-24T03:29:09Z

Patrice Riemens schrieb:

> Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) just keeps invading new territories, and its latest
> target is your computer's operating system. It's officially released the
> open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system that will turn up
> in third-party vendors' netbooks. Those devices should start selling next
> year.
>
> With Chrome, Google takes a very different approach than major OSes like
> Windows, Mac OS, or even most Linux distributions. It's sort of like what
> would happen if an Ubuntu mated with a Firefox. It's basically a browser
> that does not run on an operating system -- it is an operating system. All
> its apps are Web apps, and all the data you save using it is stored in the
> cloud, in a state of statelessness, as Google puts it. Very little data is
> actually saved on the computer's hard drive.

Nothing new, to be honest. What Google has presented here is nothing but
a consumer thin client. It's a concept that has been known for years.
Remember the Sun Webtop, or StarPortal, some ten years ago? German IT
writer Giesbert Damaschke has just summarised just that in a post in his
German Notizen blog. It says: "Chrome OS, or the return of the dumb
terminal":

http://www.damaschke.de/notizen/index.php/chrome-os-oder-die-ruckkehr-des-dumb-terminals/

Damaschke argues that the main problem lies with data security, as with
Chrome OS all data is stored "in the cloud". This being a technical
issue, I think the more important point is data protection which is a
legal issue. Who would trust any third-party contractor for
trustworthyly saving all his working data (for free, as it seems), after
all? Data protection should not be mixed up with data security. While
data protection is at risk here, data security, i.e., backup and related
issues, may indeed better be left to a computing centre. However, in the
end this is a matter of trust. And then, Damaschke's post is right in
saying: "My desktop is my castle." Although he belives that Google
Chrome may well become a success. He that does not hesitate to hand his
data to Google so far will also use Google Chrome OS. Others like him
stay with their desktop computers.

Regards,
Jürgen.

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

AHAcktitude 2009, Milan, Italy November 27.28.29

2009-11-24T02:12:36Z

AHAcktitude 2009

27-28-29th November, Milan, Italy

Organised by:
aha@... and AHA:Activism-Hacking-Artivism

AHAcktitude '09 is the second collective meeting for the community of
the aha@... mailing list, one of the lists hosted by the historical
independent server Isole Nella Rete (Islands in the Net), and at the
core of the networking project AHA:Activism-Hacking-Artivism.

The idea of AHAcktitude came about from the desire of the more than 600
members of the aha@... to be able to meet. For the first time
after the creation of the mailing list (30th of December 2002) this
happened last year in Venice at the S.A.L.E. Docks. AHAcktitude '09 is
the second stop point for this path whose centre is to discuss themes
like artistic, political and technological activism. The meeting will be
held in Milan on the 27-28-29th of November at the Social Centre
Cantiere and will be proposing to create networks, share projects and
build new activist interventions for the future.

By adopting the same strategy as Hackmeetings, AHAcktitude is organised
and managed directly by the participants who can propose and share
seminars or projects via the aha@... list. AHAcktitude began
as a space for dialogue and sharing, with the purpose of learning and
spreading practices and knowledge in a free environment, without
censorship. Everyone can use the AHAcktitude wiki to participate: it is
a shared space for the presentation of projects, ideas, files,
documents, music, etc.

# A bit of history

AHA:Activism-Hacking-Artivism is an artistic networking project founded
in 2001 by Tatiana Bazzichelli aka T_Bazz. AHA is a networking
initiative activated by contamination/integration of multiple media and
events, where the common denominator is hacktivism and artistic and
political activism. Activism-Hacking-Artivism focuses on artists and
hacktivists in Italy and abroad that use media in an independent way,
through the organisation of exhibitions, events, and collective meetings
organised by T_Bazz along with other curators that change accordingly.

The core of the project AHA is the community that develops in the
mailing-list aha@..., where AHAcktitude comes from. The
mailing-list aha@... is administered by Lo_Bo, Dedalus and
Gionatan, and today counts more than 600 subscribers and it is the
sister mailing-list of the international list Nettime.
The AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism project won an Honorary Mention in
the Digital Communities cathegory of Prix Ars Electronica at the ARS
Electronica Festival in Linz (AU) in September 2007.

More info:

AHAcktitude 2009:
http://www.ahacktitude.org/event/2009/
Social Network:
http://www.ahacktitude.org/

AHA mailing list:
http://lists.ecn.org/mailman/listinfo/aha

AHA - Activism-Hacking-Artivism:
http://www.ecn.org/aha/

--
[IIIII] lo|bo
)"""(
/ \
/`-...-'\
|asprin |
_ |`-...-'j _
\)`-.___.(I) _(/) email: lo_bo [at] ecn [dot ] org
(I) (/)(I)(\)
--------------------------------------------------------------------

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: Google officially released the open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system

2009-11-23T15:51:45Z

Instead of the tirade about the braindeads giving corporations full control
of their underwear (including the enclosed dicks and pussies), I'll point
to something perhaps more obvious which is missing.

There are indeed advantages of the professional maintenace of storage and
"application-space". Backup, conformance, availability.

However:

1. While remotely encrypted file systems are well established and developed
concept, not a single thin-client peddler offers these.

In short, the remote storage operator would not be able to read your data.
It is decrypted and processed locally (applications also come from the
remote storage.) The implementations already exist and would be trivial for
Google, Inc. and others to offer.

They are not offering those because they want access to your data. This is
how you pay them.

2. There needs to be a standard for remote storage if we are to trust our
private data to remote keepers. If I can replace a Seagate disk with a
Winchester disk drive, I should be able to replace a remote repository.
Because I don't ever want my computer to tell me "if you don't want to
stick with Seagate, you'll have to pay". It doesn't matter if it's Google
or hundreds or service providers that hold my data.

There is no such standard. On the contrary, each provider goes through
pains to make sure you cannot jump the boat.

The only standard that these service providers agreed on is how to leave
you with nothing (thin web client) and lock you in while holding your data.
Of course, the argument is convenience, and it appears to work with
single-digit IQs (huge market.)

In short, this is about taking away the last thing you really control today
and they still don't have - bits on your disk drives. The only thing you
will have left is conditional shared access to your own data and
pay-as-you-go use of your memories.

I can totally see governments having wet dreams along these lines.

> All its apps are Web apps, and all the data you save using it
> is stored in the cloud, in a state of statelessness, as Google
> puts it. Very little data is actually saved on the computer's
> hard drive.

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

SWARM the VOTE TODAY - Support Transborder Immigrant Tool

2009-11-23T14:33:07Z

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ricardo Dominguez <rrdominguez@...>
Date: 2009/11/23
Subject: [announce] SWARM the VOTE TODAY - Support Transborder Immigrant Tool
To: announce@...

Hola all once again,

We the Chicana Coyotek Gangs (CCG),
we used to be known as
Electronic Disturbance Theater/bang.lab.

What is your vote on our new name?

Speaking of votes.

CCG would like you to SWARM the VOTE TODAY.

How can I do that you ask and what am I voting for?

Here is the scoop - a new news story has popped-up at the OCR:

November 20, 2009 9:26 AM
GPS tool will help immigrants cross border
BY CINDY CARCAMO
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/news/border-220422-people-desert.html

Lots of angry folks clicking in and voting on the poll:

Transborder Immigrant Tool:
Does this tool pose a threat to national security?
Yes 80 %
No 19 %
Not sure 2 %
Total Votes: 171

(Found on the bottom right of the article page).

Which was a Viral Bounce from this interview:

FOLLOW THE GPS, ÉSE
THE TRANSBORDER IMMIGRANT TOOL HELPS MEXICANS CROSS OVER SAFELY
(It has lots of mistakes, that should be fixed soon).
http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n11/htdocs/follow-the-gps-225.php

Now You - YES YOU! can go by and click "NO!"
and make Chicana Coyotek Gangs (CCG) even richer than we are already are!

So go now and do not hesitate. CLICK=ACTION!

Abrazos grandes,

>From Chicana Coyotek Gangs (formally known as EDT/bang.lab)
http://bang.calit2.net

P.S. Recent review by David Ronfeldt from the RAND about the Transborder
Immigrant Tool:

"fascinating. what an innovative twist."

http://spinuzzi.blogspot.com/2009/11/transborder-immigrant-tool.html

David Ronfeldt
About Me
Professional status: retired. Fields: first 20 years, U.S.-Latin American
security issues (esp. Mexico, Cuba); last 15 years, worldwide implications
of the information revolution (cyberocracy, cyberwar, netwar, swarming,
noopolitik, the nexus-state). Goals: finish "STA" framework about how
people think and act; finish "TIMN" framework about social evolution
(past, present, future). Publications: mostly online at rand.org and
firstmonday.org.

P.P.S. The CCG has been getting a-lot-of-LUV from folks around the world even
the military on the other side of the world!:

A new comment on the post #2 "About This Project" is waiting for your
approval
http://bang.calit2.net/xborderblog/?page_id=2

Author : The Eagle (IP: 214.13.141.100 , host141-100.iraq.centcom.mil)
E-mail : pcomey@...
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=214.13.141.100
Comment:
It's disgusting that a group such as this exists to circumvent U.S.
law. Perhaps an investigation should be initiated to determine if they
can be charged with Conspiracy/Aiding and Abetting the Illegal Entry
of Aliens (18 USC 2/8 USC 1325).

--
Ricardo Dominguez
Associate Professor
Hellman Fellow

Visual Arts Department, UCSD
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/
Principal Investigator, CALIT2
http://calit2.net
Co-Chair gallery@calit2
http://gallery.calit2.net
CRCA Researcher
http://crca.ucsd.edu/
Ethnic Studies Affiliate
http://www.ethnicstudies.ucsd.edu/
Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies Affiliate
http://cilas.ucsd.edu

Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics,
Board Member
http://hemi.nyu.edu

University of California, San Diego,
9500 Gilman Drive Drive,
La Jolla, CA 92093-0436
Phone: (619) 322-7571
e-mail: rrdominguez@...

Project sites:
site: http://gallery.calit2.net
site: http://pitmm.net
site: http://bang.calit2.net
site: http://www.thing.net/~rdom
blog:http://post.thing.net/blog/rdom

--
micha cárdenas / azdel slade

Lecturer, Visual Arts Department, UCSD
Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab, http://experimentalgamelab.net
Calit2 Researcher, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Google officially released the open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system

2009-11-22T20:18:36Z

Bwo BytesforAll list/ George Lessard

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) just keeps invading new territories, and its latest
target is your computer's operating system. It's officially released the
open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system that will turn up
in third-party vendors' netbooks. Those devices should start selling next
year.

With Chrome, Google takes a very different approach than major OSes like
Windows, Mac OS, or even most Linux distributions. It's sort of like what
would happen if an Ubuntu mated with a Firefox. It's basically a browser
that does not run on an operating system -- it is an operating system. All
its apps are Web apps, and all the data you save using it is stored in the
cloud, in a state of statelessness, as Google puts it. Very little data is
actually saved on the computer's hard drive.

The advantage, as Google describes it, is that boot-up times are extremely
quick. Security is also easier to handle. If you aren't hosting any data
yourself, you also aren't hosting any malware. Finally, if someone steals
your Chrome netbook, and your password is nice and safe, then you'll be
able to reclaim all your data and settings simply by signing on to another
Chrome netbook -- which you'll have to buy, of course, but some data's
worth more than a few hundred bucks.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Googles-Strange-and-Shiny-New-OS-68707.html?wlc=1258823023

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

http://f1x.eu/

2009-11-22T16:35:50Z

Waste Management

--
|_/H\_| http://hackerspaces.org/ | |o| |
[_xSx_] irc://irc.freenode.net/hackerspaces | | |o|
! \O/ ! xmpp:hellekin@... |o|o|o|
: : :

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

signature.asc (892 bytes) Download Attachment

[[[news-Struggles]]] .:: edu-factory.org ::.

2009-11-21T15:53:34Z

www.edu-factory.org

*edu-factory book launch in London*
edu-factory Collective & Queen Mary University present Toward a Global
Autonomous University: Cognitive Labour, The Production of Knowledge, and
Exodus from the education Factory. Edu-factory collective (2009 Automedia).
[...]

*Students arrested at UCLA*
A University of California Board of Regents committee today approved a
series of controversial increases in student fees that, if passed by the
full board, will raise UC undergraduate education costs by more than $2,500,
or 32%, in two steps by fall 2010.[...]

*Victory for Students at the University of Illinois UC*
On Tuesday, November 17, at 7:00 pm, the Strike Committee of the Graduate
Employees? Organization (GEO), AFT/IFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO, the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), officially and unanimously voted to
suspend the two day strike that brought major portions of the University
campus to a standstill.[...]

--
subscribe to th mailing list: edufactory-subscribe@...
contact us: info@...

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

FW: [APC Forum] Willetts' lecture on 'Who Really Created the Internet'now online

2009-11-18T12:05:18Z

-----Original Message-----
From: apc.forum-bounces@...
[mailto:apc.forum-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Anna Feldman
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 5:21 AM
To: A general information sharing space for the APC Community.
Subject: [APC Forum] Willetts' lecture on 'Who Really Created the
Internet'now online

http://www.city.ac.uk/whatson/2009/10_oct/291009_Peter_Willetts.html
Peter Willetts' lecture of a couple of weeks ago on the origins of the
internet is now available to view online.

Professor Willets makes a very well argued case that the modern public
internet is not a child of the US military, but rather the work of NGOs
and activists during the 80s, that later came together to form the APC.
He goes on to speak about the consequences of that history on the
internet that we all depend on today.

Well worth taking some time out to watch - especially as the work of
many on this list are referenced in the lecture. Reconnecting with our
organisational ancestry certainly gave those of us from GreenNet who
went to hear him, a rosy glow of pride :).

I recommend skipping the introductory guff and starting at 3'30'',

Anna

--
____________________________________________

Anna Feldman
GreenNet Web Projects Developer
Online Monday to Thursday
anna@... | http://www.gn.apc.org
T: +44 (0)20 7065 0940 +44 F: +44 (0)20 7065 0936

____________________________________________

=======================================
APC Forum is a meeting place for the APC community - people and
institutions who are or have been involved in collaboration with
APC, and share the APC vision - a world in which all people have easy, equal
and affordable access to the creative potential of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) to improve their lives and create more
democratic and egalitarian societies.

_______________________________________________
apc.forum mailing list
apc.forum@...
http://lists.apc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/apc.forum

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Phil Agre's gone missing

2009-11-18T09:49:24Z

Very sad. And very strange that he's been missing since "2008/2009":

http://sites.google.com/site/philipagre/

On another list, someone pointed out this writing of Agre's, which
he described as a cri de coeur, from late '98:

I don't normally get emotional about political issues. I don't
know why, but I don't. Nonetheless, in October 1997 I heard
something that I found so disturbing that I haven't been able to
write about it until now. At the Telecommunications Policy
Research Conference, the conference organizers put together a
plenary panel presentation about so-called cyber war. The
presenters were all US military guys, both officers and military
academy intellectuals, who have developed what is apparently an
entirely new US military doctrine for the cyber world. I judged
these guys to be honest about their reasoning, and I was hardly
alone in finding everything they said to be astonishing.

More:

That's bad enough, but it's just the start. In the new world,
the military guys said, warfare is no longer conducted along
borders and boundaries, with front lines and supply lines and all
of that. Warfare, in fact, can no longer be comprehended in
spatial terms. To the contrary, in a world where communications
infrastructure is everywhere and every element of communications
infrastructure is a sensitive military target, war has no spatial
limits. And when terrorists can use public communications
networks to conduct endless low-level attacks anywhere in the
world from anywhere else in the world, war has no temporal limits
-- they actually used the phrase "permanent war".

And more:

War, on these guys' conception, is now conducted in every aspect
of society. Foreign manipulation of the content of American news
media, for example, is "cultural war". Taken all together, the
result is -- and this is their term -- "total war". You might
have thought that the Soviet Union had fallen, that the United
States was by far the greatest military power on earth, that the
heavy cloud of the Cold War had lifted, and that it was time for
the United States to stand down from its total mobilization,
disband the national security state, end the culture of secrecy,
reshape the military in some reasonable proportion to its
plausible adversaries, and get to work on the rest of society's
problems. You might think all of that, but you would be wrong.
In the world of the Internet, it would seem, things have only
gotten worse. We are now in a world of permanent, total,
omnipresent, pervasive war. Cold War plus plus: all war, all the
time. They said this.

The military guys' view of the emerging nature of war has
numerous consequences, and they spelled some of them out. They
stated, for example, that in the event of war it would create no
precedent for the government to take control of facilities that
are sensitive from a military perspective. But they asserted
that war is no longer an event but a permanent state, and they
had also asserted that virtually the entire productive
infrastructure of the country was relevant to war as it is now
defined. During the question period, therefore, I asked them
where the boundary between military and non-military facilities
could be found, and they answered, with seemingly genuine
distress, that the boundary does not exist. The consequence,
which they did not spell out, is that the emerging economics of
information infrastructure have required the United States
government to adopt as official policy an authoritarian variety
of communism.

The whole thing's well worth reading, as is just about everything
Agre wrote:

http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/notes/98-12-16.html

And that was eleven years ago. For context, it's also worth a glance
of what was afoot on this list at the time:

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9812/threads.html

Naturally, my eye was drawn to the two messages I sent:

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9812/msg00005.html
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9812/msg00064.html

As Vuk used to say: bingo.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between individual
biographies and the mood of the broad trends and discourses that people
recognize and articulate. I hope that Agre doesn't turn out to be a victim
of his own formidable intelligence; he wouldn't be the first, and he
certainly won't be the last in the coming years.

Not cheers,
T

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

[[[news-Struggles]]] .:: edu-factory.org ::.

