Nabble - NetTime-l

Zizek's transformative ego under the cap

2009-11-09T11:58:47Z

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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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/

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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

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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

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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).

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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.
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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

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September-October, 2009
David Balleby Rønbach, "Green jobs are blowing in the wind",
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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

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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

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# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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# 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

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[Fwd: Center for Icelandic Art seeks new director]

2009-11-01T14:37:13Z

*Center for Icelandic Art seeks new director*

*Deadline for applications: November 23, 2009*

The Center for Icelandic Art was established in 2005 with the key role
of presenting Icelandic visual artists abroad. It is an independent
institution, primarily funded by the Icelandic Ministry of Education,
Science and Culture. All the main visual arts institutions and
associations in Iceland are members of the institution.

The new director will be the successor of Dr. Christian Schoen, CIA.IS’
founding director, who has build up its international reputation over
the past five years. His term will end on February 28, 2010.

*The Goals
*CIA.IS aims at building and strengthening the networks between the
local and international visual art scene and activating the engagement
of Icelandic visual artists and professionals in the international art
scene. In the coming years, among the Center’s goals are to:

- Facilitate the presentation of Icelandic artists abroad in
international galleries, at exhibitions and events of various kinds.
- Facilitate participation of Icelandic art galleries in established art
fairs.
- Initiate collaborations between Icelandic and international artists in
Iceland and abroad.
- Create a residency program for international art professionals in Iceland.
- Extend CIA.IS’ visitor’s program in close collaboration with private
and public institutions.
- Secure Iceland as a host country for international art projects and
strengthen the position of Iceland as a cultural destination

The board of the Center for Icelandic Art seeks a new director with an
inspirational view on how to promote Icelandic art abroad. The director
is the full-time controller of the Center's operations, appointed by the
board for five years. The director is responsible for the Center's
activities and policies, seeking to improve connections between Iceland
and the international art community. The director is responsible to the
board.

The Director manages the daily running of the Center, is responsible for
its finances, raises funds, prepares budgets and manages accounts. The
Director presents budgets to the Board for approval and is responsible
to the Board for budgetary implementation.

The canditates are expected to meet the following requirements:

- Education in art history, curatorial studies or other comparable studies.
- Good connections with museums, collectors, curators and other
proffessionals in the visual art field.
- Experience with international correspondance
- Good English in writing and -speaking is required, and knowledge of
the Nordic languages is an advantage.
- Good organizational and financial management skills and experience
with fundraising

Applicants need to supply documents that confirm their qualifications
together with the application, and should express their salary expectations.

Further information can be found on the Center’s website: www.cia.is
<http://www.cia.is>

Applications in digital format only must be sent via email to *Dr.
Halldór Björn Runólfsson, chairman **of the CIA.IS board *before
November 23, 2009 to *board@... <compose.php?mailTo=board@...>.*

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Arctic Perspective Initiative announces the winners of its open architecture competition

2009-11-01T12:03:52Z

Arctic Perspective Initiative announces the winners
of its open architecture competition

Three architects – Richard Carbonnier (Nunavut, Canada), Giuseppe
Mecca (Italy), and Catherine Rannou (France) – have been selected as
the joint winners of the Arctic Perspective Initiative open
architecture competition. The challenge of this international
competition was to design a zero-footprint mobile research unit for
use by local populations in the Arctic. The unit is intended to
facilitate a diverse range of technological research opportunities,
such as remote sensing, environmental monitoring, video editing and
streaming, and communications systems.

The three winning entries, each awarded €1500, were selected by an
expert jury from 103 submissions from architects and engineers in
more than 30 countries. The competition was the first phase of a
design process, the next phase of which will involve working with the
winning submissions through a collaborative design effort with local
community members from Nunavut, Canada. A prototype unit will be
tested in the field next year in Igloolik, Nunavut, by local media
workers, hunters, youth and elders of the community.

API is committed to the empowerment and sustainable development of
Northern communities through the collaboration and combination of
science, arts, engineering and culture. The unit aims to serve as a
model for mobile research in the north, incorporating proven local
expertise, sustainable resources, and high tech solutions, while
promoting open source data sharing strategies and management. All
required power will come from green sources.

The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a transnational art,
science, and culture work group composed of HMKV (Germany), The Arts
Catalyst (UK), Projekt Atol (Slovenia), Lorna (Iceland) and C-TASC
(Canada). API is the brainchild of Marko Peljhan and Matthew
Biederman, who met and worked together for the first time as
crewmembers of the Makrolab mkII in Blair Atholl, Scotland in 2002.
API intends to direct attention to the global cultural and ecological
significance of the Polar Regions. In light of the effects of climate
change, the Arctic is simultaneously a zone of crucial contemporary
geopolitical controversy and a space with an opportunity for
transnational, circumpolar, and intercultural cooperation and
collaboration. API aims to do this through the empowerment of the
local citizens of the North via new communications, sensing,
aggregation, transmission and information sharing through
participatory and open technology methodologies.

The design competition is but the first step towards what will
develop, in 2010, into a large-scale (artistic) research project, the
results of which will be documented in the exhibition ARCTIC
PERSPECTIVE – THIRD CULTURE 2010. The exhibition will be on view from
11 June - October 2010 at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, Germany, during the
European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010 as well as the international
media-art conference ISEA2010 RUHR.

ARCTIC PERSPECTIVE – THIRD CULTURE 2010 is funded by the European
Commission, the City of Dortmund and by the Ministry of Culture of
the Republic of Slovenia.

For more information:

http://www.hmkv.de/dyn/e_program_exhibitions/detail.php?
nr=3594&rubric=exhibitions&
http://arcticperspective.org/

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

Dr. Inke Arns
Kuenstlerische Leiterin / Artistic Director
Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV)
Guentherstr. 65 (Buero / office)
44143 Dortmund, Germany
T ++49 - 231 - 823 106
M ++49 - 176 - 430 627 93
inke.arns@...
www.hmkv.de

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Fwd: Electronic Crimes Ordinance 2007 Requires Serious Revisions

2009-10-31T23:00:36Z

From: Pildat News System <News@...>
Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development & Tranparency

________________________________

Electronic Crimes Ordinance 2007 Requires Serious Revisions before it is
passed by the Parliament: PILDAT Legislative Forum

________________________________

Islamabad, October 26: The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Ordinance 2007
requires serious revisions before it is passed by the Parliament. This was
the consensus that emerged out of a PILDAT Legislative Forum on the
Prevention of Electronic Crimes Ordinance 2007 that was held here today.

The Forum included as its speakers Mr. Ejaz Khan, techno-legal expert and
Partner Aqlaal Advocates, Mr. Tariq Khosa, Director General of the Federal
Investigation Agency (FIA), Ms. Anusha Rehman Khan, MNA and Ms. Marvi Memon,
MNA.

Speaking at the occasion, Ms. Aasiya Riaz, PILDAT Joint Director, said that
PILDAT organised the forum in order to generate public debate on this
important piece of legislation before it is adopted by the National
Assembly. Earlier, PILDAT had prepared and issued a legislative brief on the
ordinance both in Urdu and English languages which was widely circulated to
the Parliament, the news media and other stakeholders. The legislative brief
has been part of PILDAT's Legislative Development Programme and its
objective was to assist parliamentarians to understand the context,
objective and issues relating to the ordinance and to enable them to
participate in a more informed debate and take well-considered position on
the subject. Presenting an overview of PILDAT's analysis, she said that
despite the presentation of the report of the National Assembly Standing
Committee on Information Technology on the Ordinance, there remain serious
concerns that the offences outlined in the ordinance are vaguely defined,
despite involving complex technological issues and carrying severe
penalties. The offence of "cyber-terrorism," is very broadly defined and
carries a potential death sentence. Concern has also been expressed as to
the potential overlap of offences within the Ordinance itself and existing
provisions contained in the PPC. She said that the PILDAT Legislative Brief,
also circulated to the participants of the forum, recommends that the
jurisdictional definitions of offences be amended to require a significant
link to Pakistan. The offence of unauthorized interception should be amended
so as to include a requirement of malicious intent and the reversed burden
of proof in relation to sensitive electronic systems must be removed, etc.
She thanked active support from Ms. Anusha Rehman, MNA and members of the
National Assembly Standing Committee on Information Technology for her
support for background information on the ordinance and for organising the
forum.

Mr. Ejaz Khan, the techno-legal expert and Partner Aqlaal Advocates,
presented an overview of the existing ordinance, its provisions and their
shortcomings. He said that in the context of ever increasing cyber crime,
regulation was required, however, he expressed grave concerns over the
existing law in terms of civil liberties, business continuity and the norms
of international best practice. Essentially he proposed a careful amendment
of the Pakistan Penal Code, to ensure coverage of electronic offences in
terms of existing crimes, rather than a specialist law, whilst highlighting
the need for safeguards for civil liberties and fundamental rights. His main
concern related to the discretionary application of normal criminal
processes in cyber crimes cases, which can be dispensed with by the Federal
Government. He also drew attention to the lack of any third party
protections, right to privacy or confidentiality or redress for economic
damage arising from data loss or hardware damage. He proposed the use of the
Budapest Convention as a model for future amendment, legislation and
protection in relation to cyber crime, alongside robust capacity building of
specialist knowledge in terms of the FIA's specialist cyber crime cell.

Mr. Tariq Khosa, Director General of the FIA, spoke from an enforcement
perspective. He explained the existing Special Cyber Crime Branch of the FIA
and its work. He strongly defended the need for a specialist agency to
investigate and prosecute this technical area of criminal law. He asserted
the political independence of the FIA and gave the forum an assurance that
the branch applied the Criminal Procedure Code in all cases and that there
was "no chance of playing with rights" by the FIA.

Ms. Anusha Rehman, MNA, explained to the forum the role of the Standing
Committee, its work in reviewing the Ordinance and the content of its report
to the National Assembly that was presented in the last session. Ms. Anusha
Rehman and Ms. Marvi Memon added a detailed dissent note on the committee's
report tabled in the House. She indicated that, in some respects, her views
differed from other members of the Standing Committee. She highlighted a
number of major concerns with the existing Ordinance, most notably the
overlap of offences with both the Pakistan Penal Code and Electronic
Transactions Ordinance, and the resulting risk of multiple liability and
punishment. She drew particular attention to the copy of the FIR of the
Khanani and Kalia case that the Interior Minister Rehman Malik provided to
her on the floor of the House in response to her specific question noting
that the FIR carried reference to prosecution under three separate
legislative provisions. She raised particular concern regarding the vague
definitions adopted for offences of cyber terrorism, which, in some cases,
can attract the death penalty. She made clear that in her view the law must
provide protection for basic human rights and freedoms and protect against
possible abuse in the future, rather than placing reliance on good practice
by law enforcement agencies. She also highlighted the need for specialist
expert input to the Standing Committee and Parliament, in order to ensure
that Parliamentarians can adequately understand and tackle technical areas
of legislation. Finally, she highlighted the critical need for public
debate on such an important issue before the National Assembly passes the
law in its current form during the upcoming session in November 2009.

Ms. Marvi Memon, MNA and also a member of the Standing Committee on
Information Technology, made a strong plea for a public debate on the issue
and cautioned that approval of the Ordinance in its current form would lead
Pakistan towards "a police state." She described the Ordinance as a law
bulldozed through Parliament and the Standing Committee and her view that
efforts at presenting alternatives had been blocked by Government. She
called for the business community, whose interests could be irreparably
damaged, to enter the debate and expressed her view that the issue was now
time-critical as the National Assembly could pass the law in its current
form at any point once the National Assembly session starts on November 2,
2009. She expressed disappointment at the lack of debate on this critical
issue to-date and said that if the civil society, particularly the Overseas
Investors Chambers and the FPCCI, did not protect its interests by
intervening now, it will be too late. Parliamentarians are doing their job
but the stakeholders must also come forward and present their reservations
now, she urged. She highlighted that a revised law has been proposed by them
the text of which is available at her website: at
http://marvimemon.wordpress.com/category/legislation-bills-introduced/

In the ensuing discussion at the forum, that mainly included representatives
from the IT business community, telecom industry, media and
Parliamentarians, a number of provisions of the law and its practical use
were discussed. It was highlighted by the business community, through the
anecdotal evidence of their experience, that even though the FIA Director
General maintained the agency will never stoop to abusing basic rights, the
law was applied indiscriminately by corrupt officials. It was highlighted
that a badly drafted law can not be left to be implemented on the integrity
of the implementing agency but the job of the Parliament was to ensure that
no unspecific, duplicate or badly-drafted law should be passed that is
liable to misuse at the stage of implementation. The industry deplores this
Ordinance, many participants said, terming the ordinance as an "atrociously
drafted law." Mr. Khurram Dastgir, MNA noted that if the law violates basic
human rights which are enshrined in the Constitution of Pakistan, these
constitutional rights can not be left to be protected or abused on the
discretion of implementers. The session ended with a call for further public
debate and expressions of disappointment that the Interior and Information
Technology Ministries and Standing Committees of both the Senate and the
National Assembly which chose not to participate in the forum despite
invitation.

PILDAT Legislative Brief on The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Ordinance
2007 can be downloaded here.
http://www.pildat.org/Publications/publication/LB/PILDAT%20Legislative%20Brief%206%20-%20PECO%20Sept%2009.pdf

_____________________________________

PILDAT will welcome feedback and comments at
info@...<executive.director@...>

If you wish to unsubscribe, please e-mail at
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[[[news-Struggles]]].::edu-factory.org::.

2009-10-31T14:03:26Z

www.edu-factory.org
*
International Press Release ? Austrian Students Squat Universities!*
*Austrian students squat universities! Mass-demonstrations and broad
solidarity throughout the country. Throughout the last years studying
conditions at Austrian universities have dramatically declined. The
introduction of tuition fees, a massive cutback of democratic structures and
the lack of course availability are only some examples for that
development.[...]*

*Statement by the students of the University of Vienna, occupying the
Audimax
*
*Education, not qualification! - We want education for all, to strive for a
reasonable society, not just qualification according to economic
profitability! Our aim is to enable all students to study independently and
self-organized. We are against restrictive curricula. Therefore we demand a
thorough transformation of the BA-MA-architecture**.[...]