2009-11-18T09:08:28Z

www.edu-factory.org

*Graduate Employees Strike at the University of Illinois*
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN (November 16): Starting at 8 am on November 16, members of
the Graduate Employees' Organization (GEO), AFT/IFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO, The
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) began the first strike by
a recognized union local at UIUC in over 10 years.[...]
*
Reclaim (y)our education, body and brain! A report from Wien's occupation*
During the last three weeks, occupations, manif sauvage and flash mobs have
spread all over Austria: several universities are still occupied and 20.000
students demonstrated in Wien on November 5th.[...]
*
University of California - No Business as Usual: Call for a System-Wide
Strike*
In solidarity with students, faculty, and staff, In defense of public
education in California, We call for a massive, system-wide student and
teaching strike beginning November 18th.[...]
*
In Soo Chun Memorial Draws Hundreds
*On Friday, October 30th, dozens of people stood for half an hour with
custodians during In Soo Chun's memorial, and over 300 people came to pay
their respects in memorium for In Soo Chun in the course of a couple of
hours.[...]*

McMaster University Teaching Assistants Call Strike
*McMaster walks away from table.[...]
*
Latest News
* Occupied Universities in Germany [...]

---
subscribe to the mailing list: edufactory-subscribe@...
contact us: info@...

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Conference BioFeedback and Ubiquitous Anthropology @ Consciousness Reframed X

2009-11-17T14:48:04Z

Art is Open Source is going at Consciousness Reframed X conference organized
by the Planetary Collegium in November 2009 at the Macromedia University of
Applied Sciences in Munich. We?ll be there from November 19th to 21st.

We will present the Ubiquitous Anthropology project with FakePress. We will
also present and use our little new project: Conference BioFeedback.

http://www.artisopensource.net/2009/11/18/conference-biofeedback-consciousness-reframed-x/

ciaociao

xDxD.vs.xDxD

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Reality Shifting – Part 1: Rezzing @ _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_

2009-11-16T09:46:19Z

See the rest, with video @
http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/2009/11/14/the-dynamics-of-rezzing-part-1/

///

Reality Shifting – Part 1: Rezzing

“There are many worlds and many realities in our universe. When one
reality, or one world-view is superimposed on another, it is
inevitable that social, economic and cultural problems arise.
Hierarchies of worlds are constructs of a bygone era. Ecologies of
worlds should guide us in considering our future… We can begin by
designing environments that can respond to physical, environmental, or
social needs. Not only the needs of human beings, but also of the
organisms and elements with whom we share the Biosphere.” – fo.am

Rezzing occurs in the space in-between worlds. Rezzing happens in the
moment we switch from one reality to another: where the structure of
synthetic worlds is unveiled. We see these spaces appear gradually –
textures, alpha channels and audio appear in layers. Forms start as
simple grey patterns that morph and evolve via emergent detail. These
patterns resolve as final forms that adhere to in-game physics and
flop into “place”.

When I begin rezzing – and am between avatars – my body disappears.
Then, the simple basic shape beneath is exposed with pitch black skin
and bizarre proportions. Finally, my body parts materialise.

I stand naked: staring ahead as my clothes begin to appear, one piece
at a time. As the textures of my skin are downloaded, my blurry body
is redrawn in photorealistic detail. In Second Life, Linden Labs has
added a feature where rezzing avatars are surrounded by a cloud whilst
forming. This cloud presumably covers the moments of nakedness while
an avatar’s clothes are appearing and bare pixel genitalia are
exposed.

There is no geophysical equivalent to the act of rezzing. The closest
phenomenon is the act of awakening from – or falling into – dreams.
When an object or avatar is rezzed in a synthetic environment, its
data representation is downloaded from the database into the local
client. On screen, a visual “something” is created from synthetic
“nothing” – an ontological novelty out of the pure void. This act
reveals a flaw in the materiality and persistence of these worlds; a
type of virtual ontology similar to Deleuze’s spinozan plenty without
void.

After encountering the whooshing sound that indicates teleporting, I
am dropped into an incomplete world. Often during this phase, my
avatar manifests in a falling animation. First, all is sky and water
which faithfully glistens with the sun (according to environment
settings). Then, distant objects appear. In complex areas this can
take minutes as particle scripts initialise and begin to swirl and
glow before the details of architecture appear.

During the rezzing process, as a user’s body begins to form they step
into a swirl of affect. This affect may induce feelings of
identification with the avatar or a revulsion from it. This emotional
polarisation may produce a sense of pleasure in seeing or a sense of
disjunctive discomfort. The activity of the database creates its own
unreproducable order dependant on the speed of the bytes transferred.
Hair or pants/skirt may take minutes to download, with the avatar
blinking into space with a bald head or exposed thong in the meantime.
At this juncture, the avatar hover-stands in an unfolding environment
and waits for the expected transactions of the “normal” synthetic
world to begin.

How do we come to understand the resonances, affects and effects of
rezzing into synthetic environments? With augmented reality making
headline news, can we think of other ways of entering other realities
which are not limited to visual modes? What about pain? Sound? Smell?
Can Mixed Reality Performances be used to develop and explore these
methods of realityshifting? If we can think of ways of finding spaces
between realities, then can we think of the space between realities as
similar to the space between genders and sexualities? Could entering a
space between realities free us of certain rules, be a strategy of
liberation and transformation? Part 2 will explore these questions.

--
micha cárdenas / azdel slade

Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab, http://experimentalgamelab.net
Calit2 Researcher, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: the soul @ work

2009-11-16T03:31:38Z

It's really good to see this coming out. I've read some of the
materials it's based on and Bifo has given numerous presentations
around these themes this year in London, New York, Helsinki, and
Vilnius. Quite a timely and useful book.

It is strange, though, how the description says how it is the 'long
overdue introduction to English readers.' Strange in that no less than
3 books by Bifo have come out in English during the past year:

F?lix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography
(released by Palgrave, posted here as PDF: http://a.aaaarg.org/)
Ethereal Shadows (put out by Autonomedia)
Precarious Rhapsody (released by Minor Compositions, posted as PDF
here: http://www.minorcompositions.info)

And that's in addition to all the materials translated by him that
have been circulating on the net and in publications for over thirty
years now, most obviously collected on the wonderful Generation OnLine
site: http://www.generation-online.org/p/pbifo.htm

It does make you wonder, given all that, how this can possibly be
thought of as the first introduction to Bifo for English audiences. Is
the idea that author and their writing don't exist until a larger
publisher put them out? And somehow does web based circulation of
knowledge not count as a means of introducing an author. Strange...

Cheers
Stevphen

On 15 Nov 2009, at 14:34, un heimlich wrote:

>http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=3D2&tid=3D11880
>
>>From Semiotext(e):
>The Soul at Work
>>From Alienation to Autonomy
>
>Franco Berardi
>
>Translated by Francesca
>Cadel and Mecchia Giuseppina
>
>Preface by Jason E. Smith

<...>

--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://info.interactivist.net

"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is
created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political
practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and
compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied
practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a
political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary
knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social
and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of
skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with
others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts
the domination and hegemony of the master?s rule." - subRosa Collective

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge

2009-11-14T06:46:04Z

ENGLISH ? CATALAN ? CASTELLANO

(Please help to spread)

A broad coalition from over 20 countries, of hundreds of thousands of
citizens, users, consumers, organizations, artists, hackers, members of
the free culture movement, economists, lawyers, teachers, students,
researchers, scientists, activists, workers, unemployed, entrepreneurs,
creators? has come together to campaign and organise for respect and the
fullfilling of the rights of citizens and artists in the digital era.

The action started with the celebration of a First International Forum
on free culture and access to knowledge (October 29 to November 1
Barcelona) and continuous with the international launching of the
"Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge".

The Charter constitutes the beginning of an unprecedented offensive of
civil society in defense of the fundamental rights in response to the
pressure of the lobbies of the culture industry and lobbies for the
privatization of education and knowledge on the national parliaments,
and particularly European Parliament.

Citizens of the digital era stand up to full fill the potential of the
digital era in the increasing freedom, justice and rewarding for all.

We invite all citizens to make this Charter theirs, spread it and
practice it.

We invite all the governments, multinationals and institutions urgently
to listen to it, understand it and enforce it.

See the Charter at:

http://fcforum.net/ Download the Charter at:
http://fcforum.net/files/CHARTER_short.pdf

CASTELLANO

Una coalici?n inclusiva proveniente de m?s de 20 pa?ses de cientos de
miles de ciudadanos/as, usuarios/an, consumidores/as, organizaciones,
artistas, hackers, miembros del movimiento de cultura libre,
economistas, abogados/as, profesores/as, estudiantes, investigadores/as,
cient?ficos/as, activistas, trabajadores/as, desempleados/as,
emprendedores/as, creadores/as... se ha unido para defender y poner en
practica los derechos de la ciudadania y los y las artistas en la era
digital.

La acci?n empez? con la celebraci?n del Primer Foro Internacional de
cultura y acceso al conocimiento (Del 29 de Octubre al 1 de Noviembre de
2009) y continua con la difusi?n de la Carta del foro de cultura de
Barcelona por la innovaci?n, la creatividad y el acceso al
conocimiento.

La Carta constitute el inicio de una ofensiva sin precedentes de la
sociedad civil en defensa de los derechos fundamentales en respuesta a
la presi?n de los lobbies de la industria cultural y lobbies por la
privatizaci?n de la educaci?n y el conocimiento sobre parlamentos
nacionales y en particular sobre el Parlamento Europeo.

La ciudadania se levanta para desarrollar el potencial de la era
digital. Que las nuevas tecnologias sirvan para aumentar la libertad y
la justicia para la toda humanidad, no para aumentar solo el beneficio
de unos pocos.

Invitamos a toda la ciudadan?a a hacer suya esta Carta, difundirla,
organizarse y ponerla en pr?ctica.

Invitamos a todos los gobiernos, multinacionales e instituciones a
escucharla urgentemente, entenderla y aplicarla.

Consulta la Carta en: http://fcforum.net/es En formato .pdf en:
http://fcforum.net/files/carta-castellano.corta.pdf

CATAL?

Una coalici? inclusiva provinent de m?s de 20 pa?sos de centenars de
milers de ciutadans/as, usuaris/ies, consumidors/es, organitzacions,
artistes, hackers, membres del moviment de cultura lliure, economistes,
advocats, professors/es, estudiants, investigadors/es, cient?fics/es,
activistes, treballadors/es, aturats/es, emprenedors/es, creadors/es...
s'ha unit per a defensar i posar en practica els drets de la ciutadania
i els i les artistes en l'era digital.

L'acci? va comen?ar amb la celebraci? del Primer Forum Internacional de
cultura lliure i access al coneixement (29 Octubre - 1 Novembre 2009) i
continua amb la difusi? de la ?Carta del f?rum de cultura de Barcelona
per la innovaci?, la creativitat i l'acc?s al coneixement?.

La Carta ?s l'inici d'una ofensiva sense precedents de la societat civil
en defensa dels drets fonamentals en resposta a la pressi? dels lobbies
de la ind?stria cultural i lobbies per la privatitzaci? de l'educaci? i
el coneixement sobre parlaments nacionals i en particular sobre el
Parlament Europeu.

La ciutadania s'al?a per a desenvolupar el potencial de l'era digital.
Que les noves tecnologias servisquen per a augmentar la llibertat i la
just?cia per a la tota humanitat, no per a augmentar solament el
benefici d'uns pocs.

Convidem a tota la ciutadania a fer seva aquesta Carta, difondre-la,
organitzar-se i posar-la en pr?ctica.

Convidem a tots els governs, multinacionals i institucions a escoltar-la
urgentment, entendre-la i aplicar-la.

Consulta la Carta en: http://fcforum.net/

???`?.(*?.?(`?.? ?.??)?.?*).??`??
????*???? Mayo Fuster Morell ?.?.?*?`??
???`?.(?.??(?.?* *?.?)`?.?).??`??

Research Digital Commons Governance: http://www.onlinecreation.info
European University Institute - Phd Candidate
School of information Berkeley Visiting researcher
Phone Italy: 0039-3345440747 or 0039-0558409982
Phone Spanish State: 0034-648877748
E-mail: mayo.fuster@...
Skype: mayoneti
Identi.ca: Mayo

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: The Precariat and Climate Justice

2009-11-13T04:43:03Z

Dear Felix, i realize now you have theorized much more cogently
the relationship between informationalism and green capitalism
than I did. I totally agree Castells' structural interpretation of
fall of USSR is best yet offered. Since I don't have much to add
to your text on these aspects, I will concentrate on what you call
appropriately the competing political projects of informationalism,
one capitalist (murdoch etc) the other commonalist (btw did u see
spat b/w huffington and springer over paid online content? will
send next). Open source peer production is already an economic
reality but not yet a full-fledged political reality, altho pirate
parties clearly are getting most of their votes there. And Hardt and
Negri are portraying immaterial labor as the social constituency
of a cooperative revolutionary autonomous multitude (Commonwealth
is a great book, in my opinion) which mobilizes around a radical
politics of the common(s) to overthrow existing capitalism. Their
take is: if the poor, precarious, immigrants don't build the new
institutions of the common, they won't defeat the republic of property
to replace it with a wobbly commonwealth (may the authors forgive this
brutal synopsis). Their emphasis is on the foucaultian production of
alternative, radical subjectivity.

But a competing political project needs to also be grounded in
ideological and geopolitical realities and no p2p revolutionary
army or emerging power is posing as alternative to nato-defended
imf-governed informational capitalism. Maybe a more nuanced analysis
would counterpose authoritarian informational oligarchies like China,
Russia, Italy to liberal republics of copyright (US, UK). Definitely
there's internal opposition within the EU to copyright enforcement,
but it's not yet portraying a systemic alternative.

Maybe I'm too traditional on this, but to me it seems that in Europe
the major cleavage is not on property rights but on identity: what's
Europe? when did it start and where does it end? It's Western
and Christian, i.e. monoethnic, the Right says. Multiethnic and
Solidaristic, movements are saying (since the Left is basically dead
in the Old Continent). The other cleavage, which the EU has in common
with the US, is the absurdity of trillions to the bankers that caused
the crisis while people get fired by the millions. There's likely to
be a social explosion over this: will it go left, will it go right?

solidarity to the striking universities of Austria!

love and climate justice, lx

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

The Precariat and Climate Justice

2009-11-12T23:39:36Z

Im gonna address Brian's crucial points and then will turn to Felix's.
Sorry for being so late in answering, but Great Recession is biting
and so I lost one of my two jobs and had to scramble for another
source of income... u know the life of precarity that awaits gen x+y+z
now worsened by the slump.

First objection: does green capitalism really exist? Well Soros
and most moneyed venture capitalists (like dorr or perkins&C) are
heavily betting on solar and renewables. On FT a HSBC study says
that environmental sectors could surpass aerospace this year. Plus
Oscar-Nobel Gore, Wash-Oslo Obama, Lord Stern and IPCC are pushing
strongly in that direction and have unimaginable access to global
media. Barroso wants Europe to outcompete the others on this. Hatoyama
wants to cut emissions significantly, and Friedman says green tech
is the new sputnik visavis China. Let's see what happens in Beijing
shortly, although Copenhagen is likely to fail in providing a new
framework for accumulation (new climate treaty), which is what big
corporations want but the US and China (and also India and Brazil) are
unlikely to deliver in December. >

Second point, Brian writes:

> This is the heart of your economic argument (productivity boost or
> not and its redistribution), so I wonder what you see as a possible
> fourth industrial revolution (or maybe a fifth, 'cause a lot of
> people start with water mills and then put railroads and steam
> in before in before steel and electricity). Couldn't capitalism
> already grow, and grow intelligently and greenly, on the basis of an
> egalitarian distribution of informatic production? You know, genetic
> engineering is more or less informatics, it's DNA interpreted on the
> informational model. I'd say neoliberal aka financial capitalism
> is a failed regulation of informational production. Is what we
> need a green regulation of informationalism that clears out all
> the financial waste, or is informationalism consubstantial with
> financialization and do we need something entirely different?
> Anyway, I'd like to hear more about the next revolution if you see
> it in the wings!

Yes! neoliberalism is the failed regulation of informationalism! As an
anarchoautonomist I need something really different, but my prediction
is that green (and non-securitarian) regulation of informationalism is
probably the best we can achieve through our struggles.

In passim about anarchogreens, basic income theory, immaterial growth:
yes, this is my solution to the cognitive and entropic riddles (negri
meets bookchin?;), no theorists of the reddito d'esistenza (they now
like to call it that way) have yet to uncover the link, in fact Andrea
Fumagalli has just proposed we write something togethere on basic
income and climate justice. Given the severity of the recession, basic
income is attracting consensus also on the reformist left. On the
other hand, many anarchogreens just want the fall of industrialism,
in which they include informationalism (in a paradoxical way, on the
NLR Gopal Balakshrinan is also making the argument that 30 years
of informationalism have been largely irrelevant for the basics of
capitalist dynamics).

>> Increasingly, the Italian and German traditions of autonomia are
>> intertwined with anarchist, antifascist and antiracist strands to
>> form an anarchoautonomist synthesis across Europe. A generation
>> totally oblivious of 20th century ideological disputes does not
>> distinguish between anarchist and autonomous resistance: on the
>> barricades, all you see is black hoodies fighting state repression
>> and corporate domination.
>
> Alex, tell me, isn't there a major major major problem of political
> articulation right here? You say the aim of the anarcho-autonomist
> wing is SMASH THE STATE. But all your argument says TRANSFORM
> STATE CAPITALISM. Where's the bridge? We know it in practice:
> education, social services and income redistribution, give people
> what they want and what they need. But doesn't there have to be some
> redefinition in theory of the basic aim, if only to avoid getting
> chucked in the terrorist bucket by the fascist fossil capitalist
> types who are really still a majority? Or a damn powerful big loud
> uberminority anyway? I think the question is serious, because so
> far, every ultraleftist upsurge produces a stronger fascistoid
> reaction and I am not sure those days are over...

Man, Brian, you really got me there! Yes, you could say mine is
an anarcho-reformist piece if such thing existed, and that's why
some anarchogreens found it unpalatabale. If i can find refuge in
non-teleological dialectics (aristotle rather than hegel) i'd say that
only riots and barricades are gonna put the pressure need to bring
about the redistribution of wealth and reorganization of production we
need to survive as informational civilization to the climate crisis. I
don't think that leftist riots today would risk causing a fascistoid
backlash. The securitarian discourse in europe is mostly based on
xenophobia. Economic riots have occurred in 2008-2009 in Europe, East
and West. In countries of the old soviet bloc they've mostly taken a
rightwing form, and a leftwing form in pre-enlargement EU. It'd be
different if precarious and immigrants, anarchoautonomists and young
muslims joined forces in a permanent way, as we saw last year in some
very inspiring episodes. In that case, the shit would hit the fan, and
Europe would be set ablaze. > > Nobody wants a vanguard and not me
either, but don't we have to think > seriously about a class fraction
that can mediate between the excluded > precariat and the clueless
green capitalist liberals? You know, my big idea > now is that the
whole thing stands or falls on the capacity to really take > over the
universities, and then all the smash the state folks think I'm a >
proto-traitor...