**Parts of the University of Vienna occupied *
*After a manifestation of students against the Bologna Process and in
solidarity with the squating of the Academy of Fine Arts two days ago, parts
of the University of Vienna have been occupied spontaneously.*[...]

*UCSC STUDENTS OCCUPY DEAN?S OFFICE: CALL TO REVOLT! *
*The glass walls of passivity, separating us from one another, can only be
shattered with revolt. We are occupying a second building on the Santa Cruz
campus of the University of California because we have answered the call of
the first to occupy everything.*[...]

*Communiqu? from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life *
We live as a dead civilization. We can no longer imagine the good life
except as a series of spectacles preselected for our bemusement: a
shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-filled life and our own
imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more
lavish and inhumane than anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally
beyond reach. *No one believes in such outcomes anymore.*[...]
*
We Are Your Crisis! Occupy California*
We are occupying this building at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
because the current situation has become untenable. Across the state, people
are losing their jobs and getting evicted, while social services are
slashed. California?s leaders from state officials to university presidents
have demonstrated how they will deal with this crisis: everything and
everyone is subordinated to the budget.[...]

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

*

*

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a parallel image - installation documentation now online

2009-10-30T06:31:11Z

A PARALLEL IMAGE

a new installation by Gebhard Sengmueller, in collaboration with Franz
Buechinger

“A Parallel Image” is an electronic camera obscura. This media-
archaeological, interactive sculpture is based on the fictive
assumption that the currently still valid principle of electronically
transmitting moving images, namely by breaking them down into single
images and image lines, was never discovered. The result is an
apparatus that attempts a highly elaborate parallel transmission of
every single pixel from sender to receiver. This is only possible by
connecting camera and monitor using about 2,500 cables. Unlike
conventional electronic image transmission procedures, “A Parallel
Image” is technologically completely transparent, conveying to the
viewer a correspondence between real world and transmission that can
be sensually experienced.

you can find installation views of "a parallel image" at:
http://www.gebseng.com/08_a_parallel_image/schmiede_hallein_2009-10/

and a video at:
http://www.gebseng.com/08_a_parallel_image/
or
http://www.gebseng.com/08_a_parallel_image/a_parallel_image_promo.mp4

Gebhard Sengmueller is an artist working in the field of media
technology, currently based in Vienna, Austria. Since 1992, he has
been developing projects and installations focussing on the history of
electronic media; creating alternative ordering systems for media
content; and constructing autogenerative networks. His work has been
shown extensively in Europe, the US and Japan, among others in venues
such as Ars Electronica Linz, the Venice Biennale, the Institute of
Contemporary Arts London, Postmasters Gallery NYC, the Museum of
Contemporary Photography Chicago, the FCMM Festival Montreal, or the
ICC Center Tokyo (http://www.gebseng.com).

contact information:
Gebhard Sengmueller
Leopoldsgasse 6-8/8
A-1020 Wien
tel +43 699 15 45 59 29
fax +43 1 545 59 29
email gebseng@...
http://www.gebseng.com

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EU Observer on Climate Alarm action in Charlemagne Building in Brussels today

2009-10-28T13:02:52Z

http://www.climate-justice-action.org/news/2009/10/28/breaking-news-from-european-quarter-in-brussels-our-climate-not-your-business/

http://euobserver.com/9/28903
Climate activists shut down EU business conference

Climate Alarm activists hang a banner outside the Charlemagne building
(Photo: Leigh Phillips)

LEIGH PHILLIPS <lp@...>

Today @ 16:38 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - British-style "climate camp" activists shut down the
annual conference of the Confederation of European Business in Brussels on
Wednesday (28 October) morning, occupying and blockading the European
Commission building where industrialists were due to talk about global
warming.

The new group, Climate Alarm, accused the EU executive of getting into bed
with the businesses sponsoring the conference, which include Shell, Daimler
and Arcelor-Mittal, companies it says are some of the worst carbon emitters
in the world.

"Corporate lobbyists have no role to play in deciding how to deal with the
climate crisis," said spokeswoman Anna Martin.

"[These firms] all lobby hard to obstruct strong action on climate change
...At the same time, they have made windfall profits from a failing carbon
market."

A few dozen youthful campaigners from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany
swooped into the commission's Charlemagne building a few minutes before 9.00
am local time. EU officials had lent the building to the employers' group,
also known as "Business Europe'," for free for the duration of the
conference.

Some protesters chained the entrance closed while others deliberately
trapped themselves inside the large glass revolving doors by jamming wooden
door stops into its base, preventing any delegates from entering.

"This is the second time the European Commission has hosted Business
Europe's annual conference. It shows how close the EU institutions are to
business when it comes to climate change," Ms Martin told EUobserver.

Such radical direct action has been on the increase over the last couple of
years in the UK, where activists have occupied or tried to disrupt two
coal-fired power stations and block the extension of Heathrow airport. In
April this year, activists blocked streets in London's financial district to
protest the EU emissions trading scheme.

But the blockade on Wednesday, which lasted two hours before police used
pepper spray to disperse some of the activists and arrested 20, was the
first time climate campers had taken such action in the European capital.

The major environmental NGOs and development groups in Brussels regularly
engage in showpiece stunts outside the EU buildings. On the same day, in an
Oxfam action, hundreds of miniature tents were set up in Brussels Central
Station as well as in London, Berlin, Dublin and Madrid to symbolise the
plight of climate refugees, while Action Aid campaigners are to "hammer" on
the doors of the European Summit of premiers and presidents on Thursday.

The events are almost always carefully co-ordinated with police and building
security. But the Climate Alarm action was not authorised by the Brussels
police, which the campaigners believe is why the police took the unusual
step of using pepper spray.

The activists, who formed the new organisation at a climate camp on the
Belgian-Dutch border this summer, are linked to Climate Justice Action
(CJA), a wider global network of groups with a strong presence from NGOs in
the developing world, which say that emissions reductions targets do not
match what scientists are demanding and that the range of climate solutions
on offer actually exacerbates global warming and only benefits business.

Emissions trading, carbon capture and storage, carbon offsets, biofuels and
nuclear power - embraced by the EU and to a lesser degree by some of the
more mainstream green outfits as the main strategies to tackle climate
change - have been denounced by CJA as "false solutions".

They also say that industrialised countries owe an "environmental debt" to
developing countries for creating the climate crisis.

*'Climate change is everyone's business'*

The action managed to prevent a crowd of some 200 delegates from entering
the building. Hans Korteweg, a senior manager with Foratom, the European
Atomic Forum, told this website: "One of their banners says: 'Our climate is
not your business,' but climate is everyone's business, including business."

"Business absolutely has a role to play - we have the solutions available,
the technology we can transfer and the money to invest," he added. "They
should come into the meeting and debate, not shut it down."

Enzo Gatta, the industrial affairs committee chairman of Business Europe was
furious: "It's just unbelievable. I really don't understand this. We have
enormous amounts of money to invest."

"It's not about lobbying. There is already worldwide acceptance that
emissions must be reduced. There is no serious debate on this anymore. Now
it is just a question of co-ordination. That is what is being discussed."

A bemused researcher on energy and transport from Italy's National Research
Council, who was also stuck outside, was more relaxed about the situation.
Leaning against his luggage and pulling out a packet of cigarettes, Vincenzo
Antonucci said the activists had a point.

"It's difficult. On the one hand, what they are saying is true about the
likes of Shell and Daimler, of course. This is a correct point of view. But
on the other hand, even inside these companies, there are a few, some who
are serious about climate change."

"And green energy is expensive; it's big business. The revolution isn't
going to pay.

* * * * * * * * * * *
P i a E b e r h a r d t
Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO)
Rue d'Edimbourg 26
1050 Brussels
Belgium

pia@...
phone: 0032 - (0) 2 89 30 930
mobile: 0032 - (0) 4 89 28 16 93
skype: piaebse

www.corporateeurope.org

--
Corporate Europe Observatory
Rue d'Edimbourg 26
1050 Brussels
Belgium
0032 (0)2 893 0930

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POST TO LIST: climate09-int@...
UNSUBSCRIBE: send a blank email to
climate09-int-unsubscribe@...
LISTKEEPERS: climate09-int-editor@...

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new issue of chto delat "#02- 26: Another commons: living / knowledge / acton" and film "2+2. Practicing Godard" is on line

2009-10-28T11:25:52Z

First of all must say that we follow the situation in Austria and feel
proud, inspired and jealous!

that's is about knowledge production and its discontent

and I dare to bother you with more gloomy things - we have published a while
ago an issue "#02- 26: Another commons: living / knowledge / act" on recent
repressions and "knowledge production" in Russia :)) and only now finished
publishing it on line - the collection of text you can find here -

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=205&Itemid=291&lang=en

pay attention to Penzin article Alexei Penzin /// Under
suspicion<http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=582%3Aunder-suspicion&catid=205%3A02-26-new-commons-living-knoledge-action&Itemid=285&lang=en>it
is a core article of the issue

also these publication related to a new film *"2+2. Practicing Godard"* and
access to the film you better find here on our blog - because it in two
parts

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/22practicing-godard-the-story-of-the-communal-life-seminar/

- it is very funny movie on very dramatic situationand - mixture of fiction
- reenactment of Godard 1+1 and real documentation about police raid on art
seminar

as ever - very appreciate your critique, comments and distribution

my best

dmitry

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Free culture forum- Starting Oct 29: Join online!!!!

2009-10-28T09:29:20Z

ENGLISH - CATALÀ - CASTELLANO

First International Forum on free culture and knowledge accessibility (Barcelona October 29 to November 1 2009): Join online!!!!!!!!!!

ENGLISH

http://www.fcforum.net

The International Forum on free culture and knowledge will take place from October 29 to November 1st 2009 in Barcelona. This event is a unique opportunity to bring together under the same roof the main organizations and active voices in the world of free culture and free knowledge; a meeting point to sit down and work together setting common agendas and strategies, and also to reflect, from a critical point of view, on the different views, dangers and contradictions of free culture. At the same time, the forum is an opportunity to give more visibility to alternative conceptions of knowledge, culture and creativity, different from the ones that the entertainment industry and universities insist on imposing.

Why Barcelona

In January 2010, Spain will take up the Presidency of the European Union. The Spanish Government has already announced that one of its flagships will be the reinforcement of the control over the Internet and the criminalization of the sharing culture in the digital environment. The consequences of those decisions will be noticed in the rest of the world. Furthermore, within this context
Barcelona is closing agreements about access to culture that will serve as models to other institutions in Catalonia and Spain. In October 29 this year Barcelona will hold the Second Edition of the Oxcars Festival, an international event to honor the defense of culture and to show the existence of other creation channels, at least as good as the traditional ones. The last edition was a success with more than 2000 participants. It brought the attention both of an interested public and of media. You can find more information about last year's edition at
http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/theoxcars
There are many active organizations, movements and persons related to free culture from different perspectives in Spain, offering a very rich sharing space and a source of new proposals from where an international process can bel aunched. In this regard, several worldwide voices, like during the last World Social Forum (Belem do Para, Brazil, 2009) recognize the necessity of creating international spaces for networking, coordination and building of a global framework for free culture and knowledge, analyze similarities and develop common agendas. The Free Culture Forum of Barcelona aims to create such a space.

What

The main objectives of the Forum are, on the one hand, building networks to optimize the efforts of the different groups and setting common demands against the proposals from industry and governments in their eagerness to control culture and information; and on the other hand reinforcing the self-organization of tools and infrastructures to support free culture.

How

The Forum will take place in 3 days that combine different methodologies:
October 29: Celebration of the Oxcars Free Culture Awards Festival.
October 30: Presentation of key experiences from around the globe and discussion on the key issues.
October 31: Working groups around the key issues of the Forum
November 1st: Bring together the results from the working groups. Define a common agenda and approve a manifesto for each topic.

Key issues
The working program is on:
* Education and Acces to Knowledge
* Organizational Logic and Political Implications of Free Culture
* Free Software and Open Standards: Knowledge Sharing Hacker Philosophy and Action Technical Ware
* Economies, New P2p Models and Sustainable Distribution
* Legal Perspectives and User Access

HOW TO JOIN THE FREE CULTURE FORUM ONLINE????

DURING THE FCFORUM:

The Fcforum will take place from Oct 29th to Nov 1 2009 (Barcelona time zone). You can check out the program at http://fcforum.net/programa From the http//www.fcforum.net you have access to the several ways to join online and in live the Fcforum listed below.

Live streaming:
The oXcars Awards Festival (Oct 29 from 21pm) at http://oxcars09.exgae.net/live/
The Fcforum (Oct 30 to Nov 1) will be live streamed at http://fcforum.net/live

The main conclusions and ideas will be transmitted though distributed microblogging services, too. The messages will be transmitted in English, Catalan and Spanish.
Identi.ca': http://identi.ca/fcforum/
The Fcforum encourages you to use Identi.ca becouse is free, otherwise at Twitter go to http://twitter.com/fcforum_net
In both cases, add '!fcf' to your messages so they will be received by the fcforum group.

You can also join the Facebook event at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=179317651046&ref=mf

The collaborative wiki to support the Fcforum working groups is http://wiki.fcforum.net

AFTER THE FCFORUM:

The recordings will be availeble from the http://www.fcforum.net

Furthermore, and importantly, the Fcforum has as a goal to end up with Manifestos on free culture and a common action agenda. After the fcforum at http://www.fcforum.net you will be able to check the fcforum results and join and manifest your support if you wish.

For other questions and doubts the contact e-mail is: info(at)fcforum.net

CATALÀ

Primer fòrum internacional de cultura lliure i accesibilitat al coneixement (Barcelona del 29 d'Octubre al 1 de November 2009): Participa online!!!

http://www.fcforum.net

Del 29 d'Octubre a l'1 de Novembre de 2009 se celebrarà a Barcelona el Fòrum internacional de la cultura i el coneixement lliures. El Fòrum constitueix una oportunitat única per a reunir sota el mateix sostre les principals organitzacions, iniciatives i veus actives en el món de la cultura i el
coneixement lliures; un punt de trobada on treballar conjuntament, construir agendes i estratègies comunes, així com reflexionar, des d'un punt de vista crític, sobre les diverses visions, perills i contradiccions internes a la cultura lliure. El fòrum també és una oportunitat per a donar més visibilitat a concepcions alternatives del coneixement, la cultura i la creativitat, diferents de la que insisteixen a imposar la indústria de l'oci i les universitat neolliberalitzades.