I'd say this. These are gloomy times of political radicalization and
of proud identities. With respect to a decade ago, people aged 18-30
are a lot angrier and ready to fight. They won't compromise on any
form of capitalism, but might subscribe to a postcapitalist platform.
Who could be the mediators? On the social front, I'd say new types of
unions (biosyndicates) addressing youth, women, immigrants could be
brokers, because even revoutionary unions have to bargain (should we
import the japanese freeter model in europe?); on the political front,
I'd say that now that the greens are becoming the new socialdemocrats,
it falls onto them to find the new social compromise that reconciles
accumulation with social and ecological needs: Cohn-Bendit will have
to propose more than green liberalism to definitely bury the PS and
the SPD.

ciao fratello and see you all in Copenhagen! lx

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Songs and samizdat made the Wall fall: Europe Against the Current September 1989 revisited

2009-11-10T10:47:19Z

The full version of this article - illustrated and documented - can
be found at the following address:

The LIMPING MESSENGER:

http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/songs-and-samizdat-
made-the-wall-fall-europe-against-the-current-september-1989-revisited/

======
below here just the three opening paragraphs:

Songs and samizdat made the Wall fall: Europe Against the Current
September 1989 revisited

November 9, 2009 by Tjebbe van Tijen
In mainstream news papers and television the decade-commemoration-
machinery for The Fall Of The Berlin Wall in November 1989 is
running at full speed now. So this is the right moment to recall the
?against the current? history of those days ? just before from 1985
till summer 1989 ? when mainstream media and commentators had no clue
yet, of the sudden change in the political configuration of Europe,
that would have its now official apotheose at last in November 1989.
It was citizen dissidence that made not only the Berlin Wall fall,
but also leveled the walls of nine state communist buildings (though,
failing to dig out the deeper authoritarian fundaments). Thirty years
of heavy Cold War propaganda bombardment of party-regime edifices in
the eastern parts of Europe did not accomplish, what in the end could
only be done by the inhabitants, the citizens, themselves. Some did
it by writing and self publishing, others by distributing and
reading, playing, dancing and singing, thus exposing the internal
contradictions of systems reigning in the name and interest of all
people, while excluding most of them from participation. The counter-
culture movements in Eastern Europe have been instrumental in
hastening the erosion process of state-socialism, this to such an
extent that the walls of these bureaucratic paradises crumbled at
the sound of these ?horns of Jericho?. It was in Hungary and
Czechoslovakia that the first fissures appeared, and soon it were the
East Germans, hopping trains, buses and their Trabants to hurriedly
climb the fences of embassies in Prague, or to simply do a country
hike and walk out across the Hungarian Austrian border where ? for a
short while ? barbed wire was cut and watch towers were unmanned. DDR
citizens not tearing down walls but ?voting with their feet.?

[image]

Earlier in 1989 the iron curtain ? however rusty ? was still in
place, the great divide between Western and Eastern Europe. Block-
thinking was predominant: First World (capitalist), Second World
(socialist) and Third World (poor and revolting). A long curving line
from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean split Europe, separated it
physical in two opposing political systems. Europe was a plural word
at that time. The geographical Europe as could be found in atlases
and maps reaching till the Urals, and two socio-political Europes:
Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Culturally speaking, that what was
East of that fenced line was considered by the Westsiders NOT even
part of their idea of Europe (something like the actual perception of
Turkey as something that should not be part of the EEC). It is hard
to imagine now, but it needs to be recalled how deeply entrenched the
divide was then, on all levels. There had been popular risings in
Eastern Europe, starting in East-Berlin in 1953 and ending in Gdansk
in 1980, with the Hungarian Revolt in 1956 and Czech Spring of 1968
as moments where the iron curtain was torn aside a bit, but soon
after repaired by Soviet and Warsaw Pact occupying forces with their
tanks. There was no end in view of the ?entente? between the power
blocks that kept each other in a forced embrace of mutual deterrence,
based on their nuclear weapon arsenals. This military vision also
translated into the cultural realm with the monolithic view of the
Eastern European block as one total oppressive political unit with a
only a few courageous dissidents, martyrs for the cause of a Western
type of ?freedom?, for the rest just masses of indoctrinated
communist obeyers

[image]

Those who looked beyond this Cold War imago knew that the rule and
control in each of the countries ? messed together in the notion of
?Eastern Europe? ? had its own particularities, its own time line of
periods of openness and repression. Those who were knowledgeable had
observed that ? in each country in a different way and at different
moments - in certain official recognized cultural areas some forms
of less restricted activities and expressions were possible, like
jazz festivals, cinema and theatre experiments, international
scientific meetings, certain publishing activities, and cultural
centers managed by youth associations or students. Those from ?the
West? who went through the curtain and made the effort to go beyond
the controlled itineraries could also discover a whole network that
could rightly be labeled a ?cultural underground?, or as it was
called in Czech society of that time, not ?underground? or ?counter
culture? like in ?the West?, but ?paraleln? kultura? (parallel
culture), also sometimes named ?zweiten Kultur? (second culture) like
in the DDR.

Tjebbe van Tijen
Imaginary Museum Projects
Dramatizing Historical Information
http://imaginarymuseum.org
web-blog: The Limping Messenger
http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

NEW: MA in Cultural Production (Univ. of Salzburg, Austria)

2009-11-10T06:08:18Z

NEW: MA in Cultural Production

International and transdisciplinary Master programme for developing
sustainable cultural projects

Start in March 2010

Introduction to the programme at the University of Salzburg, Dept. of
Communication and online: November 24, 2009 // 17.00 - 19.00

Focussing on the interconnections between art, culture and media, and
political, economic and social processes, this new university
programme at the University of Salzburg balances innovative cultural
theory with practice-oriented methods. As a postgraduate programme
over 2,5 years (blocked sessions) the MA comprises five semesters.

The transdisciplinary curriculum is laid out at the intersections of
art practice, cultural and communication studies, and a social science
approach to economy. Cluster topics in relation to Space & Location,
Vision & Change and Networks & Decentralisation allow for
specialisation in one of the central fields of cultural production.
Drawing on participants own professional interests, individual
projects are constantly developed further and implemented in their
contextual complexity. The programme includes a 3-week internship,
individual coaching and a Master thesis.

We cordially invite you to attend a presentation of the MA in Cultural
Production either in person (at the Dept. of Communication, University
of Salzburg, Room 383) or online on November 24, 2009 from 17.00 -
19.00 (see www.uni-salzburg.at/wk/ma-cp).

The programme is coordinated by the Centre for Interuniversity
Cooperation in the Arts and Humanities at the Paris Lodron University
Salzburg and Mozarteum Salzburg, Austria.

More information and details: www.uni-salzburg.at/wk/ma-cp or via
Email ma-cp@... or call 0043 (0)664 8525475 (Siglinde
Lang/University Salzburg)

-------------
Dr. Elke Zobl
Fachbereich Kommunikationswissenschaft
Schwerpunkt Wissenschaft & Kunst
Universit?t Salzburg
Rudolfskai 42, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
Tel. +43 680 3146046

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY

2009-11-09T18:02:05Z

The new article I co-authored with Felipe Zuniga entitled “IO NON HO
NIENTE DA DIRE (I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY)” is in the current issue
Digimag [http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1625], an
italian new media magazine. Since its only in Italian, I’ll post the
english text here. The article discusses the Emergency – Emergent
Agency / Emergencia – Agencia Emergente
[http://luiproyectocivico.wordpress.com/] project for the Dialogos y
Interrogantes portion of the Proyecto Civico exhibition at CECUT in
Tijuana [http://proyectocivico.blogspot.com/].

I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY

by Micha Cárdenas and Felipe Zuñiga

How do we deal with broken promises? How can artists work to enhance
agency among participant audiences who are anonymous, migratory and in
transition? Can the museum become a space for Habermasian democratic
dialogue under a state of exception? These are some of the questions
that guided the project Emergencia – Agencia Emergente // Emergency –
Emergent Agency by the Lui Velazquez collective, which was part of the
Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes (PCDI) public programming
developed by Bill Kelly Jr. as part of the Proyecto Civico show
curated by Lucia Sanroman and Ruth Estevez, at the Centro Cultural de
Tijuana (CECUT) in the fall of 2008.

The Proposition

Is it possible to create a discursive democracy, in the manner
theorized by Jürgen Habermas, under the state of exception that
Giorgio Agamben claims is the contemporary form of governance? Our
project, Emergencia aimed to investigate this question, which was
posed by the organizers of PCDI, by focusing on the possibility of
communication among agents left outside the infrastructure of
communication, mediatic (private) and cultural ( public
institutional), specifically, unrepresented youth on both sides of the
border. The question of misrepresentation was central to this
initiative; since the PCDI program was an excuse to exercise dialogue
among citizens, or an invitation for citizens to exercise their right
for public dialogue and representation.

For decades, the goal of projects such as Paper Tiger Television and
Indymedia has been to realize the democratic promise of mass media by
allowing disenfranchised groups to have access to the airwaves. Bulbo
TV is a Tijuana based media collective whose mission uses a different
approach, fostering communication and liaison between social/cultural
groups alienated by their ways of living in order to gain a deeper
understanding of their social realities. Bulbo was another of the
groups who participated in PCDI. They are not specifically making
claims at democratization such as PTTV, but similarly targeting
various social groups and attempting to create better understanding
between them. Yet in many ways the promises of media activism have
failed to materialize. While today more people have access to
publishing than ever thanks to blogs, social networking sites, photo
and video sharing sites, there is still little improvement in
political conditions thanks to this increased media production. Most
media produced is personal, private and for entertainment purposes.

For the last three years, mass media in Mexico has undergone
unprecedented levels of privatization. An example of this was the
Televisa Law, the unofficial name that a series of amendments to the
Federal Telecommunications Law (LFT) Federal Law of Radio and
Television (LFRT) of Mexico, published in the Official Gazette on
April 11, 2006. This controversial law was approved in March 2006 by
the whole House of Representatives and in a span of 7 minutes, without
the prior reading, the text was voted unanimously, something unusual
in the history of Mexico. The law was upheld by the Senate, "without
changing a comma", during the last year of the presidency of Vicente
Fox and shortly before the general elections of 2006.i Vicente Fox
could have banned the law for the statements made by the Ministry of
Communications and Transport against it but decided to publicize it,
and in fact, entered into forceful arguing that for democracy to
prevail in the chambers, approval was necessary.

The controversy is that, in view of its critics, the law enshrines
deregulation of spectrum for digital duopoly formed by Mexican media
group Televisa and TV Azteca. Senators who were in fact members of the
LIX Legislature before the Supreme Court of the unconstitutionality of
a Nation, argued that the so-called "Televisa Law" inhibits
competition and promotes the power of the television duopoly.

According to this law the digital frequency spectrum is given to
private TV stations use, free of charge, a public good that belonged
to the Mexican state. Opponents of this legislation agreed that this
law would increase the control of television on the market blocking
free frequencies for radio or television for educational or community
purposes.

While the mass media around the world grows increasingly privatized,
it supports the state of exception whereby the population is
disenfranchised and alienated from the political process, steadily
eroding any sense of citizenship or social responsibility. Yet the
situation is more complicated than simply a mass media in service of
pure totalitarianism. In her 2004 book, Network Culture: Politics for
the Information Age, Tiziana Terranova looks at the politics of
information theory, communication and noise. In it she states:

“the public sphere of the welfare state and mass democracy is
described by Habermas in terms that are markedly different from those
of the bourgeois public sphere… The current public sphere is not a
sphere of mediation between state and civil society, but the site of a
permanent conflict… Communication is not a space of reason that
mediates between the state and society, but is now a site of direct
struggle between the state and different organizations representing
the private interests of organized groups of individuals.”

For PCDI, our project Emergencia focused on the transmission of
messages, as a most basic form of communication, as a means of
facilitating engagement between various social groupings and the mass
media. Emergencia can be seen as an entry into this network of
conflict, a modulation of the flows of messages, not with the goal of
creating communication or understanding between groups, but with the
goal of allowing the messages to find a broader audience, opening the
possibility that they might find their intended recipient. While we
did not seek to create pure communication, we did seek to engage the
passions of those involved by offering them a mass media platform for
their voices. We also sought to impact the viewer on an affective
level, in a way demonstrating the non-transparency of communication.

We planned to solicit various groups for short messages they wanted to
have broadcast, and then encode as many as possible into a short 20
second segment that we had negotiated with a spanish language
television station in the San Diego.ii We first engaged with a group
of homeless youth, through an expressive arts facilitator. Some of
these youth are undocumented, sexually exploited, queer, transgender
or do not fit any of these categories, but they must all remain
anonymous, for their own safety. In this way, we hoped to offer these
youth a space of reflection on what they might want to communicate
through the mass media.

Our contact at the station told us that they receive messages such as
lost dog information nearly everyday, and they discard these. This was
one of our initial inspirations. It is an example of how the mass
media can maintain the state of exception, by choosing who’s emergency
is worthy of broadcast, and who’s is worthy of broadcast a hundred
times a day. By broadcasting these messages, we open the question of
the mass media as a public service and who they should be serving.

For the Habermasian space of discursive democracy to exist, there
needs to be a space of pure communication. The mass media, much like
the art museum, always already precludes such a space of pure
communication, because such a space would have to exist without
privilege or hierarchy, among equal speaking partners. In the mass
media, just as in the system of the museum, there is always a
gatekeeper, be it a director or curator, who not only chooses what
messages are to be included in the communication, but who sets the
very terms, questions and focus of the dialog from the outset. Given
the years of work that are required to become a television network
producer or a museum curator, there is no pure communication here,
because the participants are not equals, and are subject to pleasing
the hierarchy.

Our project critiques this idea of discursive democracy by providing a
service to the groups we engage, without attempting to reproduce the
rhetoric of democracy that only reproduces the state of exception. In
his book Protocol, published in 2004, Alexander Galloway examines the
politics of information infrastructure, asking “how control exists
after decentralization” and proposing protocol as the answer. He
proposes that the way control societies operate is through a
decentralized “protocol [which] not only installs control into a
terrain that on its surface appears actively to resist it, but in fact
goes further to create the most highly controlled mass media hitherto
known.” (emphasis in original) Not only does the mass media serve to
maintain the lack of democracy, it does so by presenting itself as a
constituent part of democracy.

As we are concerning ourselves with messages, missives or letters
which have been discarded or disregarded, it seems appropriate to
visit the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” of Jacques Lacan, which
deals with the question of the possibility of communication that is at
the basis for Habermas’ discursive democracy. Lacan also found
television to be an interesting site of intervention, as some of his
seminars were broadcast there. In the seminar, Lacan claims that “a
letter always arrives at its destination.” If this were true, it would
seem that our task for our project, of broadcasting anonymous
messages, would be unnecessary. How is one to understand this concept?
In the same seminar, just before, Lacan says that “the sender…
receives from the receiver his own message in an inverted form.” If
this is so, if one only hears the inverse of what one says, perhaps
communication is not possible. Perhaps the public at the root of the
notion of the public sphere doesn’t exist, but in its place can be
found a network of immeasurable complexity, such that one can only add
more messages to send off into space, not knowing if they will be
received.

The Project

The Lui Velazquez collective was invited to participate in PCDI and
asked to find a group of people outside of our own collective with
whom we should facilitate a dialog. From the beginning, we had a
concern about tokenizing a group of people by choosing a particular
group and trying to offer them a service through our project.

We were aware of the problematic nature of project, specifically under
the critical arguments developed by theorist since the mid nineties.
Miwon Kwon recapitulates this discussion in her book, One Place After
Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity and brings up the
controversy in the collaborative interaction between artist and local
community groups. Kwon points to Grant Kester's argumentiii that
cultural mobilization of social “usefulness” of art (foundational to
community-based art) and the rhetoric that accompanies it need to be
understood within what he calls the “moral economy of capitalism” and
the history of liberal urban reform. “This outpouring of compassion
and concern over “community”—imagined by many critical practitioners
as a means to greater social justice and inclusive political and
cultural processes—“must be understood in relation to the successful
assimilation in the US of conservative arguments about underlying
causes of poverty, social and cultural inequity, and
disenfranchisement”.

As a result, we decided to work initially with a group of anonymous
youth, through the medium of an expressive arts therapy facilitator,
Jennifer Stanley. The youth all homeless for various reasons but had
to remain anonymous for their safety and because of the restrictions
of the institution at which she interacted with them. Around the time
of our offer to participate in PCDI, the collective was also in
conversation with a television station about producing a short series
of informational television segments, based on a performance of one
collective member, Felipe Zuniga, which the station had broadcast
previously.

The group with whom the collective worked represented a challenge:
youth living on the streets. This population can be seen as a parallel
to the situation of immigrants: the condition of bare life, under
which the individual is stripped of universal human rights and turned
into a subject totally under state power. Homeless youth have a very
problematic condition especially when we look at the restriction of
their freedom. In the first place, because of their lack a of legal
guardian, the state prevents the possibilities of the teens to have
visibility before the law. To prevent exploitative practices employed
by media, the teens are prevented from being portrayed by media. This
restriction of the use of the image and speech generates a very
harmful effect: the disappearance of the individual. So here legal
protection applies as a restriction that produces erasure. The
individuals lose the opportunity of factual presence and are pushed
into an anonymous condition that increases their fragility and
invisibility.iv

Combining our former approaches of radio transmission and broadcast
performance, we planned to offer the youth the opportunity to
broadcast a short message on television. The facilitator held a
workshop with the youth about media privatization and institutional
racism in the mass media and told them that they could write short
messages, one sentence only, which may be selected by an artist group
for broadcasting on television. She further told them that they could
write anything they liked, such as an announcement for something lost,
a commentary or simply a shout out. The youth wrote varied messages,
including...