Per què Barcelona

El gener de 2010 Espanya prendrà possessió de la Presidència de la Unió Europea. El Govern Espanyol ha anunciat que un dels seus cavalls de batalla serreforçar el control d'Internet i criminalitzar la cultura de la distribució en l'ambient digital. Aquestes decisions tindran conseqüències a la resta del món.
A més, en aquest context, institucions culturals a Barcelona estan signant acords sobre l'accés a la cultura que serviran com models per a altres institucions a Catalunya, Espanya i Europa.
El 29 d'Octubre d'enguany se celebrarà a Barcelona la segona edició del Festival dels Oxcars, un esdeveniment internacional en defensa de la cultura que demostra que existeixen altres canals de creació d'igual o major qualitat que els tradicionals. L'edició passada dels Oxcars van ser un èxit, comptant amb la participació de més de 2000 persones directament interessades i amb la cobertura dels principals mitjans de comunicació (la informació sobre els Oxcars de l'any
passat està disponible a:
http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/theoxcars).
Finalment, a l'estat Espanyol hi ha organitzacions, moviments molt actius i persones relacionats amb la cultura lliure des de diferents perspectives, que ofereixen un espai molt ric des del qual llançar un procés internacional. En aquest sentit, des de diversos llocs del món, com durant la celebració de l'últim Fòrum Social Mundial a Belem do Per (Brasil, Gener de 2009) es reconeix la necessitat de crear espais internacionals per a l'establiment d'una xarxa de coordinació i per a la creació d'un marc global de la cultura i del coneixement lliures, des del qual analitzar similituds i diferències entre iniciatives a diferents continents i desenvolupar agendes comunes. El Fòrum de la cultura lliure de Barcelona vol crear aquest espai.

Què?

Els objectius principals del Fòrum són, d'una banda, construir xarxes per a optimitzar els esforços dels diferents grups i compartir objectius per a impedir que la indústria i els governs imposin la seva política de control i restricció de la cultura i la informació; i per altra banda, organitzar-nos per a construir infraestructures per a la cultura lliure.

Com?

El Fòrum tindrà lloc en tres dies que combinen diverses metododologies:
29 d'Octubre: Celebració del Festival de la cultura lliure Oxcars
30 d'Octubre: Presentació d'experiències claus i inspiradores entorn 5 eixos de treball.
31 d'Octubre: Grups de treball al voltant de les qüestions clau del Fòrum.
1 de Novembre: Posada en comú dels resultats dels grups de treball. Definició d'una agenda comuna i aprovació de manifests per temes.

Eixos:
Perspectives Legals i Accés dels Usuaris
Economies, Nous Models P2P i Sostenibilitat Distributiva
Educació i Accés al Coneixement
Lògica Organitzativa i Implicacions Polítiques de la Cultura Lliure
Programari Lliure i Estàndards Oberts: Filosofia hacker de Coneixement Compartit i Eines d'Acció

COM PARTICIPAR EN LÍNEA AL FCFORUM???????

DURANT EL FCFORUM:
El Fcforum tindrà lloc del 29 d'Octubre al 1 de Novembre de 2009 (Barcelona fuso horari). Pots consultar el programa d'activitats en http://fcforum.net/programa Des de the http//www.fcforum.net tens accés a totes les vies de participació en línia i en viu llistades baix.

Retransmissió en viu (streaming): http://fcforum.net/live
Festival dels oXcars (Oct 29 des de les 21h) http://oxcars09.exgae.net/live/
Fcforum (del Oct 30 al Nov 1) http://fcforum.net/live

Les conclusions principals i les idees que sorgisquen seran difoses a traves de "microblogging". Els missatges seran difosos en castellà, català i angles.
Identi.ca: http://identi.ca/fcforum/
El Fcforum t'anima a usar Identi.ca perquè és un servei lliure però sinó pots unir-te per Twitter en http://twitter.com/fcforumnet
En ambdós casos inclou '!fcf' als teus missatges perquè els arribe als demas fcforumer@s .

Pots unir-te també si vols al esdeveniment en Facebook http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=179317651046&ref=mf

El wiki col.laboratiu de suport als grups de treball del fcforun es http://wiki.fcforum.net

DESPRÉS DEL FCFORUM:

Les gravacions estaran disponibles en http://www.fcforum.net

A més a més, i importantment, el Fcforum té com objectiu definir Manifestos sobre cultura lliure i acordar una agenda d'acció comuna. Després del Fcforum en http://www.fcforum.net podràs comentar els resultats del forum i expressar la teva adhesió si així ho desitges.

Per a altres qüestions o consultar dubtes l'e-mail de contacte és: info(at)fcforum.net

CASTELLANO

Primer foro internacional de cultura libre y accesibilidad al conocimiento (Barcelona del 29 de Octubre al 1 de November 2009): Participa online!!!

Del 29 de Octubre al 1 de Noviembre de 2009 se celebrará en Barcelona el Foro internacional de la cultura y el conocimiento libres. El Foro constituye una oportunidad única para reunir bajo el mismo techo las principales organizaciones, iniciativas y voces activas en el mundo de la cultura y el conocimeinto libres; un punto de encuentro donde trabajar conjuntamente, construir agendas y estrategias comunes, así como reflexionar, desde un punto de vista crítico, sobre las diversas visiones, peligros y contradicciones internas a la cultura libre. Así mismo el foro es una oportunidad para dar mayor visibilidad a concepciones alternativas del conocimiento, la cultura y la creatividad, diferentes a la que la industria del ocio y las universidades neoliberalizadas insisten en imponer.

Por qué Barcelona

En enero de 2010, España tomará posesión la Presidencia de la Unión Europea. El
Gobierno Español ha anunciado que uno de sus buques insignia será reforzar el
control de Internet y criminalizar la cultura de distribución en el ambiente
digital. Estas decisiones tendrán consecuencias en el resto del mundo. Además,
en este contexto, instituciones culturales de Barcelona están firmando acuerdos
sobre el acceso a la cultura que servirán como modelo para otras instituciones
en Cataluña, España y Europa.
El 29 de Octubre de este año se celebrará en Barcelona la segunda edición del
Festival de los Oxcars, un acontecimiento internacional en defensa de la cultura
que demuestra que existen otros canales de creación de igual o mayor calidad que
los tradicionales. La edición pasada de los Oxcars fue un éxito, contando con la
participación de más de 2000 personas interesadas y la cobertura de los medios
de comunicación (la información sobre los Oxcars del año pasado está disponible
en: http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/theoxcars).
Finalmente, en el Estado Español hay organizaciones, movimientos muy activos y
personas relacionados con la cultura libre desde distintas perspectivas, que
ofrecen un espacio muy rico desde el que lanzar un proceso internacional. En
este sentido, desde varios lugares del mundo, como durante la celebración del
último Foro Social Mundial en Belem do Para (Brasil, Enero de 2009) se reconoce
la necesitad de crear espacios internacionales para el establecimiento de una
red de coordinación y para la creación de un marco global de la cultura y del
conocimiento libres desde el que analizar similitudes y diferencias entre
iniciativas en diferentes continentes y desarrollar agendas comunes. El Foro de
la cultura libre de Barcelona quiere crear tal espacio.

Qué
Los objetivos principales del Foro son, por una parte, construir redes para
optimizar los esfuerzos de los diferentes grupos y compartir objetivos para
impedir que la industria y los gobiernos impongan su politica de control y
restricción de la cultura y la información; y por otra parte, organizarnos para
construir infraestructuras para la cultura libre.

Cómo
El Foro tendrá lugar en tres días que combinan diversas metododologías:
29 de Octubre: Celebración del Festival de la cultura libre Oxcars
30 de Octubre: Presentación de experiencias claves e inspiradoras en torno a 5
ejes de trabajo.
31 de Octubre: Grupos de trabajo alrededor de las cuestiones clave del Foro.
1 de Noviembre: Puesta en común de los resultados de los grupos de trabajo.
Definición de una agenda común y aprobación de manifiestos por temas.

Los Temas del Forum:
- Perspectivas Legales y Acceso de los Usuarios
- Economías, Nuevos Modelos P2P y Sostenibilidad Distributiva
- Educación y Acceso al Conocimiento
- Lógica Organizativa e Implicaciones Políticas de la Cultura Libre
- Software Libre y Estándares Abiertos: Filosofía Hacker de Conocimiento Compartido y Herramientas de Acción

¿COMO PARTICIPAR ONLINE EN EL FCFORUM????

DURANTE EL FCFORUM:

El Fcforum tendrá lugar del 29 de Octubre al 1 de Noviembre de 2009 (Barcelona fuso horario). Puedes consultar el programa de actividades en http://fcforum.net/programa Desde the http//www.fcforum.net tienes acceso a todas las vias de participacion online y en vivo listadas mas abajo.

Retransmisión en vivo (streaming):
Festival de los oXcars (Oct 29 - 21h) http://oxcars09.exgae.net/live/
Fcforum (del Oct 30 al Nov 1) http://fcforum.net/live

Las conclusiones principales y las ideas que surjan seran difundidas a traves de "microblogging". Los mensajes seran difundidos en castellano, catalan e inglés.
Identi.ca: http://identi.ca/fcforum/
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«·´`·.(*·.¸(`·.¸ ¸.·´)¸.·*).·´`·»
«·´¨*·¸¸« 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

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Re: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna squatted!

2009-10-27T16:23:34Z

Eduard Freudmann wrote:

> The Bologna process aims at an extensive convergence of european
> Universities with the Anglo-American education system. The aim is to
> enter competition in the global education market in order to strengthen
> universitie's economic position and increase their research dependent
> revenues. The establishment of regulative norms and the harmonization of
> standards are the basis and at the same time the precondition of this
> process: without standardization there can be no measurability, without
> measurability no comparability, without comparability no competition.
> Economization and the logic of competition are imposed at every level of
> knowledge production.

Brings back memories of the strike of the art faculty and students back in
1996... (http://neoscenes.net/1996-04-22.jpg)

Standardization is inexorable as long as the Techno-social system has the
energy input to expend on maintaining and propagating ordered sub-systems.

That energy input is, at base, the attention paid to it by the individuals
who populate its institutional sub-systems.

When the Techno-social system runs out of energy input, it will gradually
gain in disorder and degrees of autonomous freedom.

Learning takes place everywhere all the time. It is a mistake that you
expect a state institution, an integral part of the Techno-social system to
be a free and open system. It's best to pay it NO attention and instead
take your education fully into your own hands. Take your attention and
give it fully to your peers, and you will learn everything you need to
know. And at the same time, you will see the Techno-social system weaken
as it loses your energy/attention input...

Leaning on/into the State in opposition only strengthens the
reified/reifying bulwarks of State. Walk away on a new self-determinate
path and the State falls flat, crumbled edifice of artifice.

Liquidity and Flow (rather than Solidarity) from Sydney, where the #2
source of GNP to Australia is Corporate/International Education -- it's
right behind #1 which is the Extractives/Mining Industries.

Not much difference between the two, somehow...

jh

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Squatting Supermarkets @ Piemonte Share Festival

2009-10-27T04:45:13Z

Squatting Supermarkets @ Piemonte Share Festival

An interactive supermarket in augmented reality, a radical marketplace
squatting the infrastructures of consumism. Logos transform into places,
becoming access doors to the domains of communication, action, opportunity.
Information, relations and emotions become readable, creating a new way of
writing into spaces, expressing the stories of products and people, beyond
corporations' practices of control and information manipulation.
"Shoptivism" is born.

http://www.artisopensource.net/2009/10/27/squatting-supermarkets/

Piemonte Share Festival
"Market Forces"

3-8 November 2009
Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali
via Giolitti 36
Turin, Italy

http://www.toshare.it/?page_id=304&lang=en

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Tinker.Solder.Tap: A Graphic Novel

2009-10-27T00:33:04Z

http://www.sarai.net/publications/occasional/tinker-solder-tap

(Free Download)

We live in a tumultuous media environment. There is widespread confusion,
uncertainty and awe at the inventiveness of the thousands of people in
media networks who innovate, copy, tinker, recycle, produce, remix and
relay. The protagonists of Tinker.Solder.Tap bring alive the ways in which
the relationship between life and the media has been re-scripted in the
various neighbourhoods of our cities. The story begins in the mid-80s,
when a man returns home with an object called a VCR. The chain of effects
that follows transforms irreversibly the social life of the neighbourhood
and its reverberations can be felt all over the world.

Produced and Designed at the Sarai Media Lab

Text: Bhagwati Prasad
Graphics: Amitabh Kumar
Translation and Editing: Shveta Sarda
Additional Research: Rakesh Kumar Singh, Lokesh
Pencilling sequential comic pages: Raja Pocket Books (Raj Comics)
Design and Cover: Amitabh Kumar

Published by
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India
Tel: (+91) 11 2394 2199 Fax: (+91) 11 2394 3450
Email: dak@...
www.sarai.net
Delhi 2009

Any part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the prior
written permission of the publishers for educational and non-commercial
use. The authors and publishers would, however, like to be informed.

This work is part of the project, ?Social and Material Life of Media
Piracy? of Sarai-CSDS and Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore) supported by
International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada .

ISBN 9788190585316
Published by the Director, CSDS.
Printed by Impress, New Delhi

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Fwd: NOII leaflet on enviro/migration and call out for bookfair

2009-10-26T20:03:32Z

FWD:

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND THE CASE AGAINST IMMIGRATION CONTROLS

The spectre of mass immigration

A spectre haunts the rich countries of the West, or at least some of those
who currently live in them. This is that climate change will create many
millions of ?environmental refugees?, who will wish to migrate to the rich
countries which, through their excessive consumption and their greed, are
themselves responsible for their plight.

The environmental degradation of the planet by capitalism has led to the
displacement of people from their homes and livelihoods throughout
capitalism's history. Currently, the vast majority of the people who are
forced to migrate do so because of wars and invasion by the West,
persecution by repressive right-wing regimes (supported by the West
because they serve its interests), and cuts in public expenditure,
privatisation and other poverty-inducing measures enforced by the World
Bank and other agencies of the West (partly as a means of extracting
inflated interest payments on an unjust foreign debt).