I have nothing to say

Ethnicity? Human.

Felizidades! Acabas de Ignora otra hora de hambre en Africa.

The government f***** (fucking) sucks

I would like to give a shoutout to my brother michael.

Hi I'm X X. I would like to encourage to play football.

I love my lil brothers.

Our collective then made it our task to try various means of
broadcasting these messages to a broader public, to try to create
resonance with anyone who may be receptive. We used three platforms,
video, radio and t-shirts a public art fair.

To try to begin to create a dialog, we facilitated a video production
workshop in professor Claudia Algara's new genres class at the
Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC). We explained the
project and gave the students the original messages from the original
group of youth and asked them to create responses to the messages
using video. We explained that the original group had to remain
anonymous, and so they should also try to make their videos under the
same restriction, without showing their faces or voices . The students
made a series of videos during the workshop, around school and with
available materials. The students were also informed that the videos
would hopefully become the content of the Univision broadcast.

These videos are available on: http://www.youtube.com/user/luivelazquezart

A second part of the workshop took place at the Lui Velazquez space in
Colonia Federal, where interested students were able to continue
editing their videos, learn more editing techniques and participate in
the radio workshop. At these workshops, a radio broadcast was also
used to disseminate the original messages. In collaboration with
Neighborhood Public Radio, discussions on visual arts production and
politics, mass media privatization and the state of exception took
place at the workshops at Lui Velazquez, led by Michael Trigilio and
Ricardo Dominguez, both working artists and professors in the Visual
Art department at UCSD. Students who attended the workshops were able
to see how to produce a low power FM broadcast. The edited versions of
the videos the students produced were posted on Youtube.com at the end
of the workshop, broadcasting them online and allowing the students to
share the videos with friends.

Our next attempt to distribute the original messages of the youth took
place at Entijuanarte, an annual art fair held in the courtyard of
CECUT. We were invited to participate by organizing a booth as part of
our role in PCDI. At our booth, we played the videos produced by the
UABC students and allowed visitors to make t-shirts in response to the
original messages of the youth. We supplied blank t-shirts with the
Lui Velazquez name on the back as well as the name of the project,
fabric markers and a bowl with small slips containing the original
messages. We encouraged youth attending the art fair to read the
messages, think of a response and make a t-shirt of their response. In
this way we attempted to engage youth to consider participating in the
dialog and to engage the public at the art fair to become an audience
for the dialog as well.

With the edited videos, we went back to the television station. Yet,
the producer was not happy with the content of the videos. In
particular, one video was made in response to a youth who said “I HAVE
NOTHING TO SAY.” The video depicted two young women, students in the
media art class at UABC, wearing black plastic bags over their heads,
breathing silently. Given the context of violence in Tijuana and the
daily stories of victims found dead with bags over their heads, the
Univision producer found the videos objectionable. Ultimately, we were
unable to broadcast any of the videos or the messages on Univision. In
a way, this could be seen as breaking our original promise to the
youths who wrote the original messages. Yet we tried as best we could
to disseminate the messages in many other ways.

Our last act of transmission (before this article!) was at the
presentation of projects for PCDI at CECUT. We discussed the project
in the museum, in front of a public audience, and displayed many of
the original messages.

Conclusions

In an attempt to deepen the dialog, we wanted to go back to the
original group of youth who wrote the messages and let them know how
people had seen the messages. Yet when we asked the expressive art
therapy facilitator, we found out that all of the youth had left the
institution at which she met them. This led us to consider the success
of our project and the ways in which it may have been effective or
not.

When considering the question of how artists can enhance agency for
political actors who may be anonymous, transitory or in transition or
becoming, perhaps one answer is the notion of scaffolding. For our
project, given our limited resources and limited time to accomplish
the project, we did not create a long lasting infrastructure for
political engagement. Yet what we did was to create a light
scaffolding, a temporary infrastructure, a prototype for testing out a
form of communication or engagement. Perhaps given the rapidly
shifting social conditions of the state of exception and disaster
capitalism, building light scaffolding makes more sense than
dedicating years to an infrastructure of political action. When not
only the conditions are changing but also the subjects of political
action are, a light structure can be more flexible, allowing rapid
changes to a plan of action. In our case, the scaffolding was the
project Emergencia, facilitated by our collective. Within this
scaffolding, various groups of youth were invited to engage in a
consideration of politics, media and communication. Neighborhood
Public Radio (NPR) itself can be seen as an example of this kind of
scaffolding, in that they use small, mobile, temporary broadcasts for
each of their projects and as such have evaded the large fines that
the FCC has levied on many other unlicensed broadcasters.

Yet with NPR and Lui Velazquez, one can see an infiltration and a
parasiting of larger institutions which allows for a more flexible
approach to political engagement. In the case of NPR, their
participation in larger institutions of art such as the Whitney
Biennial can provide legitimacy and possibly allow them to operate
more freely than a broadcaster without such institutional support. Yet
the extent to which the Whitney understands and supports the actions
of NPR as opposed to NPR benefiting from the relationship more, is
unclear. Similarly, Lui Velazquez was invited by CECUT to participate
in their public programming, and thanks in part to the legitimacy
provided by the museum, was able to expand a number of existing
relationships and invite new collaborations from groups we sought to
work with, and provide agency for, through the museum.

The possibility for political engagement becomes a question of scale.
Along the lines of thought of micropolitics or molecular revolution
from Deleuze and Guattari, daily acts begin to take precedence here
over moments of massive social upheaval or long term social movements.
When asking how we can empower political agents whose identities are
in flux, the notion of relying on laws or universal human rights
begins to break down. With groups of people who do not have fixed
identities, the kind of linguistic fixity and specificity required by
laws and declarations of rights is incompatible. As such, movements
for legislative gains are incompatible with a will to improve the
conditions of communities without names, communities without
definition, under the state of exception.

In the second day of media workshops at Lui Velazquez with the
students from UABC, Ricardo Dominguez elaborated on the relationship
between communication and democracy. Speaking of the origins of
democracy in Greece, Dominguez elaborated a genealogy of democracy
stemming from theater and tragedy.

Yet, he offered another possibility, saying that if tragedy can be
seen as the origin of democracy and the will to pure communication,
perhaps comedy can be seen as another form of communication. What is
important here, beyond comedy specifically, is the notion of another
kind of communication. Perhaps when artists and curators consider how
to engage in politics in the space of the museum, another kind of
communication outside of pure democratic dialog is necessary. Other
forms of communication such as affective communication, or
communication allowing for uncertainty and ambiguity, may be useful
ways of engaging publics in political action through museums.

In the place of discursive processes leading to a liberatory
democratic situation, we offer an emergent agency, based on the
multiplication of pathways, codes, messages, identifications and
groupings. Guattari claims in Chaosmosis that the mass media is a
technology of subjectivation. He offers a strategy of using complex
interactions to offer new possibilities, saying,

“the important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new
material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of
subjectivation: multiple exchanges between individual-group- machine…
Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from
ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystallized into structural
complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of
aesthetic paradigm… an ethico-aesthetic engagement”.

As such, we propose that the value of dialogic processes of engagement
with communications media do not arise from working towards a common
reasonable agreement, but from the exercise of expressive and creative
faculties and the fashioning of new collective subjectivities. Our
project attempted to serve as a kind of “Emergency Broadcast System”,
interrupting the normal flow of mass media broadcasts to introduce
these anonymous messages. The interrupting of the patterns of flow can
be important, as Guattari states “these complexes actually offer
people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential
corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a
certain way, to resingularise themselves.” Perhaps instead of working
out agreements over differences among already constituted groups,
poetic subversive acts like ours can offer paths towards new groupings
and new ways of reimagining social engagement.

i. 47 senators of the LIX Legislature, brought on May 4, 2006 a
constitutional dispute with the Supreme Court against the Nation's
Laws Radio-Television and Telecommunications, in order to be declared
unconstitutional, in whole or in part, arguing that they were in
violation of Articles 1, 25, 27 and 28 of the Constitution of the
United States of Mexico.The Supreme Court declared unconstitutional
articles 6, paragraphs 16 and parts of the texts of the law, and it
was credited legislative omissions. The auction process for
concessions and the automatic endorsement of them were removed from
the law .

References:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_Televisa

Becerril, Andrea, “La ley Televisa, una imposición previa a las
elecciones de 2006, según Creel”, La Jornada, May 5th, 2007, Mexico.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05/05/index.php?section=politica&article=005n1pol

Becerril, Andrea, “Nada justifica los privilegios en la ley Televisa:
Aguirre Anguiano” La Jornada, May 5th, 2007, Mexico.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05/05/index.php?section=politica&article=003n1pol

?,Anulan corazón de "Ley Televisa", BBCmundo.com June 6th, 2007.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_6726000/6726335.stm

iiOur contact at the station ask that we not use the station's name,
as we never had a formal contract with them, only an informal, verbal
statement of interest.

iii. Aesthetic Evangelists:Conversion and Epowerment in Contemporary
Community Arts” Afterimage (January 1995): 5-11.

ivThis interest can be traced back in a previous effort were the
collective tried to establish another temporal dialogic platform in
the US developed at the residencia at LACE, Street address series, La
Radio Cubo, which consisted in the production of one day workshop and
radio transmission with homeless youth in Los Angeles under the
umbrella of the infrastructure of a shelter. The project had the aim
to offer air time on the web as well as in radio frequency.

--
micha cárdenas / azdel slade

Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab, http://experimentalgamelab.net
Calit2 Researcher, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: Zizek's transformative ego under the cap

2009-11-09T14:24:38Z

German translation see below.

Subject: 38317 Performance Against Celebrations of the Fall of the
Berlin Wall 1989 FAELLT AUS!

------------------------------------------------------------------------
AUSFALL
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Der BRD-Performance Mensch hatte letzte Nacht zuviel und die Auffuehrung
am heutigen Sonntag, den 8. November 2009 um 15:00 Uhr unter freiem
Himmel an der East Side Gallery Berlin FAELLT AUS!

38317 - Anschluss http://www.n0name.de/38317/trax/anschluss.mp3

(c) n0name 2009

http://www.38317.tk

------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------
CANCELLATION
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The FRG-Performance Human had too much last night and the presentation
today Sunday, November 8 2009 at 15:00 hrs outdoors by the East Side
Gallery Berlin IS CANCELED!

38317 - Anschluss [Annexation]
http://www.n0name.de/38317/trax/anschluss.mp3

(c) n0name 2009

http://www.38317.tk

Monday, November 9, 2009, 8:58:47 PM, you wrote:
> 20 Years of Collapse
> By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html

> TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During
> this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous
> nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true,
> the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards

Ah ja, and I don't believe in this house of cards-theory, it was a long
long wasting away and this turn in 1989 was the peak of it.

And concerning Zizek: He's only sitting in the cellars of the
Film-History, and sitting and sitting and sitting.

best,
Matze

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Zizek's transformative ego under the cap

2009-11-09T11:58:47Z

----'''''''' '' ' ! {-
--'-'''''''''' ' ' { -{
-'''''''''''' ' ' ( {
'''''''''''' '' ' - !o
'''''''''''' ' ' ' (
---'''''''''' '
--'''''''''''''' '
---'''''''''' ' ' ' ~
--'-''''''' ' \ {
'-''''''''''''''' -o '!!!~ {
''''''''''' '' ' ' ( !\\~~!! {
---''''''''' '''' ( !!!!\~~! (
-----'''''''''''''' ' ~ \\(\\ o -!{{{{{{(~
------''''''''''''' ' ' - -\{{o{ooo{'
-'''-\{ooooo{\- ''''''' !!!! '
----'-'''''''''''''''''' - ' ' ~!\!~ !~~~~!-~- \
--'-''-'''''''''''' ''' ( ~~~!!- ~~!!!~~~~\o\\\
''''''''''''''''''''''' {' ~~~~\~ !!~~\~~~~~~o\\
'''''''''''''' ' '' { ~~~~~\~~ !!\!\\\\\\\o\
'''''''' '' '' ' ' { -~~\ \!~~ ~!!\!\\\\\~~
''''''''''' ' ( -~~~ \\\~~ ~!!!\!'
''''' ''''' \ -~-~ o{\\~~- ~~~~~~~ -
'''''''' - ~o~~ ~---~~~~~!~~~~- {
''''' ~~~!~ -~o~~~oo-~\oo{!~~-o(\{!-o
''''''' {{{ ~~~!~{oo(({ ~{(oo{\{o{(\(ooooooooooooooooo{
'''''''' {oo{{{{oooooooooo{o~o{{oooo{ooooooo\ oooooo{o{(o o{~o{(-
'''''''' ' ({{\ (\\\{{\\{{\ooooo--oooooooo{\oooo{!~ooooo(-({{{(
-'''''''' ' { !\({(( {{{{{ '-({{{ooooo{o{\~ o{(\~(oo{{oo{-
-'''' { \\\(\(({{{{{{{( {{{{oooooo({(\o -\\~~o
-''''' ' o (\(\((-{({{ \\\\\((ooooooo{{({\\!\o
-''''' { oooooo{oo{({ ~~\\\!\((!\(\\oooo{o\{{o~-
-'''''' \ oooooo!ooooo \\\\\\\\\({{{ooooooo ooooo
'''''''' oooooo\oooooo\\\\!\\\\{({{ooo{o(o oo{o
'''''''' ooooo\(oooooo\(\\\(\\(\\{({{oo({{ oo{'
-''''''' - ooooo\(ooooooo((((\\\({((((((ooo{ o{o
--'''''' ' { ooooo{ooooo{{~!\\\oo{(({oooo{{!\(-((({{oo{{~
---'''''''''' { \{\o{{oooooo{ooo{(\\({(ooooooooo{ooo{o(\\~
-----''''''''' {{{{{oooooooooo~{({oooooo{\\\\\(o((((({{(o{ooooooo{{{((!
------''' o{{{{{{{{{{ooooo oooo{~\{oo{oo{((((((\\\(((((({{{!{ '{o{(
-----''''{{!'''''''''' \ oooooo( '~ o ~{((((\\\((((({(((\( (
----'-''\!({{o{{'''''' oooooo''' ('{~({((\\(({(((((\(\( {
-----'''{{(o ({ '''''' oooooo''''''\ {o{{((\\\\\\({(\(\! o~
------''o(\-({o{{{''''('oooooooo''-''-' \\\\\(\\\\\\\(\!\! {{'''
-------\o\{{{ooooo---'('{oooooo{''!'' \\\(\\\(\\\\\\{(!\\''!\'''
~~-----~o\o(\oooo'--''o''{oooo({''('' !\\\\\\\!(!\!\\((!!\''' -' '
~~-----'ooo'ooooo{---'o'~ooo{\(\''{' \!\\\\\\\\((\\\\\!\!-' '{''''
~~~----{\{ooo(oooo'-''o''(ooo\\{--{''!{\{\(\\\\\{{(\!\\\!!!' ~('''
~~-----o{\ooo\ooooo-o''''oo\o\\{{'oo'\o\\\\\\\\\\(\o\(\\\!'''{'-'''''
~~~-~--\oo----oooo'{'\(~\ooooooo{\o-\\o\\\\\\!!\{{{{oo\({\--!o({~~-' ~~
~~~~~~-{-\----(oo{{{ooooooo{{{{{!(ooooo{{\{{{{({({{(ooooooooooo{oooooooo{o
~~~~~~\-o~----\{o({ooooooo{\!o{{('o((\o\\\(({{{o{{{\oooo{o{{{oo{\{(-{{(ooo
~~~~~~(-{~~~--oo{-{--o-o----{~{{{~o!((o(({{{{{{o{{{ooo{\\o({(o-'{-~~!o('''
~~~~~~~\~~~~o~~{-\-~-o~~---((-{{{oo--(o(((({{{{{{{o{ooo{(\o~~{~~{--'\o{'''
~~~~~(~{~~(~~~~!-{!(\(--\\--{-{{o-{--\o((((({{({{{{{{o(({(\(-!~~-~--!{o'''
~~~~~\~~~o~~~~~-ooooooo!~~--o-\{o-(!~~o\\\\\{{{({{{{{{{((\{((~!~-o--!{{~~~
!~~~(~{o~~-----\ooooooo{~---{{~~!~(!!~(!\\\\\\\((((((((((\(\(((~~{~~\o{~!!
!~~~(~{o~~-----\ http://eyescratch.tk (!\\\\\\\((((((((((\(\(((~~{~~\o{~!!

It is interesting writing about transformative events especially in a
time where the ability to transform has supplanted so drastically the
ability to shape or compose. In this sense Zizek today writes as part
of an eastern Europe whose transformation was so sudden and thorough
among the ruling elite who maintained power, that the idealists never
stood a chance to shape it. What Zizek might not be aware of is that
among the late night discussions among western European leftists
intellectuals in the 60's and 70's, the true hard core capital
thumping Marxists made this same transformation much earlier and
quickly found opportunity within the capitalists system, as if they
had some inside knowledge of how the system works. It is interesting
how Zizek, at the end of his opinion, sums up the perspective by
stepping back and melts into the crowd. Just what part of we is Zizek?
They, the we, excluded from the Bolivarian revolution? Or failing at
it? Perhaps from another perspective, there is hope, because it
demonstrates the ability of systemic knowledge to transform
individuals (even if just for their own benefit). It means that
ideology's, even if Zizek is calling for new ideologies, inability to
catch a grip on the psyche.

These, as it turned out, invented vehicles of constructed words is the
best advert for free access. Not anymore in the realm of benign
information access, but in a mode of turbulent renunciation of past
selves accompanied by all sorts of shady dealings and back channel
communications, refuted before they are composed, yet signed
cryptically. So capitalist is not really the love and accruing of
money, but the simple ideology of looking out for number 1, as apposed
2 or 3. The drive to reform then, is to make the terms better so not
every selfless act inflicts a penalty on said outcome. Is this the way
new ideologies are born? Driven by desire to inflict less on the self?
Because the need for continual self-aggrandizement ultimately leads to
boredom?