But global warming and climate change, mainly brought about by the massive
generation of greenhouse gases by the rich, are adding to the pressures on
people to migrate. Global warming is contributing to desertification and
droughts. In combination with the scramble by Western corporations for the
wealth of the Third World this has created massive deforestation, and in
other places has driven people off their land or made it uninhabitable,
creating deserts where there was once cultivated land, plains where
animals could graze and people could live. Rising sea levels may force
many millions off their land, most notably in Bangladesh. According to the
World Development Movement a 4 degree centrigrade rise in global
temperature could lead to up to 300 million more people suffering from
coastal flooding each year. Most of them are in the global South. Cities
at risk include Banjul in the Gambia, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Manila in
the Phillipines. A May 2009 report by the United Nations Global
Humanitarian Forum says that:

The findings of the report indicate that every year climate change leaves
over 300,000 people dead, 325 million people seriously affected, and
economic losses of US$125 billion. 4 billion pople are vulnerable, and 500
milion people are at extreme risk?
It is a grave global justice concern that those who suffer most from
climate change have done the least to cause it.

Shockingly, the reaction of some people, and even of some
environmentalists, to the terrible threat of climate change is to worry
about the possible impacts of mass migration on the wellbeing of the
current inhabitants of the rich countries. There is something astonishing
in the assumption, apparently made by so many of those who argue for
cutting immigration, that it is morally correct to argue entirely in terms
of the self-interest of the current inhabitants of their particular bit of
territory. To claim that immigration must be stopped or limited in order
to protect the British environment is no different from arguing that it
should be stopped, or increased, in order to protect the jobs, wages and
prosperity of British capitalists and/or workers. There is an
extraordinary failure to pay attention to the needs of humanity as a
whole, or even the planet as a whole.

The response of the British and their governments to potential
environmental disaster is likely, unless we campaign successfully to
persuade them otherwise, to be to try and close their borders. If so, this
will mean a huge increase in suffering. There will be more repression,
more destruction of civil liberties than already exists in the viciously
cruel and arbitrary system of ?tough?immigration controls, and more
suffering, destitution and criminalisation of migrants and refugees.
Already, for reasons probably more connected with internal racist
pressures than any actual increases in attempts to migrate, the ruling
class in Europe and North America are trying make their borders more
impregnable. Governments not only cruelly mistreat the migrants and
refugees who manage to reach this country, but, contrary to international
law and their treaty obligations, they try to stop them getting here at
all. Hundreds of migrants are drowned or die in other ways every year in
their attempt to flee from wars and repression. Governments are
patrolling the sea to try and stop them, forcing them into more and more
dangerous routes. They make deals with regimes on other continents to get
them to cooperate in preventing migration, and bribe them with ?aid?.
There are new immigration prisons in most of the countries surrounding
Europe, funded by the European Union, to prevent migration. The USA is
building a wall along its border with Mexico.

NOII is of course utterly opposed to any such response. It would be
obscene if the rich countries tried to stop people fleeing the tragedies
thay have themselves largely created. As Betsy Hartman points out in her
?10 Reasons why Population Control isn't the Solution for Global Warming?
(Different Takes, Climate Change Series, No 57, Winter 2009):

The industrialised countries, with 20% of the world's population, are
responsible for 80% of the accumulated carbon dioxide build-up in the
atmosphere. The US is the worst offender. In 2002 the US was responsible
for 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per person compard to on 0.2 tons
in Bangladesh, 0.3 in Kenya and 3.9 in Mexico.

Why should people living in the 'developed world' have all the 'gain' of
the unfettered industries that create climate change while many millions
elsewhere have to suffer the pain? This is totally unjust. Immigration
controls try to protect the unjust privilege of those destroying the
planet. The richer countries should not be allowed to destroy other parts
of the planet whilst sitting pretty behind borders against the people
displaced by their greed. The fight against immigration controls is, in
part, a fight against this global injustice.

Convincing people that immigration controls are cruel, unnecessary,
unworkable without massive increases in repression (and perhaps not even
then), an abuse of human rights and should be got rid of, would of course
reduce suffering. It would also be one way to counter racism, which is fed
and legitimised by immigration controls, and to prevent employers from
using divisions in the working class to make all workers, and not just
migrants, more vulnerable to exploitation.

Supposing large numbers of people succeeded in escaping poverty, wars and
climate change and finding safety in the rich countries, and supposing
even that this, unlike previous immigrations, was damaging to the economic
self-interest of the current inhabitants of the rich countries, it would
still be utterly wrong to try to stop them. In fact we believe that more
people, rather than fewer, should be able to migrate.

Talk of flooding by immigration is a distraction from the real tragedy of
climate change.

In addition, getting rid of controls might mean that people would be more
able to concentrate on the real problems in this world, and the real
causes of climate change. As most environmentalists well know, it is far
more important to campaign for policies to end the potential tragedy of
climate change in the world as a whole than it is to campaign against
immigration to Britain, or the USA, or anywhere else. It is essential for
all of humanity, and especially for the poorest in the world, for climate
change to be stopped, for the economic exploitation of the poorest
countries to stop, for the arrangements of the markets to suit the rich
and starve the poor in the world to end.

Already the governments of the rich countries spend many billions of
pounds on immigration controls, while failing to deal with homelessness
and other problems which make people suffer. Their peoples are encouraged
to blame the problems of homelessness, unemployment and failings in public
services on immigrants. But if there has been a 'strain on resources' this
has, at least up to now, had nothing to do with immigrants, who are merely
made into scapegoats useful to the survival of privilege. It is the
result, on the contrary, of inequality and the failures of capitalism. To
take the example of housing: social housing is privatised, huge numbers
of properties are left dilapidated while building workers are left idle.
Blaming the problems of capitalism and climate change on immigration plays
to a sense of powerlessness, paralyzing effort when we still have the
power to transform and rescue the situation, and put the world on a
sounder, happier and more sustainable path than before.

Dubious statistics, or scaremongering.

There is, moreover, an element of scaremongering in the assertion that
climate change will lead to mass immigration to Britain and other rich
countries. While it is clear that climate change will cause massive
problems and displacement, it is far less clear that the displaced people
will want, or be able, to cross continents, deserts and oceans to reach,
for example, Northern Europe. The assertion that many millions of people
from the global South will migrate to the rich North may simply be wrong,
as many of the predictions about rising levels of immigration and
population growth have notoriously been in the past. The figures on
?predicted? levels of immigration bandied around by Woolas, Kingsnorth and
others (see below), for example, are figures produced by the far right
anti-immigration lobby group Migration Watch, which have been shown to be
full of holes and false claims. In any case the scares about population
growth, and its potential effects on the environment and well-being, are
frequently false. Britain is not in any meaningful sense an ?overpopulated
island?; if there are problems, they are caused by the over-consumption of
the rich, rather than the existence of the many (see our pamphlet on
population).

Even in the rich countries climate change, as well as the havoc wrought by
the disasters of neo-liberalism, are likely to make life more difficult,
which would make them less attractive to migrate to; Danny Dorling,
professor of geography at Sheffield University, for example, thinks that
Britain?s problem in the future may be too few rather than too many
migrants. London and its surroundings are threatened, like other coastal
areas, by rising sea levels. Already there are accounts of British
citizens leaving the UK in order to take advantage of what they hope will
be the greater environmental safety of New Zealand.