In his warning words Zizek enunciates China. In these terms what
happened in China twenty years and a few summer months ago was much
more threatening for what has stood. A well-heeled world bank employee
at the time felt the need to pass a warning to me before those events
took shape: "When we were young we all read Mao's little red book,
but..." I forget what was the self-transformative nuance at the end of
this lecture. Then it happened. She was constructed. A testament to
looking forward in concert. A spirit that still pervades China,
nineteen years later becoming more and more adept at launching
spectacle. What defines transformative events is their ability to give
significance. There is a crucial difference in a challenge laid out
between construction and destruction in these events. No part of her
was sold stamped and packaged at Macy's. And even her likeness shifted
back to the French made original at protests on these shores.

So "what's next?" plays in a continual loop. Who is tearing down or
rather tearing open the next best thing? Or a post-package shift of an
economy that works like ecology rather than being lucrative or
ludicrous? Who is learned from a quarterly exchange of tactics?

November 9, 2009
20 Years of Collapse
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html

TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During
this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous
nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true,
the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the world
suddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few months
earlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections with
Lech Walesa as president?

However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was dispelled
by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted with an
unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in turn, as
nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as rightist, nationalist
populism; and as renewed, belated anti-Communist paranoia.

The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists who
decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heard
mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communist
nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing an
actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a form
of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the
rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a
common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization.

Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism from
Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large protests against
the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for weeks. Protesters
linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule by successors of the
Communist party. They denied the very legitimacy of the government,
although it came to power through democratic elections. When the
police went in to restore civil order, comparisons were drawn with the
Soviet Army crushing the 1956 anti-Communist rebellion.

This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June 2008,
Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of Communist
images like the hammer and sickle, as well as the playing of the
Soviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government proposed expanding
a ban on totalitarian propaganda to include Communist books, clothing
and other items: one could even be arrested for wearing a Che Guevara
T-shirt.

No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist right
to the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the old
Communist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new problems and
challenges are reduced to the repetition of old struggles, up to the
absurd claim (which sometimes arises in Poland and in Slovenia) that
the advocacy of gay rights and legal abortion is part of a dark
Communist plot to demoralize the nation.

Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from?
Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young
people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism
provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so
much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”

It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do
not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark
forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former
Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really
changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated
...

What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image
they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused
traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal
democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other
words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are
denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.

One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the
disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run
the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the
heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their
dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the former
Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the new
capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency,
inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.

A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists
allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power:
they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists
themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism,
but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating
capitalism in its own terrain.

This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always
seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion
of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume
that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.

But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to
be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What
if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of
economic development, but its impediment?

If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in
the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign
of the “immature” expectations of the people who didn’t possess a
realistic image of capitalism.

When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large
majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom
to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk
as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity,
liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the
prevailing cynical hypocrisy.

As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters were
to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology itself —
people aspired to something that can most appropriately be designated
as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude deserves a
second chance.

This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, the
Soviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission to
Washington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, “I Chose Freedom.”
His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism included a
detailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s Ukraine, where
Kravchenko — then still a true believer in the system — helped enforce
collectivization.

What most people know about Kravchenko ends in 1949. That year, he
sued Les Lettres Françaises for libel after the French Communist
weekly claimed that he was a drunk and a wife-beater and his memoir
was the propaganda work of American spies. In the Paris courtroom,
Soviet generals and Russian peasants took the witness stand to debate
the truth of Kravchenko’s writings, and the trial grew from a personal
suit to a spectacular indictment of the whole Stalinist system.

But immediately after his victory in the case, when Kravchenko was
still being hailed all around the world as a cold war hero, he had the
courage to speak out passionately against Joseph McCarthy’s witch
hunts. “I believe profoundly,” he wrote, “that in the struggle against
Communists and their organizations ... we cannot and should not resort
to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.” His warning to
Americans: to fight Stalinism in such a way was to court the danger of
starting to resemble their opponent.

Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the inequalities of
the Western world, and wrote a sequel to “I Chose Freedom” that was
titled, significantly, “I Chose Justice.” He devoted himself to
finding less exploitative forms of collectivization and wound up in
Bolivia, where he squandered all his money trying to organize poor
farmers. Crushed by this failure, he withdrew into private life and
shot himself in 1966 at his home in New York.

How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and
disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new
Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for
justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to
invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous
utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream
that holds the rest of us under its sway.

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

huillet and straub

2009-11-08T18:54:10Z

Dear nettime!

Please allow me to invite you to join (locally or remotely) a new
project we are currently preparing for the next few weeks.

OF A PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING will open next Thursday, November 12 as a
Ciné-club and exhibition on films by Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie
Straub.

http://ofapeoplewhoaremissing.net

The project approaches the work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub
from a perspective of contemporary image production. Although until very
recent almost exclusively tied to the analog mode of production the way
the two filmmakers have worked could be considered as "open source" in
the true sense of the word. Rather than owning the images they have
produced, their images try to own up to their sources or predecessors,
and therefore they value their collaborators and potential audiences in
the highest possible way.

It seems like Straub-Huillets entire work and attitude could not be more
contradictory to the digital mode of production. Instead, we understand
the background as an extreme pole of analog filmmaking which -- besides
the technical questions and challenges -- provokes a permanent
rethinking of the potentialities and limitations of the digital itself.
As the filmmakers constantly questioned the possible transformation from
one medium to the other, such as literature, painting, music towards
film, as a process of re-reading, re-inventing or readjusting of
meaning.

The "Straubs", as Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub are often
called, are among the most outstanding, and yet widely unknown
contemporary filmmakers in the history of cinema. Jean-Marie Straub and
Danièle Huillet worked together for over 40 years until Danièle
Huillet's death in October 2006. Since the early 1960s their radical
approach towards filmmaking allowed them to create more than 30 very
diverse films; they treated and transformed literature by Kafka, Pavese
and Hölderlin, as well as the paintings of Cézanne, cantatas by Bach and operas by Schönberg.

If there is such a thing as a "Pédagogie straubienne" (as Serge Daney
once hinted), the project follows the question: what can be learned
from their films today? Is it possible to translate their precision
which seems so deeply connected to and conditioned by the means of
analog film production, into what is usually conceived as the age of
digital image production, and if so, under what terms?

Huillet and Straub categorically refused to offer any kind of
interpretation that might ease or facilitate access to the artwork or
so-called original. Instead, their focus on the act of speaking, always
in very specific circumstances, opens up a multitude of possible
interpretations; this marks precisely the peculiarity of their films.
Through the speech-act the moving images change one of their most
essential properties and they become no-one's property.

No-one's property is the opposite of what pretends to belong to
everybody -- no matter whether it is communicated, participated in or
otherwise shared. In this sense one can also understand the remarks that
Gilles Deleuze repeatedly put forth in his books on cinema: the films of
the "Straubs" are made for a people who are missing. "A people" needs to
be invoked rather than represented or addressed. "The people no longer
exist, or not yet...".

The phrase "a people who are missing" is taken from the only public
lecture Paul Klee held in 1924 in the Kunstverein Jena: "Uns traegt kein
Volk." Instead of embellishing the splendid isolation of the artist,
such a people who are missing need to be understood literally and
Jean-Marie Straub once suggested dedicating his movie "The chronicle of
Anna Magdalena Bach" to the Vietcong.

OF A PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING will open in Extra City from November 12 to
December 20 as a platform for both the viewing and making of films. The
exhibition space will be structured around five studios which will act
as showrooms as well as independent production spaces. Each studio is to
be used in a different configuration of archive material, film excerpts,
actual footage and the critical discourse around it. Every Thursday to
Saturday, one studio will host invited guests and contributors for a
series of screenings, lectures and debates.

Among the contributors are: Chantal Akerman, Pietro Bianchi, Manon de
Boer, Robert Bramkamp, Vanessa Brito, Giulio Bursi, Rinaldo Censi, Anna
Fiacciarini, Jack Henrie Fisher, Peter Friedl, Kim de Groot, Romano
Guelfi, Armin Linke, Laura Malacart, Martha Rosler, Sally Shafto, Ines
Schaber, Eyal Sivan, Benoît Turquety, Barbara Ulrich, Klaus Volkmer,
Susanne Weirich.

OF A PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING
On films by Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub

Ciné-club and exhibition
12 November - 20 December 2009
Extra City - Kunsthal Antwerpen

Curated by: Annett Busch and Florian Schneider

Detailed program at:
http://ofapeoplewhoaremissing.net
http://extracity.org

Of A People Who Are Missing is a collaboration of Extra City – Kunsthal
Antwerpen and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. With the support of
Multitude e.V., Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg and Time Festival, Ghent.

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

unCraftivism: call for participation

2009-11-08T02:54:47Z

unCraftivism: call for participation

unCraftivism is an open event where you can present your own work and
organise your own event. unCraftivism is uncurated: your work will not
be judged, or restricted by a theme, neither it has to be finalised.
unCraftivism is self-organised: you organise and promote your own
event, whether a performance, a talk, a workshop, a meal, a song, a
party or other as-yet-undefined events.

How to participate in 3 steps:

1. Add your event to the programme (http://www.craftivism.net/wiki/Programme
).
2. Subscribe to the mailinglist and stay tuned to the latest news.
3. Invite your friends and show up in person or avatar from 12th to
13th of December.

Saturday 12th + Sunday 13th of December
Arnolfini (contemporary arts centre)
16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA
UK
http://www.craftivism.net
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: The Precariat and Climate Justice

2009-11-07T23:29:46Z

On Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 03:31:47PM +0100, Rob van Kranenburg wrote:
>
> Hi Felix,
>
> I really share your optimism, but just not here:

<....>

As I wondered what kind of friends Rob had, I got a similar mail from,
yes, a friend (from Germany). In fact another friend of mine actually
works, as editor, for one of these profit maximisers publishers
operating in perfect cahoot with the academic establishment. So you
try to broach the subject of open access/ publishing with these
people, and you get a sympathetic ear from the smart ones (the
minority) and very dark looks from the professionally and militantly
incompetent ones (the vast majority, especially in academia) and you
pretty well know it's hopeless... at least at that level, with these
people and within the existing institutional framework.

That makes me always wonder why people bother about occupying these
empty shells and try to get the scientific establishment(s) changed.
Why not go fishing instead? Would be like the famous German slogan of
the xxxties: "Imagine, there is war, but nobody goes there".

Cheers from the Turkish Tea House, AsiaSource3 F/OSS Camp, IIRR, Silang,
Cavite, Pilipinas (http://www.asiasource3.net)
patrizio and Diiiinooos!

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Cybernetics, finance and precarious existence

2009-11-07T07:51:26Z

Here's another twist on a perennial theme:

Cybernetics, for someone like Herbert Simon in his book "Sciences of the
Artificial," comes down to this:

1. the interactions of an agent and an environment can be modeled
2. the crucial variable is information
3. the model environment can be built
4. the agent (human beings) will conform to the built environment and
its flows of information.

Well, that's what has happened over the course of four decades with
networked financial markets. The initial model was for an instrument
called an option, which is a contract that allows its owner to buy or
sell a stock or commodity for a fixed price at a future date, creating
something like a safe haven amidst the flux and volatility of trading.
The question was, what kind of information about the financial markets
as a whole would you need in order to sell such a contract, that is,
in order to accurately determine its price and make it profitable? The
answer was a mathematical formula, the Black-Scholes option-pricing
formula, which is really the model of an idealized market in which
information about prices is known for many decades in the past and is
continuously updated in the present, so that statistical trends can be
extrapolated for every kind of asset, and random changes in price can
be conceived as blips within a predictable and regular equilibrium of
the market as a whole.

The next step is to build the environment within which the model
can be applied to the information. Well, I live in Chicago now and
they built it here, it's called the Chicago Mercantile Exchange -
"the Merc". Inside that great hall and others like it, traders with
hand-held computers linked to vast databases and lightning-fast
networked information systems are able to calculate prices on the
spot for a veritable galaxy of options, futures, swaps, swaptions and
seemingly endless varieties of derivatives. They make so much money in
that way, that gradually not only the environments inside the great
halls of finance, but also the cities around them, came to conform
to the mathematical world models pioneered by Black and Sholes. To
the point where we live inside an artificial world model: it's the
paradigm of financially regulated informational production, which is
now on the point of collapse, as Alex Foti just pointed out in his
great post on "The Precariat and Climate Justice."

Two artists, Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, constructed a
magnificent artistic allegory of the fatal universe of finance
capitalism, called "Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium." Basically
it represents the financial markets as a dome of glittering stars,
and it populates this dome with artificial life creatures whose
algorithms allow them to live, and also to die, inside the artificial
world model that has been created for them. This work is that rarest
of things in contemporary art: a stroke of genius that is beautifully
realized in all its complexity and potential, but also left wide open
to interpretation. When you realize, for example, that Fischer Black
studied artificial intelligence with Marvin Minsky and also worked
for Bolt, Beranek and Newman (the engineering company that built
the Arpanet) as well as for the RAND corporation before going on to
develop the formula that changed the world, then you begin to see just
what a rich piece of art this really is...

I have written an interpretation of the Black Shoals Stock Market
Planetarium under the title "Is it Written in the Stars? Global
Finance, Precarious Destinies." In the text, I try to explain how the
Black-Scholes model works, how our urban environments have gradually
conformed to it, and some of the consequences that brings to fragile
human destinies. Amid the endless piles of books that I ploughed
through over the course of about six months in order to write this
short article, I finally managed to take up what I think is the most
important contribution to Autonomous Marxism in many years, namely
Matteo Pasquinelli's fantastic book, "Animal Spirits," whose political
concepts orient my text from start to finish. So thanks, Matteo, for
the inspiration! My text is here:

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/is-it-written-in-the-stars

What I am trying to talk about is really the nature and also
the collapse of the financial paradigm that has regulated the
informational mode of production for the last forty-five years. So I
hope that in parallel with Alex Foti's article, maybe we can have a
good nettime debate on these things.

best, Brian

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: The Precariat and Climate Justice

2009-11-07T06:31:47Z

Hi Felix,

I really share your optimism, but just not here:

> A crucial arena in this struggle, as Brian Holmes pointed out, are
> current fights of the university and knowledge as a commons.

One Vienna swallow does not a summer in Europe make.

I still get mails from friends at Universities to buy books from their
conferences for 140 euros published by Springer Verlag and when I tell
them I have no intention to pay twice - first through taxes allowing
a system to sponsor people at universities - and a second time to a
German publisher that I do not know personally, they do reply sure
we need to do something about that, but they are clever people and
realize that any real transformation of that system would also be the
end of the universities and their jobs ( and their lives build around
those jobs) as they have no other role to play any more then sheer
powerplay and regulations of knowledge careers through their formats
of ma and phd and prof.

So if "the necessary pressure cannot come from capitalist actors and
also not from the state which is largely captured by these actors." it
can by this very definition also not come from any source that starts
from one of key actors that helped to build the power hegemony: the
university itself,

cheers! Rob

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: The Precariat and Climate Justice

2009-11-07T03:44:56Z

Hi Alex,

what a great text. I took me a while to absorb it, since there is so
much in there.

On a theoretical level, I think there are some points deserve to
be spelled out in a bit more detail. Most importantly, it makes
sense to come back to an old Marxist distinction between the "mode
of production" and the "mode of development". Despite a number of
problems with these concepts [1], I think it's vital, as you do, to
distinguish between the "technical relationships of production",
basically the techno-scientific state-of-the- art of doing things,
and the social relationships of production, that is, the social goals
towards which this state-of-the-art is employed. The relationship
between the two is fairly open.

Industrialism and informationalism refer to the mode of development.
Fordism, Soviet-style socialism and more cooperative-oriented
approaches (like Yugoslavia) where industrialism embodied in different
political projects. To me, the most convincing explanation for
the demise of the Soviet-block was its inability to move from
industrialism -- which has reached an internal impasse (threshold of
complexity) at the end of the 1960s -- to a more advanced mode of
development, informationalism.

But also informationalism can be embodied in competing political
projects. So far, we know two. One is informational capitalism,
the other is "commons-based peer production." Now, the type of
competition between these modes of production is very different from
the competition between statism and capitalism, but still, these are
systems of social relationships oriented towards different goals.
Informational capitalism, like all forms of capitalism, is oriented
towards private appropriation of surplus in the hands of the owners
of capital, based on private property and competition between market
participants. Commons-based peer production is oriented towards
use-value and cooperation between participants (competition is on the
level of attention and reputation).

If you take software production, it makes no sense to say anymore that
software production is capitalist. Sure, there are very significant
capitalist actors in it, but they no longer control the field and
the further development of the field is no longer fully-dependent
on them. In other words, there are co-existing modes of production
which together -- in mutual interdependence -- make up the "software
industry". The competition between the two modes of production is
regarding their relative weight within the field as a whole.

I think we have a comparable situation in terms of the greening of the
economy. On the level of the mode of development, there can be only
one direction: forward. We must do things much more intelligently,
and this will require more advanced technologies and more science.
Everything else is a cynical fantasy. Telling the poor to be more
frugal is not an option.

Thus, in terms of the mode of development, I don't think we are
anyway near a next paradigm, and even informational capitalism is
not particularly in crisis. The deep crisis is with the industrial
paradigm and its focus on what now appears as primitive forms of
property (copyright) and primitive ways of energy production (linear
extraction of carbon-rich, finite resources). The greening of the
economy, in my view, is an expansion of informationalism, since, as
Brian pointed out, even genetic engineering basically views DNA as
information system susceptible to the same forms of manipulation like
digital information systems. Meaningless bits -- 4 rather than 2,
though -- to be rearranged into complex networks capable of producing
any meaning. Every cell is now a Turing machine.

The deep question is whether we can establish other modes of
production which can mobilize the state-of-the-art towards other
goals. I guess commons-based peer production, or more generally,
the commons, is the best conceptual and practical basis for such a
project we have right now. So, the underlying question becomes how
much "green capitalism" do we need to advance an ecological commons.
I'm convinced that part of that ecological commons is also a social
and a informational commons, and the demands of the developing
countries that green technologies should me made freely available --
rather than expensively licensed to them -- shows that.

Green capitalism cannot produce an ecological commons, since
capitalism, geared towards private appropriation, cannot think in
these terms. However, if the commons becomes the dominant framework
on which the existence also capitalist actors depends in an immediate
way, it will seek ways to appropriate surplus that do not destroy the
commons. Put crudely, the GPL forced IBM to advance the free software
commons in the pursuit of private profit. But software is also a
misleading example because of the particular force of the GPL. For the
ecological commons, regulation and supply-side subsidies will make all
the difference.

However, as Alex points out more clearly than I can, as pointed out,
the necessary pressure cannot come from capitalist actors and also not
from the state which is largely captured by these actors. The pressure
must come from these sectors where practice of the commons are already
(or still) established.

A crucial arena in this struggle, as Brian Holmes pointed out, are
current fights of the university and knowledge as a commons. If only
because this seems to be one of the fights that's actually winnable.
Not the least because there is the potential to build large coalitions
around it. On the one hand, universal eduction is a project that is
at the very core of enlightenment, thus it's a deeply felt, positive
value of the enlightened bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it the
contemporary university is a site of precarization. Plus, it's a
genuinely inter-generational concern (students worry about themselves,
parents worry about their kids and remembering the very different
conditions of their own education, at least in EU-land).

The breath of the possible coalition around free universities can
currently be witnessed in Austria, of all places [2]. A wild-cat
occupation of the lecture halls at universities in Vienna has spread
across the country and waves of solidarity are simply amazing,
including unions and pensioner's associations (which are very powerful
in this gerontocratic country). The disappointment with the current
political system is very deep producing a lot of energy. This is
usually harnessed by the extreme right here. Not this time, and not
around this issue. Others will follow.

Felix

[1] The main problem is the general economism of Marxism so that this
differentiation is made only in terms of the economy, and assumes that
the state-of-the-art exist primarily there whereas the social live is
assumed to be more or less free of technology and is not seen as a
source of techno-scientific innovation.

[2] http://unsereuni.at

--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now:
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

The Shrimp Prince in Mexico: sabotage or poetic inspiration by La Chingada?

2009-11-06T22:03:56Z

Prins Garnaal in Mexico/ The Shrimp Prince in Mexico: sabotage or
poetic inspiration by La Chingada?

November 6, 2009 by Tjebbe van Tijen
When we shout “Viva Mexico Hijos de la Chingada!” we express our
desire to live closed off from the outside world, and above all, from
the past. In this shout we deny our origins and deny our hybridism.

[Octavio Paz "The labyrinth of solitude: and the other Mexico" (first
edition published in 1950 as "El laberinto de la soledad"]

Prince Willem Alexander spiced up his state visit lecture in Mexico
on environmental issues on November 4 2009 (as he likes to change his
color from orange to green) with this little sentence: “Let me
conclude by giving you a Mexican proverb.

“Camaron que se duerme se lo lleva la chingada”.
(intended as “a shrimp that is sleeps is washed away by the tide”)

The rather short speech (a full copy can be found on the web-site of
the Dutch Royal House and I kept a copy in PDF format just in case
the translation may be lost for posterity) had some other references
to the Aztec empire as “children of the sun” linking that to solar
energy and the natural partnership of Mexico and the Netherlands as
providers of oil and gas and at the same cautioning his audience
about the needed restraint in its usage. The word “chingada” does
appear in the official State Information Service (RVD) both on the
Royals House web site and elsewhere signed © RVD .

It had to be ‘corriente’ instead of ‘chingada’ with its historical
connotation of violence as started by conquistador Cortes: molesting,
pricking, wounding, killing, the violated mother and many more
negative associations.
The prince thus has created himself a new emblematic personality “THE
SHRIMP PRINCE” or in Dutch PRINS GARNAAL (with its connotation of the
word Prinsgemaal, the Dutch attribute given to the husband of a queen).

==========
These are the opening sentences of a day and night long attempt to
research all the sources and put this seemingly silly incident in its
historical context, also documenting the lazy and low level rendering
of the event in the mainly royalist Dutch press.

My search did lead me me not only to the past and the special meaning
of the word Chingada for Mexicans, but I also discovered a lead to
what seems to be a corrido music group that has played and publish a
song with exactly the same "mistaken" title as the lapses of the
Dutch crown prince in Mexico.

All this can be found at my blog The Limping Messenger, fully
illustrated and documented.

http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/prins-garnaal-in-
mexico-the-shrimp-prince-in-mexico/

Tjebbe van Tijen
Imaginary Museum Projects
Dramatizing Historical Information
http://imaginarymuseum.org
web-blog: The Limping Messenger
http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: part 1: ecologies of self-display

2009-11-06T04:52:10Z

1. Maybe there are different desires, not only one "behind" the others ;
2. "Immersion" (vs separation) is not only a desire but our
contemporary condition - of course we can argue that this condition is
the result of a productive desire, but it's not enough, the
"quasi-cause" comes back on the desire and changes the situation,
forces a shift in the desire agency;
3. and I guess we have to take into account the existing fear of
immersion AS the repulsive and final possible result of the desire ;
4. at last, to give up oneself with any kind of reliance / reliable
frame seems to me weird ...
5. so, why not and exposure and separation (= sustainable world,
sustainable erotics) ?

(excuse me for my bad english)

Frédéric Neyrat

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: The Precariat and Climate Justice

2009-11-05T12:07:11Z

Thank you ALEX for writing a great visionary political text that takes
the strongest theoretical arguments and addresses them directly to the
people in the streets! I haven't read anything this interesting in a
dog's age, that is, since 1999...

> From the ashes of early 21st century
> free-market liberalism, a new form of social and political regulation
> of the economy will have to emerge if the crisis is to find a
> democratic solution. In fact, just like in the interwar period,
> especially in Europe, the danger of authoritarian and xenophobic
> solutions to the Big Crisis is significant.

Every half-decent historical theory of industrial capitalism shows that
after initial technological booms we run into deep regulation crises
that can only be fixed by changing the institutions of government,
exchange and redistribution. And every half-conscious theorist knows
there is no guarantee that it will be done except for the direst
necessity. "So it falls onto the anarchists, feminists, precarious,
immigrants, on those radical actors that have a stake in subverting the
present financial order, to fight for real climate justice, to bring the
economy back under the control of polities and communities," that's it
and what a responsibility... For those who haven't read the historical
stuff I wanna point their braincells to a Left Curve piece you wrote a
few years ago, which seems like the foundation this new text builds on:

http://www.leftcurve.org/LC31WebPages/Grid&ForkTable.pdf

Compare it to the schema of a smart mainstream theorist like Carlota
Perez, you can see the overlap and also the kind of depth and detail
that Alex is working off:

brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/perez-installationdeployment1.jpg

> The Great Recession, just like the Great Depression three generations
> ago, is a major demand crisis leading to mass unemployment and
> underemployment. It won't be solved until the collective fruits of
> social productivity finally accrue to the employed and unemployed
> instead of managers and financiers. This requires massive fiscal
> redistribution from the tiny élites to the precarious multitudes. Free
> public health and education, basic income and leisure expansion, green
> jobs and new labor and property laws are the first-aid tools to
> address the crisis and ferry us toward a postcapitalist society, where
> corporations and investment banks are dismantled, credit is
> socialized, copyright is abolished, culture and knowledge are freely
> shared, the global economy is regionalized, food distribution networks
> are localized, energy production is decentralized, and political power
> is federalized, in regional and transnational federations of
> autonomous cities and liberated lands.

Rhetorical question: Who said our movements aren't proposing anything???

But now I wanna ask some real questions, means, ones where I don't
already have the answer. First, does Green Capitalism even exist? I
definitely see what you call "eco-keynesian regulation lite," but the
environment being protected by all those massive monetary injections is
the environment for speculation, basta. I know if California's
Proposition 7 would've passed last year it would have stoked a green
boom, cause half the state's energy would've had to be clean by 2025 -
but it didn't pass. What do you suppose green capitalism really is? Are
there industries starting, or new molecular economic practices? I'm out
of it, tell us what you know about this...

> if green capitalism is just greenwashing, i.e.
> marketing hype unsupported by hard facts, ultimately the ecological
> crisis will end up endangering capitalist accumulation leading to the
> the common ruin of today's contending social classes: the global élite
> and the transnational precariat. If, on the other hand, green
> capitalism is the harbinger of a fourth industrial revolution (first:
> steam and textiles; second: electricity, steel, chemicals; third:
> electronics, networking; fourth: genomics, greenomics), productivity
> will rise and this would create a favorable context for victories on
> wages and labor conditions, as well as ease political resistance to
> income redistribution

This is the heart of your economic argument, so I wonder what you see as
a possible fourth industrial revolution (or maybe a fifth, 'cause a lot
of people start with water mills and then put railroads and steam in
before in before steel and electricity). Couldn't capitalism already
grow, and grow intelligently and greenly, on the basis of an egalitarian
distribution of informatic production? You know, genetic engineering is
more or less informatics, it's DNA interpreted on the informational
model. I'd say neoliberal aka financial capitalism is a failed
regulation of informational production. Is what we need a green
regulation of informationalism that clears out all the financial waste,
or is informationalism consubstantial with financialization and do we
need something entirely different? Anyway, I'd like to hear more about
the next revolution if you see it in the wings!

> Yet, economic growth only has a meaning if measured in money terms,
> not in physical terms. So, in principle a socially regulated form of
> capitalism can be envisaged that still grows in dollar terms (and this
> overcomes the economic crisis), but not in entropic terms. A stage of
> the economy where immaterial growth becomes the norm, along with the
> maximization of collective knowledge and social well-being, rather
> than corporate profit or private wealth. An economy where people
> mostly exchange immaterial services rather than material goods. In
> other words, a world where there's money to be made in the economy,
> because informational as well as green jobs are available in large and
> increasing numbers.

Is this the anarcho-green solution to the riddle of cognitive
capitalism? So far, all the proposals for a basic income in Italy and
France that I know have excluded the green issue or any other question
of socially constructive activity and have instead been based mostly on
the idea of a solution to precarity and a pathway to free desire. What
you're talking about is a validation in monetary terms of different
kinds of productivity. That would ultimately mean a redefinition of what
productive capital is, since so far it has been defined as
concentrations of alienating machines and hierarchical management. Am I
behind the times on the "reditto di cittadidanza" crowd? Are there
theorists in Italy who are making these ideas explicit?

> Increasingly, the Italian and
> German traditions of autonomia are intertwined with anarchist,
> antifascist and antiracist strands to form an anarchoautonomist
> synthesis across Europe. A generation totally oblivious of 20th
> century ideological disputes does not distinguish between anarchist
> and autonomous resistance: on the barricades, all you see is black
> hoodies fighting state repression and corporate domination.

Alex, tell me, isn't there a major major major problem of political
articulation right here? You say the aim of the anarcho-autonomist wing
is SMASH THE STATE. But all your argument says TRANSFORM STATE
CAPITALISM. Where's the bridge? We know it in practice: education,
social services and income redistribution, give people what they want
and what they need. But doesn't there have to be some redefinition in
theory of the basic aim, if only to avoid getting chucked in the
terrorist bucket by the fascist fossil capitalist types who are really
still a majority? Or a damn powerful big loud uberminority anyway? I
think the question is serious, because so far, every ultraleftist
upsurge produces a stronger fascistoid reaction and I am not sure those
days are over...

Nobody wants a vanguard and not me either, but don't we have to think
seriously about a class fraction that can mediate between the excluded
precariat and the clueless green capitalist liberals? You know, my big
idea now is that the whole thing stands or falls on the capacity to
really take over the universities, and then all the smash the state
folks think I'm a proto-traitor...

> Redistribution of wealth and power toward the precarious, growth of
> immaterial knowledge, cultural enrichment of society and massive
> expansion of leisure are fundamental social preconditions for the
> horizontal eco-social design of a resilient postcapitalist society,
> freeing the time to pursue ecohacktive and permacultural activities,
> giving the time and money back to precarized people to work for
> environmental remediation and think collectively about their own
> future, cutting the need for quick consumption and instant
> satisfaction.

We are dyin' for it and that ain't no joke!

ecored anarchosolidarities,

Brian

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Re: George Monbiot: Why the sudden surge in climate change denial?

2009-11-04T13:58:09Z

Chickens are coming home to roost for scientists. They have
squandered the credibility they earned in the early days of
public interest scientific research by craven work with the military
and corporations.

Horrible scientific consequences have come to the earth and
its inhabitants by unethical scientists, and the small number who
do public benefit work cannot match the deleterirousness of
harm caused by willingly captive, well-paid scientists and their
technological implementors, engineers.

Health-related scientists and technicians -- medical, pharmaceutical,
profit-making health entrepreneurs -- have become as untrustworthy
as mass-death weapons designers who still abet the huge worldwide
overkill of military and intelligence threat-generation and putative
defenses under the narcotizing rubic "national security."

Why scientists think they should be believed on the basis of
"scientific evidence" is not terribly different from why other
puveyors are hypnotized by their self-referencing conviction.

Scientific advocacy is on shaky ground when it cannot be readily
explained in common sense language rather than by complex,
arcane modelings which appear to be as much shamanism as
biblical certainty. Jiminy, the popularizing sci-fi movie by Al Gore
is shameful as shilling for the health industry.

It is no answer to smear the room temperature-IQ disbelievers.
That smacks of easy greasy condescension in lieu of considering
that scientists -- a huge special interest group -- deserve to be
cut down to size if they do not want to be seen as an infallible
priesthood.

A fundamental principle of good science is skepticism about
received wisdom, in particular those seers who predict doom
for humanity unless ... humans stop thinking for themselves.

The ratcheting up of climate doomsday has become ridiculously
herdlike, verily a mirror of climate change opponents. The stoning
of anybody who disagrees is despicable no matter who does it.

This is not to suggest that stoning is not a perfectly healthy
reaction against those who propound cures from apothecaries
of enlightenment (spit).

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

George Monbiot: Why the sudden surge in climate change denial?

2009-11-04T03:07:29Z

Bwo Sarai Reader List/ Jeebesh
With usual apps for X-posting

dear All,

Here is an arresting essay by Monbiot on the climate change denial.
It's an intriguing reality. Climate change is going to displace
millions and put substantial ethical pressure on ways of living of
people used to certain form of material life. This is not going to be
a simple conflict less process.

Species survival is at risk :)

warmly

jeebesh

"If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are
closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against
reminders of death? I haven???t been able to find any experiments
testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And
could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the
past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific
evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?"

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/02/death-denial/

Why the sudden surge in climate change denial? Could it be about
something else altogether?

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 2nd November 2009

There is no point in denying it: we're losing. Climate change denial
is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which
cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to
draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious
invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the
proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the
world has been warming over the past few decades has fallen from 71%
to 57% in just 18 months(1). Another survey, conducted in January by
Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US
voters who believe that global warming is the result of natural causes
(44%) now outnumber those who believe it is caused by human action
(41%)(2).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet
pages proposing that manmade global warming is a hoax or a lie more
than doubled in 2008(3). The Science Museum's Prove it! exhibition
asks online readers to endorse or reject a statement that they have seen
the evidence and want governments to take action. As of yesterday
afternoon, 1006 people had endorsed it and 6110 had rejected it(4). On
Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently
ranked at 1,2,4,5,7 and 8 in the global warming category(5). Never
mind that they have been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers,
they are beating the scientific books by miles. What is going on?

It certainly doesn't reflect the state of the science, which has
hardened dramatically over the past two years. If you don't believe
me, open any recent edition of Science or Nature or any peer-reviewed
journal specialising in atmospheric or environmental science. Go on,
try it. The debate about global warming that is raging on the internet
and in the rightwing press does not reflect any such debate in the
scientific journals.

An American scientist I know suggests that these books and websites
cater to a new literary market: people with room-temperature IQs. He
didn???t say whether he meant Fahrenheit or Centigrade. But this can???t
be the whole story. Plenty of intelligent people have also declared
themselves sceptics.

One such is the critic Clive James. You could accuse him of purveying
trite received wisdom, but not of being dumb. On Radio Four a few days
ago he delivered an essay about the importance of scepticism, during
which he maintained that "the number of scientists who voice
scepticism [about climate change] has lately been increasing."(6) He
presented no evidence to support this statement and, as far as I can
tell, none exists. But he used this contention to argue that "either
side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on
that scale, you can't call it a consensus. Nobody can meaningfully say
that the science is in."

Had he bothered to take a look at the quality of the evidence on
either side of this media debate, and the nature of the opposing
armies - climate scientists on one side, rightwing bloggers on the
other - he too might have realised that the science is in. In, at any
rate, to the extent that science can ever be, which is to say that the
evidence for manmade global warming is as strong as the evidence for
Darwinian evolution, or for the link between smoking and lung cancer.
I am constantly struck by the way in which people like James, who
proclaim themselves sceptics, will believe any old claptrap that suits
their views. Their position was perfectly summarised by a supporter of
Ian Plimer (author of a marvellous concatenation of gibberish called
Heaven and Earth(7)) commenting on a recent article in the Spectator.
"Whether Plimer is a charlatan or not, he speaks for many of us"(8).
These people aren't sceptics; they are suckers.

Such beliefs seem to be strongly influenced by age. The Pew report
found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the
population to deny that there is solid evidence that the earth is
warming, that it is caused by humans or that it is a serious problem(9).
This chimes with my own experience. Almost all my fiercest arguments
over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with
people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?

There are some obvious answers: they won't be around to see the
results; they were brought up in a period of technological optimism;
they feel entitled, having worked all their lives, to fly or cruise to
wherever they wish. But there might also be a less intuitive reason,
which shines a light into a fascinating corner of human psychology.

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the
fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with "vital lies" or "the
armour of character"(10). We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror
by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and
grant us meaning that extends beyond death. Over 300 studies conducted
in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker's thesis(11). When people are
confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death
they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas
that threaten it and increasing their striving for self-esteem(12).

One of the most arresting findings is that immortality projects can
bring death closer. In seeking to defend the symbolic, heroic self
that we create to suppress thoughts of death, we might expose the
physical self to greater danger. For example, researchers at Bar-Ilan
University in Israel found that people who reported that driving
boosted their self-esteem drove faster and took greater risks after
they had been exposed to reminders of death(13).

A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the
journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and
discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to
repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the
terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their
character armour but diminish our chances of survival(14). There is
already experimental evidence suggesting that some people respond to
reminders of death by increasing consumption(15). Dickinson proposes
that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as
well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists.
Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central
immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth,
supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are
closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against
reminders of death? I haven't been able to find any experiments
testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And
could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the
past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific
evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?

www.monbiot.com

With thanks to George Marshall

References:

1. http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/556.pdf

2.http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/44_say_global_warming_due_to_planetary_trends_not_people

3. http://www.desmogblog.com/2008-stats-global-warming-denial-blogosphere

4. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx

5. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_8?rh=n%3A266239%2Cn%3A!1025612%2Cn%3A57%2Cn%3A278080%2Cn%3A922416&bbn=278080&ie=UTF8&qid=1257145116&rnid=278080

6. Clive James, 23rd October 2009. A Point of View. BBC Radio 4.http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n9lm3/A_Point_of_View_23_10_2009/

7. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/09/14/answers-come-there-none/

8. http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5332261/an-empty-chair-for-monbiot.thtml

9. http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/556.pdf

10. Ernest Becker, 1973. The Denial of Death, pp47-66. Republished
1997. Free Press Paperbacks, New York.

11. Tom Pyszczynski et al, 2006. On the Unique Psychological Import of
the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations. Psychological
Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4, 328???356.

12. Jeff Greenberg et al, 1992. Terror Management and Tolerance: does
mortality salience always intensify negative reactions to others who
threaten one's worldview? Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, Vol 63, No 2 212-220.

13. OT Ben-Ari et al, 1999. The impact of mortality salience on
reckless driving: a test of terror management mechanisms. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 76, No 1 35-45.

14. Janis L. Dickinson, 2009. The People Paradox: Self-Esteem
Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change.http://www.ecologyandsociety.org:80/vol14/iss1/art34/

15. T. Kasser and K. M. Sheldon, 2000. Of wealth and death:
materialism, mortality salience, and consumption behavior.
Psychological Science 11:348-351, Cited by Janis L Dickinson, above.
_________________________________________
reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
Critiques & Collaborations
To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request@... with subscribe in the subject header.
To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>

----- End forwarded message -----

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

The Precariat and Climate Justice

2009-11-04T01:06:08Z

For the "Anarchy, Autonomy, Ecology" table and for footnotes (some on
marxian theory of value) please read complete version here:

http://www.greatrecession.info/2009/11/03/the-precarious-question-and-the-climate-struggle/

The Precarious Question and the Climate Struggle
Fighting for Social and Ecological Justice. Because Climate Change
Makes All of Us Precarious.

Alex Foti

Precarity in the Great Recession

The Great Recession is making millions of precarious workers
unemployed. Millions of precarious youth, women, immigrants are being
made redundant. The crisis is swelling the ranks of the precariat, the
new class created by neoliberalism which is the sum of those who are
either unemployed or working under non-standard, temporary, part-time
contracts in service, creative, knowledge industries. Those
responsible for the crisis -- big banks, investment funds, free-market
economists and governments -- whitewash and greenwash without shame
hoping to go on with business as usual. Governments are giving
trillions to the bankers and peanuts to the precarious. Riots and
protests are spreading as a result, also resisting rising
securitarianism and racism, but the fight against political and
economic power to defend society and nature has just begun.

This historic crisis parallels the Great Depression in scope, if not
in depth (extraordinary monetary expansion has so far cushioned the
blow of the financial crisis), and will have similarly far-reaching
socioeconomic and political consequences. From the ashes of early 20th
century free-market liberalism, the Fordist-Keynesian mode of
regulation emerged, ensuring working-class economic inclusion into
mass consumerism via high wages and social integration via extensive
welfare-state provisions. From the ashes of early 21st century
free-market liberalism, a new form of social and political regulation
of the economy will have to emerge if the crisis is to find a
democratic solution. In fact, just like in the interwar period,
especially in Europe, the danger of authoritarian and xenophobic
solutions to the Big Crisis is significant.

Today's crisis marks the end of Neoliberal-Hayekian regulation, as
imposed over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to the seminal
political work done by Reagan, Thatcher, Deng, Pinochet in the two
hemispheres. But this once-in-a-century crisis occurs in the scary
geoclimatic setting of Anthropocene, the man-made geological age
triggered by the extremely rapid burning of fossil fuels in order to
feed capital accumulation. The climate crisis is becoming
frighteningly apparent, from polar caps to river deltas, from
temperate plains to tropical forests. Millions of species are dying,
millions of people are being displaced by droughts and floods. From
the likes of Gore and Stern it's hard to expect a veritable solution
to the causes of climate change, since this would mean to confront the
major carbon emitters, such as energy conglomerates, manufacturing
corporations and their logistics, the aviation industry, fast food and
agribusiness, mass tourism, in essence to shelve global, free-trade
capitalism as we have known it since the Fall of the Wall. Turned
liberals, most greens today just lack the political teeth needed to
confront squarely corporate capitalism for its double responsibility
in the economic and ecological crises. If anything, they are for green
capitalism. So it falls onto the anarchists, feminists, precarious,
immigrants, on those radical actors that have a stake in subverting
the present financial order, to fight for real climate justice, to
bring the economy back under the control of polities and communities,
so that bioregional and atmospheric balances and constraints are
respected.

The Great Recession, just like the Great Depression three generations
ago, is a major demand crisis leading to mass unemployment and
underemployment. It won't be solved until the collective fruits of
social productivity finally accrue to the employed and unemployed
instead of managers and financiers. This requires massive fiscal
redistribution from the tiny élites to the precarious multitudes. Free
public health and education, basic income and leisure expansion, green
jobs and new labor and property laws are the first-aid tools to
address the crisis and ferry us toward a postcapitalist society, where
corporations and investment banks are dismantled, credit is
socialized, copyright is abolished, culture and knowledge are freely
shared, the global economy is regionalized, food distribution networks
are localized, energy production is decentralized, and political power
is federalized, in regional and transnational federations of
autonomous cities and liberated lands.

The issue of the distribution of productivity is crucial. The
structural cause of the Great Recession lies in the failure of
neoliberalism to distribute the productivity growth afforded by the
digital revolution to large strata of society, who then had to take on
debt to finance consumption of the new informational goods and
services. Green capitalism wants to solve the economic crisis via
green jobs and a new welfare system, but it will succeed in its task,
only if it manages to widely redistribute what Negri and Hardt call
"common wealth" i.e. the backlog of collective inventions, creations,
relations and desires presently appropriated by Gates, Murdoch,
Berlusconi, and the like.

The debate is open among leftists about whether green capitalism is
economically sustainable (possibly so), and if so, if will lead to
ecological sustainability (hardly so). Ecomarxists, for whom the labor
theory of value is dogma, believe that the ecological crisis entails a
squeeze in the rate of surplus value and thus a tendency for the rate
of profit to fall*. Empirically, if productivity declines because of
the ecological crisis, due to increases in the cost of energy or to
the internalization (inclusion in the business cost of products and
services) of the environmental damages caused by the economic process,
then ecomarxists are right and green capitalism is unsustainable due
to falling profits. If, conversely the ecological crisis triggers a
green technological revolution, the rate of profit can stay equal as
wages rise, so that green capitalism can create its own demand. In
simpler words, if green capitalism is just greenwashing, i.e.
marketing hype unsupported by hard facts, ultimately the ecological
crisis will end up endangering capitalist accumulation leading to the
the common ruin of today's contending social classes: the global élite
and the transnational precariat. If, on the other hand, green
capitalism is the harbinger of a fourth industrial revolution (first:
steam and textiles; second: electricity, steel, chemicals; third:
electronics, networking; fourth: genomics, greenomics), productivity
will rise and this would create a favorable context for victories on
wages and labor conditions, as well as ease political resistance to
income redistribution via progressive taxation (when taxes hit the
rich proportionally more than the poor; under neoliberalism taxation
has instead been regressive). Another way of looking at this is to
consider the fact that the price of a good is equal to the wage rate
divided by productivity (production per hour worked) multiplied by one
plus the rate of profit, the margin that rewards the entrepreneur and
pays interest to the banker. At constant prices, if productivity
increases because of a rise in energy efficiency, either the wage rate
rises or the rate of profit must increase, or a combination of the two
factors§.

Contrary to what Marx predicted, improvements in wages and living
standards have been made possible under capitalism thanks to the
combination of much-sweated technological innovation and hard-fought
social redistribution. Have these improvements come at the cost of
bankrupting the biosphere? It will end up like that if social
resistance to capitalism is not strong enough to decarbonize the
economy. In other words, if climate anarchists lose the incipient
struggle with green capitalists. If movements lose the fight for
climate justice, Earth might become like Venus. From the experience of
the poor and precarious of New Orleans, we know the horrors that lie
in store when climate disaster strikes a class-polarized urban
society. The climate question conceals a social question, because the
precarious stand to lose the most in the biocrisis. On the other hand,
precarious need to be empowered to be effective antagonists to global
financial élites; only if they secure income and leisure, they can
have the freedom to erect the postcapitalist society.
Precarious-to-precarious community solutions to urban habitats,
energy, food production and social housing will have to become
increasingly common as answers to unemployment and environmental
crisis. Whole cities can be redesigned by expanding self-organized
groups of precarious ecohacktivists living from their collective labor
and the sharing of what's produced and exchanged in their social
networks.

If climate justice movements lose the battle that is taking tens of
thousands to Copenhagen in December and thus fail to impose their
collective will onto government and corporate technocrats, then by the
middle of this century most of us will be either drowned or toasted.
What's at stake is neither the survival of capitalism nor
industrialism, but of digital civilization and the promise of the
universal access to information, knowledge and culture that the switch
to postindustrialism has made possible.

Industrialism, informationalism, green capitalism

Green capitalism cannot be simply liquidated as a marketing ploy. It
embodies the faction of the global bourgeoisie that understands the
reality of climate change and of its own declining political
legitimacy in the face of the banking crisis and the consequent end of
neoliberal/monetarist hegemony. Capital does seek now to be submitted
to a light top-down, as opposed to bottom-up, form of regulation,
which, while warranting the survival of megabanks and
megacorporations, tries to accommodate ecological imperatives and
social needs. Fossil capitalism, on the other hand, is purely
reactionary. It has long denied the existence of man-made planetary
heating and it is now lobbying to seize upon the spaces opened by
geopolitical (Iraq, Sudan etc become up for grabs) and ecological (the
North-East and North-West passages are open) disasters. It has spawned
the growth of an oil-military complex that is the biggest threat to
the peace and welfare of humankind. The open defeat of Bushism by
Obama's civil society (young, women, Blacks, Latinos, churches,
unions, community movements) signals the decline of petromilitarism
and the rise of green capitalism. The new US administration is a
definitely a friend of global capitalism and to ensure its viability
is putting forward a set of policies amounting to eco-keynesian
regulation lite, to salvage what’s left of the hegemony of US banks
and corporations over the world economy. Obama’s economic policy is
keynesian because it provides a demand stimulus via deficit spending:
in a deep recession, banks are not lending, firms are not investing,
consumers are not spending, so the state must step in to provide
spending power and capital for investment. But it is eco- in the sense
it provides incentives to augment energy efficiency of the economy and
de-carbonize part of its power production.

Original Fordist keynesianism was incredibly wasteful in energy terms.
Oil was made so cheap and consumer goods so abundant that the
biosphere was trashed in the short space of three decades (1945-1975).
The Soviet bloc, placing an increasingly oblolescent emphasis on heavy
industry and lacking societal counterbalances to communist policies of
industrial might, was proportionally more wasteful, producing a larger
share of nuclear and environmental disasters. In their ideological
competition, both the US and the USSR strove to empower their working
classes as loyal citizens, producers and consumers. Industrialism was
their common structural base. However, it will be wrong to look at the
present ecological crisis as the crisis of "industrial society". In
fact, over the last three decades, informationalism has replaced
industrialism as the dominant system of accumulation. Indeed the
failure of command economies to perform the transition from
industrialism to informationalism, from the electrical engine to the
electronic chip, is viewed by contemporary sociology as the structural
reason behind the implosion of the Soviet Union. Now the inherited
neoliberal form of informational capitalism is morphing into green
capitalism. The evidence for this is mounting: from Silicon Valley
becoming a hotbed for solar to green sectors soon surpassing aerospace
and defense in economic weight, according to a recent study made by
the international bank HSBC. Industrialism is dependent on oil, coal
and other hydrocarbons in a way that informationalism is not. Steel
needs coal, the Net doesn’t. The problem with green capitalism is that
the scale effect is likely to more than offset any improvements in
energy intensity, so that emissions continue rise. Left to its own
instincts, green capitalism would be ecologically unsustainable. A
steady-state market economy can only come into being through extreme
regulation from below and above.

Yet, economic growth only has a meaning if measured in money terms,
not in physical terms. So, in principle a socially regulated form of
capitalism can be envisaged that still grows in dollar terms (and this
overcomes the economic crisis), but not in entropic terms. A stage of
the economy where immaterial growth becomes the norm, along with the
maximization of collective knowledge and social well-being, rather
than corporate profit or private wealth. An economy where people
mostly exchange immaterial services rather than material goods. In
other words, a world where there's money to be made in the economy,
because informational as well as green jobs are available in large and
increasing numbers. The question of growth must be reconsidered, and
is in fact being reconsidered by economists and politicians in the
light of the crisis: GDP will be soon replaced by alternative
indicator of economic performance and socio-environmental progress.

Today, the décroissance approach is likely to fall on deaf ears,
because it preaches parsimony to a population which is being
precarized by the global recession. Climate justice is definitely a
stronger rallying cry for all the forces resisting capitalist
domination today, one that already resonates from North to South. If
the overdeveloped North must certainly decrease material consumption,
the recovery from the crisis can only occur if there's more effective
demand in euro, dollar, yuan terms in the hands of those with less
money in their pockets and thus likely to spend it when given the
opportunity: the poor, women, precarious and/or immigrant youth.
Social regulation must ensure that this extra money is not spent at
the mall but in ways that are thermodynamically sound: into
sustainable mobility, local agricultural produce, reforestation, and
renewable energy deployment, for example. Social spending must be used
to strengthen the social networks of solidarity within and across
generations and lands. The precarious strata and the informal,
marginal sectors of society are the ones that stand to benefit the
most from fiscal redistribution. Only generalized conflict can
emancipate the precarious and lead to sharp increases in social
spending.

Like the wobblies a century ago, the precarious must organize across
genders and ethnic groups to create their own unions and fight for a
much larger slice of the pie. If the pie's shrinking like Latouche
wants, as people save more and consume less, many more will be made
jobless and the precariat is gonna end up in an even more precarious
condition than under neoliberalism. It's true that capitalism is
addicted to growth, but this is monetary growth, not necessarily an
increase in the amount of "stuff" produced.

The distinction between bounded material growth and unbounded
immaterial growth is useful to conceive a social scenario that is
postcapitalist and progressive. Politically, this would also be a
society where the different aims of anarchosyndicalists (constructing
a postcapitalist egalitarian commonwealth) and anarchogreens (creating
a thermodynamicist society of peers on a biodiverse planet) can be
reconciled. It's a social scenario where the autonomous, pirate, queer
practices of the immaterial precariat are able to defeat the political
offensive of green capitalism and drive the transition toward
postcapitalism, an economy meeting ecological and social targets where
grassroots experimentation is encouraged and regulation is horizontal
and bottom-up, rather than vertical and top-down. To address both the
economic and ecological crisis in my view we would have to push for a
service, relational, commons-based peer-production economy, whose aim
is the growth in knowledge, leisure and culture as opposed to the
growth of goods and material wealth. This would be a society based on
ecological remediation, immaterial accumulation and the maximization
of happiness among its participants, rather than on material opulence
for a minority of people.

Synopsis so far: we have an economic and ecological crisis of
capitalism where class and climate struggles become central. The
social actors of class struggle are new, since capitalism is no longer
industrial, but has become informational. They are the precarious,
those whose rights and talents have been immolated on the altar of
labor flexibility and financial profit. The precarious in the
informational economy must embrace the climate question, because the
solidaristic postcapitalist welfare society they demand can only be
achieved if the ecological struggle fought by the climate anarchists
is won. Since the precariat is the new anticapitalist social subject,
radical ecology shall become its ideology.

Anarchist movements and postcapitalism

The death of communism two decades ago and the birth of the
antiglobalization movement a decade ago have brought anarchism to the
fore as the only plausible anticapitalist ideology, online and
offline. But what's anarchism today? Or more interestingly, who are
the anarchists? I think they mainly come in three types:
anarchogreens, anarchosyndicalists and anarchoautonomists. One could
add the anarchoinsurrectionists, but Julien Coupat in theory and the
Greek rebellion in practice have created a new hybrid category, dubbed
anarcho-autonomie in France, which is highlighted by the insurgent,
antiauthoritarian practices spreading across the dissident/immigrant
youth of Europe and North America. Increasingly, the Italian and
German traditions of autonomia are intertwined with anarchist,
antifascist and antiracist strands to form an anarchoautonomist
synthesis across Europe. A generation totally oblivious of 20th
century ideological disputes does not distinguish between anarchist
and autonomous resistance: on the barricades, all you see is black
hoodies fighting state repression and corporate domination. The
comparative table below portrays the three major anticapitalist
tendencies at work today, and the spectrum of resources for conflict
they offer to the disaffected youth of the metropolises of the planet.
It will be interesting to see how the various discourses of
anticapitalism and radical ecology will mesh into direct action
between December 11 and 16 during the COP15 Climate Summit targeting
fossil capitalism, policed borders, agribusiness, indigenous peoples’
sovereignty, and the very legitimacy and effectiveness of the
conference itself.

Anarchy, Autonomy, Ecology: A Trinity for Anarchists?
Anarchogreen Anarchosyndicalist Anarchoautonomist

Aim Defend Earth Subvert Economy Smash State

Issue climate change
social inequality political domination
Ideology radical ecology revolutionary unionism
autonomous marxism
Direct Action ecotage
wildcat strike urban riot
Actors ecohacktivists, vegans, animalists, indigenous
peoples precarious/migrant workers, landless, unemployed p2p
multitude, immaterial labor, multiethnic underclass
Movements
(examples) Earth First!, Climate Camp, KlimaX, MCJ IWA-AIT, SUF, CNT,
euromayday Dissent, Indymedia, No Border, Antifa networks

It's vital for anarchist and libertarian tendencies to look out to the
wider world, while keeping themselves open to the queer and creative
influences coming from contemporary society and popular culture.
Ideological purity and historical fidelity are usually obstacles to
political effectiveness. What's important is not showing our lack of
complicity in the self-destruction of human civilization, but to
prevent it. The fight is not to return to pre-industrial nature,
whatever it was, but foster a postcapitalist natural environment,
where ecosystems, water, trees and bees are the most precious forms of
common wealth.

The solution to the precarious question is not going to be found in
the return to the old speculative, overindebted, overdeveloped,
ecocidal, supremely unequal consumer economy of yore, but in the fight
for a new economic and welfare system built around the environment’s
priorities and the social needs of the precarious sectors of society.
Redistribution can be achieved thanks to massive strike movements and
via capital, corporate and carbon taxation to pay for universal health
and education, basic income for all adults and finance a reduction in
worktime such as the 4-day week, provide everybody with free access to
online knowledge, supply economic incentives for commons-based peer
production and sharing, subsidize green housing and green job creation
for all unemployed wishing to work, socialize banking to fund
renewable energy and sustainable living community projects, promote
urban and labor rights of solidarity striking, self-organization and
self-unionization, and most of all end the scandalous discrimination
and persecution of immigrants and asylum-seekers. The politics of the
common and the struggle around commons -- and especially of the most
precious common of all, the atmosphere -- cannot but start from the
collective defense and expansion of our own urban commons: squats,
social centers, radical associations, alternative theaters,
self-managed parks and gardens etc. Social cooperation needs to find
its own organizational resources and political strategies to prevail
over capitalist enclosures of immaterial assets and privatizations of
social space.

Redistribution of wealth and power toward the precarious, growth of
immaterial knowledge, cultural enrichment of society and massive
expansion of leisure are fundamental social preconditions for the
horizontal eco-social design of a resilient postcapitalist society,
freeing the time to pursue ecohacktive and permacultural activities,
giving the time and money back to precarized people to work for
environmental remediation and think collectively about their own
future, cutting the need for quick consumption and instant
satisfaction. A strongly relational and solidaristic economy would
fulfill many of the needs today obviated by individualized market
transactions. The multigendered and multiethnic precariat can be the
social driver for local low-carbon economies of cooperation, exchange
and mutual aid, food and energy production, just as the immaterial
precariat has so far been the core constituency of the climate camp
movement. After all, in a networked information economy, it's the
anarchists not the capitalists that control the strategic means of
production -- the computing power of connected PCs -- enabling the
distributed elaboration and production of information, culture and
knowledge through networks which is making the age of mass media
obsolete. Immaterial labor puts a new, non-market and non-proprietary
sector at the center of wealth creation. But capitalist domination
strongly resists the encroachment of p2p cooperation on its hitherto
unchallenged prerogatives (directing production and marketing
innovation) and has parliaments and tribunals squarely on its side
striking at the growing commonalism of the precarious class.

To conclude, capitalism destroys environments as it precarizes
peoples. The climate anarchists of the world and the precarious of
europe must come together in Copenhagen to unmask Barroso's and
Obama's carbon trading and government bailouts for the rich. We must
fight for that money to go to social transfers, green jobs and
renewable energy instead, 'cos the Recession don't do discounts and
the Earth won't do bailouts.

Bibliositography

Gopal Balakrishnan, “Speculations on the State”, New Left Review, 59,
September-October, 2009
David Balleby Rønbach, "Green jobs are blowing in the wind",
http://www.modkraft.dk/spip.php?article11281, Modkraft Online, August
2009
Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: the emergence and dissolution
of hierarchy, AK Press, 2005
Murray Bookchin and David Foreman, Defending the Earth: A Dialogue
between Bookchin and Foreman, South End Press, 1991
William Calvin, Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change, University
of Chicago Press, 2008
Manuel Castells, The Information Age, 3 volumes, Blackwell, 1996-2004
(various editions)
Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press, 2009
Julien Coupat, Interview from prison,
http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2009/05/25/julien-coupat-la-prolongation-de-ma-detention-est-une-petite-vengeance_1197456_3224.html,
Le Monde, May 25, 2009 (he was released soon afterwards)
Crimethinc. Workers' Collective, Recipes for Disaster: an Anarchist
Cookbook, Crimethinc., 2004
Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, Routledge, 2004
John Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: environmental discourses,
Oxford University Press, 2005
EuroMayDay, "Precarious United for Climate Action in Copenhagen",
http://www.climate-justice-action.org/news/2009/09/20/705/, September
2009
Dave Foreman, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, Abbzug Press, 1993
Alex Foti, "Critical Dynamics of Advanced Capitalism from the Second
to the Third Industrial Revolution", Left Curve 31, March, 2007
Alex Foti, Anarchy in the EU: Movimenti pink, black, green in Europa e
Grande Recessione, Agenzia X, 2009
Alex Foti, "Climate Anarchists vs. Green Capitalists", Reimagining
Society Project, Z Magazine,
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22367, August 2009
Uri Geller, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice
to Theory, Pluto, 2007
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process,
iUniverse, 1999
David Goodstein, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, Norton, 2004
James Hansen, List of Publications, http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1, July 2009
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire, The Penguin Press, 2004
Michael Hardt and Antono Negri, Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, 2009.
Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, L.H. Lovins, Natural Capitalism: The
Next Industrial Revolution, Earthscan, 2005 Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, The
Upside of Down: catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of
civilization, Knopf Canada, 2006
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e), 2009
Ewa Jasiewicz, George Monbiot, “Anarchism and the climate debate”,
http://oilwatchsea.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=200,
summer 2008
John Jordan, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global
Anti-Capitalism, Verso, 2003
Paul Kingsnorth, George Monbiot, "Is there any point in fighting to
stave off industrial apocalypse?",
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change,
The Guardian online, August 17, 2009.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,
Metropolitan, 2008
Serge Latouche, “De-growth: an electoral stake?”, Journal of Inclusive
Democracy, http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol3/vol3_no1_Latouche_degrowth.htm,
3(1), January 2007
Tom Levitt, "Climate Camp: anarchist or saviour of the environmental
movement?", The Ecologist online,
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/296747/climate_camp_anarchists_or_saviours_of_the_environmental_movement.html,
August 6, 2009
James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the
Fate of Humanity, Basic Books, 2006
Juan Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of
Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Edward Elgar, 2002
D.H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-year
Update, Earthscan, 2004
George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, Allen Lane, 2006
Tadzio Mueller, Alexis Passadakis, "20 Theses against Green
Capitalism", http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/11656, December 2008
Arne Naess, David Rothenberg, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle:
Outline of an Ecosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1993
Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, Yale University
Press, 2002
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild
Possibilities, Nation Books, 2005
Seth Tobocman, Disaster and Resistance, AK Press, 2008
Turbulence Collective, "Who Will Save Us from the Future?",
Turbulence, no.4, 2008
Derek Wall, Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist,
Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements, Pluto Books, 2005
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, “Climate-Related
Business Surges Past Aerospace and Defense Sectors”,
http://e360.yale.edu/content/digest.msp?id=2058
John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization,
Feral House, 2008

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Fwd: Announcing the New $0 Tuition Program to be Initiated November 2, 2009

2009-11-02T14:12:37Z

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: President Mark Yudof <president@...>
Date: 2009/11/2
Subject: Announcing the New $0 Tuition Program to be Initiated November 2,
2009
To: president@...

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

BERKELEY ? DAVIS ? IRVINE ? LOS ANGELES ? MERCED ? RIVERSIDE ? SAN DIEGO ?
SAN FRANCISCO ? SANTA BARBARA ? SANTA CRUZ

1111 Franklin Street
Oakland, CA 94607-5200
Phone: (510) 987-9074
Fax: (510) 987-9086
http://ucop.cc/

November 2, 2009
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY

Dear Colleagues:

I write to update you on The Regents? actions this week concerning the
unprecedented acceptance of the UCOP?s $0 Tuition Program to be initiated
November 2, 2009. ( http://ucop.cc/ )

At their meeting on October 30th, 2009, The Regents declared that there
was an extreme financial emergency, a shortfall of over $1 billion during
the 2009-2010 academic year alone. Their leadership, over the last fifteen
years, especially after 2004, created this emergency scenario. Seeking
the complete privatization of the UC system, they advocated for a
debt-financed rather than taxpayer-financed institution, which was bond
rating, rather than education, driven. The Regents continue to make shock
and awe decisions without student and faculty input, maintaining that it
is not useful for UC to continue as a public education project for the
people of California. They explain this and their prior actions with the
acknowledgment that they, ?feel badly about the whole thing.?

While The Regents and UCOP took the time last week to finally read what UC
students, faculty and all ten Chancellors actually wrote and said, one of
The Regents opined during a party after the September 1, 2009 confirmation
of the OHH (Operation Hard Hammer) had passed, ?Who can hear anything the
faculty and students say with so much champagne popping?? ? but as I have
reported to you, they feel bad about the whole scam, me too, I really do
not like UC people wearing T-Shirts saying ?I?ve been Yudoffed!? ? so The
Regents and UCOP are going to establish $0 Tuition Program by using all
the funds we put aside for raining days under my desk and the funds we
have with our friends over at Bank of NY Mellon Trust, we will stop all
our financial and real estate speculation, and instead focus on developing
a free education model and an open research matrix for the social benefit
of people of California.

We, The Regents and UCOP, will no longer be the zombies of global
capitalism-always-in-crisis-for-our?benefit. Instead we will seek to
create an educational and research vision for a UC that will offer free
access for all those who wish to have higher education in our communities,
for those who dream of new technologies for the people, for all of those
who want to build a world that establishes global education for all,
global health care for all, global rights for labor, and push our selves
to follow the speed of dreams and not the greed of the latest ponzi
scheme.

We encourage all of you to adopt the $0 Tuition Program as we have, help
us develop it, with your friends, with your teachers, with your fellow
researchers, with your families and neighbors, and with all those on the
other side of the border a new type of UC. Let us start to re-imagine what
a university might be, rather than what it is or it cannot be.

I deeply appreciate your continuing commitment to UC. Let us all work
together to make UC something greater than itself.

With best wishes, I am,

Sincerely yours,

Mark G. Yudof
President
http://ucop.cc/

We want your feedback! To share you thoughts with the University of
California Commission on the Future, go to:
http://ucfuture.universityofcalifornia.edu/feedback.html

--
micha c?rdenas / azdel slade

Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab, http://experimentalgamelab.net
Calit2 Researcher, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...

Fwd: NY Thursday Friday Saturday -- Field Trip -- Digital Labor Conference -- 11.12, 13, 14.09

2009-11-02T01:14:36Z

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sixteen Beaver <lists@...>
Date: Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:43 PM
Subject: Thursday Friday Saturday -- Field Trip -- Digital Labor
Conference -- 11.12,13,14.09
To: generale@...

Thursday Friday Saturday -- Field Trip -- Digital Labor Conference -
11.12,13,14.09

CONTENTS:
1. Introduction
2. About the Conference
3. Participants

________________________________________
1. Introduction

What: Conference on Digital Labor 
When: Thursday, Friday, Saturday November 12,13,14
Where: Eugene Lang College - New School 
 Who: Free and open to all (but you must register online)

Following up some of the discussions we have had on notions of labor,
work, and relations to life, we would like to announce a conference being
organized at Eugene Lang College on digital labor entitled: The Internet
as Playground and Factory. It connects nicely to events we have had
recently including our discussion on Saturday with Marcel, and some
upcoming events which we will be announcing. The event looks at the
growing trend within web 2.0 and current developments online to further
complicate any traditional divisions between work, labor, play and life.

There has been an extended discussion for several months on the IDC email
list, you can find an archive here:
http://digitallabor.org/discussion/

And as most of you on our list know, we rarely send anything out more than
a week in advance, but even though the event is free, it requires
registration:
http://digitallabor.org/registration/

Please find more information by the organizers below.

________________________________________
2. About the Conference

Today we are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in economy,
labor, and life related to digital media. The purpose of this conference
is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure,
consumption, and production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television
began to establish commonalities between suburbanites across the United
States. Currently, communities that were previously sustained through
national newspapers now started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people
are leaving behind televisions sets in favor of communing with -- and
through-- their computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer,
network, tease, tag, detag, remix, and upload and from all of this
attention and all of their labor, corporations expropriate value. Guests
in the virtual world Second Life even co-create the products and
experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this
interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings
into being? What are we doing to ourselves?

Only a small fraction of the more than one billion Internet users create
and add videos, photos, and mini-blog posts. The rest pay attention. They
leave behind innumerable traces that speak to their interests,
affiliations, likes and dislikes, and desires. Large corporations then
profit from this interaction by collecting and selling this data. Social
participation is the oil of the digital economy. Today, communication is a
mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it
has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption
and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.

The revenues of today's social aggregators are promising but their
speculative value exceeds billions of dollars. Capital manages to
expropriate value from the commons; labor goes beyond the factory, all of
society is put to work. Every aspect of life drives the digital economy:
sexual desire, boredom, friendship — and all becomes fodder for
speculative profit. We are living in a total labor society and the way in
which we are commoditized, racialized, and engendered is profoundly and
disturbingly normalized. The complex and troubling set of circumstances
we now confront includes the collapse of the conventional opposition
between waged and unwaged labor, and is characterized by multiple
“tradeoffs” and “social costs”—such as government and corporate
surveillance. While individual instances are certainly exploitative in the
most overt sense, the shift in the overall paradigm moves us beyond the
explanatory power of the Marxian interpretation of exploitation (which is
of limited use here).

Free Software and similar practices have provided important alternatives
to and critiques of traditional modes of intellectual property to date but
user agency is not just a question of content ownership. Users should
demand data portability, the right to pack up and leave the walled gardens
of institutionalized labor à la Facebook or StudiVZ. We should ask which
rights users have beyond their roles as consumers and citizens. Activists
in Egypt have poached Facebook's platform to get their political message
out and to organize protests. Google's Image Labeler transforms people’s
endless desire for entertainment into work for the company. How much
should Google pay them to tag an image? Such payment could easily become
more of an insult than a remuneration.

This conference confronts the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes
labor and value in the digital economy and it seeks to inspire proposals
for action. Currently, there are few adequate definitions of labor that
fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy. The Internet as
Playground and Factory poses a series of questions about the conundrums
surrounding labor (and often the labor of love) in relation to our digital
present:

- Is it possible to acknowledge the moments of ruthless exploitation while
not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of
individual financial and political empowerment?

- What is labor and where is value produced?

- Are strategies of refusal an effective response to the expropriation of
value from interacting users?

- How is the global crisis of capitalism linked to the speculative
performances of the digital economy?

- What can we learn from the “cyber sweatshops” class-action lawsuit
against AOL under the Fair Labor Standards Act in the early 1990s?

- How does this invisible interaction labor affect our bodies? What were
key steps in the history of interaction design that managed to mobilize
and structure the social participation of bodies and psyches in order to
capture value?

- Most interaction labor, regardless whether it is driven by monetary
motivations or not, is taking place on corporate platforms. Where does
that leave hopeful projections of a future of non-market peer production?

- Trebor Scholz

________________________________________
3. Participants

For three days, 90 theorists, artists, legal scholars, activists,
students, programmers, historians, and social media experts including Mark
Andrejevic, Burak Arikan, ABarr, Michel Bauwens, Ted Byfield, Jonathan
Beller, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Paolo Carpignano, Sumita Chakravarty, Heather
Chaplin, Mark Coté, Brittany Anne Chozinski, Patricia Ticineto Clough,
Gabriella Coleman, Geoff Cox, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Sean Cubitt, Jodi
Dean, Jesse Drew, Catherine Driscoll, Kate Eichhorn, Niva Elkin-Koren,
Lauren Ellsworth, Ursula Endlicher, Laura Forlano, Christian Fuchs,
Francesco Gagliardi, Alexander Galloway, Michael Goldhaber, David
Golumbia, Ellen Goodman, Melissa Gregg, James Grimmelman, Alex Halavais,
Orit Halpern, Paul Hartzog, Joseph Heathcott, Brian Holmes, Lilly Irani,
Carolyn Lee Kane, Pat Kane, M. Christopher Kelty, Scott Kildall and
Victoria Scott, Abigail Kosnik, Julian Kücklich, Ferentz Lafargue, Mark
Larrimore, Deborah Levitt, Laura Liu, Thomas Malaby, Edward Maloney,
Meredith L. McGill, Christina McPhee, Ulises Mejias, Robert Mitchell, Nick
Montfort, Lisa Nakamura, Gina Neff, Luis Vincent Nunez, Timothy Pachirat,
Frank Pasquale, Christiane Paul, Ben Peters, Dominic Pettman, Hector
Postigo, Howard Rheingold, Alex Rivera, Martin Roberts, Judith Rodenbeck,
Kenneth Rogers, Ned Rossiter, Stephanie Rothenberg, Douglas Rushkoff, Ivan
Sigal, Brooke Singer, Hendrick Speck, Elizabeth Stark, Fred Turner,
McKenzie Wark, Darren Wershler, Jonathan L. Zittrain will address issues
of digital labor from various disciplinary standpoints.

__________________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th / 5th fl.
New York, NY 10004

for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org

TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry

--
the ankle bone, connected to the thigh bone ;)

http://del.icio.us/dr.woooo

http://www.aut-op-sy.org
http://narconews.com
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~archive/chiapas95/
http://noborder.org
http://slash.interactivist.net/
http://ainfos.ca
http://www.metamute.org
http://lists.perthimc.asn.au/pipermail/blackgreensolidarity/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity
http://www.metamute.org/en/Precarious-Reader
https://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/ipsm-l/2005-July/000781.html
http://www.deletetheborder.org
http://www.nettime.org
http://www.pochanostra.com/dialogues/
http://www.aspaceoutside.org/wp-content/uploads/Space_Outside_Reader.pdf
http://www.prol-position.net/
http://stateofemergency.nomasters.org/
http://www.infoshop.org/inews
http://www.eco-action.org/dod
http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/overview.htm
http://ww4report.com/blog

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@...