The effects on particular areas of the world are not well understood,
researched or quantified. As Dr Camillo Boano, Professor Roger Zetter and
Dr Tim Morris say in their briefing paper no. 1 on ?Environmentally
displaced people? for the Oxford University Refugee Studies Programme,
there is wide divergence in the estimates of the numbers likely to be
displaced by climate change, let alone where they might try to migrate to.
In particular, there has been little attempt to work out how many people
are actually likely to migrate North. The theories about how climate
change may affect particular areas, including Britain, are much contested.
And powerful forces induce people, if they can, to stay where they are,
and to adapt.

Above all, the sad reality is that people are likely to find it much
harder to migrate than the talk of ?flooding? implies. The tragedy is, not
at all that they will flood in their millions to Europe, but that they
will die in their attempt to move, or perhaps succeed in migrating to
nearby, perhaps equally poor, countries (as the vast majority of refugees
now do). There is a great deal of historical evidence, from previous
disasters in Brazil, Ireland and elsewhere, that this is the case.
Supposing, for example, that sea level rises in Bangladesh displace, as
some predict, 5.5 million people. They will stay as near to their homes
and support networks as they can. Some, possibly millions, will try to
find security in neighbouring East Bengal. Perhaps several thousands will
make it to more prosperous urban centres in India and elsewhere in Asia.
Only, as now, will the exceptional few make it across continents and seas
to Europe and other richer areas. They would require, as now, unusual
strength, enterprise, and some money, to do so.

The greening of hate.

Those who raise the spectre of mass immigration have a variety of motives
for doing so. Some are more reputable than others. It is unclear what
causes the respected environmentalist Professor Norman Myers, who has
written about environmental change and population displacement for many
years, to conjecture that global warming could potentially displace 200
million people, and moreover to state that:

Already there are sizeable numbers of environmental refugees who have made
their way, usually illegally, into OSCE [i.e. rich] countries and today?s
stream will surely come to be regarded as a trickle when compared to the
floods that will ensue in decades ahead. (brackets added).

Nor is it clear how his, highly conjectural, figures found their way into
the Stern report, and thence into the mainstream of environmental thinking
? although Stern himself mainly talks about migration from rural areas to
cities within the Third World [CHECK].
It is, however, very clear that there have been several attempts by
racists and fascists to infiltrate the green movement in the USA and
Britain in order to gain its support for policies against immigration.
Such people have not merely embraced the arguments about flooding and
swamping by mass immigration to the rich countries. They have also, more
subtly, argued (in case it is pointed out that for the environment in the
world as a whole it does not matter where people live) that if poor people
migrate to rich countries, they might become better off and this would
increase their carbon footprint. This point has been made, for example, by
the Centre for Immigration, an extreme anti-immigration group in the USA.
The Sierra Club, a mainstream environmental lobby in the USA, was
infiltrated by right-wingers who pushed to get them to adopt an
anti-immigration position, but were thwarted by a mobilisation of existing
members of the Sierra Club. Some members of the anti-immigration faction
were influential and respected environmental activists like Paul Watson,
Captain of the Sea Shepherd, who said:
People in the liberal camp are becoming more aware that ecological
concerns are beginning to take priority over social justice issues.
People are trying to advocate unlimited immigration, which is ecologically
unsound.
In Britain, John Redwood, Conservative MP and ex-Minister asked in
Parliament:
Does the Home Secretary accept that there must be some limit on the
overall number of economic migrants every year because of the pressure on
water resources, transport capacity, housing and land, or will he tell us
how those problems can be solved so that we can have unlimited economic
migration?
Perhaps we would expect this from a Tory but David Topple of Friends of
the Earth says:
[Immigration] leads ? obviously - to even more destruction of the
countryside and pressure on resources of all kinds? If we have millions of
people of many different races and cultures diluting each other's
identities (and that on each continent of the planet and in each country)
what sort of biodiversity is that? Who gains from all of this? Well, the
globalisers as usual.
And Paul Kingsnorth, a prominent environmentalist, broadcaster, writer of
articles for all the major newspapers and of books, arrested at Twyford
Down protests, peace observer in the rebel Zapatista villages of Mexico,
'honorary member? of the Lali tribe in Papua New Guinea, who thus has a
dangerous credibility, comes out backing New Labour immigration minister
Woolas. In his blog of October 19 2008 he says for example:
Here's the news: new immigration minister Phil Woolas has, for the first
time since Labour came to power, publicly declared that immigration levels
are too high. He has linked this to the economic downturn - because there
will be fewer jobs, he says, the government should make sure more of them
go to British people. Also, and significantly in my view, he has linked
immigration, again for the first time, to our rapidly rising population.
The UK's population is currently almost 61 million. But it's predicted to
rise to a staggering 77 million by 2051 if current levels of immigration
continue. Immigration is the main cause of population increase in the UK;
nearly two thirds of a million people arrived here last year alone.
Therefore, say Kingsnorth and Woolas (as well as the Tories, the BNP,
UKIP, Migration Watch and others), immigration (and population growth)
should be stopped (or only allowed if immigration is ?balanced? by
emigration). Kingsnorth et al do not specify by what brutal means these
goals might be achieved.

James Lovelock (famous for his early forecasts of climate change), on the
other hand, does come clean on the implications of stopping immigration.
He now apparently believes that it is too late to prevent the effects of
climate change making most of the world uninhabitable, and that Britain
will be one of the few remaining ?lifeboat islands? where human life can
be sustained. Even in Britain, he says in an article in the Sunday Times
of 8 February 2009, sea level rise may cause the loss of cities and
energy resources, but:

These dangers will be aggravated by the ever-growing flux of climate
refugees, to which will be added returning expatriates who left the
crowded United Kingdom for what they thought would be a pleasant life in
Europe. Our gravest dangers are not from climate change itself but
indirectly from starvation, competition for space and resources ? and
tribal war.

He concludes:

We need another Churchill now to lead us from the clinging, flabby,
consensual thinking of the late 20th century and bind the nation into a
single-minded effort to wage a difficult war? For island havens, an
effective defence force will be as important as our own immune systems.
Like it or not, we may have to increase the size of and spending on our
armed forces.

Suspect motivations

While it is not always clear what motivates environmentalists to raise the
spectre of mass immigration by climate refugees, it is very obvious that
it suits the purposes of the fascist British National Party. Thus the BNP
(which uses the term 'population growth' interchangably with immigration)
says on its website:

The impact of population growth is already manifesting itself in many
undesirable ways. Quite apart from the growing pressure on homes,
education, health services, employment, social welfare, water
availability, policing, energy demand, traffic congestion and the
environment in general, is landfill sourcing. In the final analysis
Britain's capacity for creating rubbish is directly linked to
overpopulation.

The lobbying of the small, but much quoted, pressure group Migration Watch
against immigration seems to be based primarily on the argument that it
will cause too great an increase in population (they recognise that
immigration is in the economic interests of the British population, while
claiming that the benefits are less than the government claims). Yet both
the BNP and Professor David Coleman, Migration Watch?s chief researcher,
argue that the solution to potential problems of declining population in
Britain is for white British women to have more babies (see article by
Coleman on ?Replacement Migration?, published in the Galton Institute
Newsletter, March 2001). Their motivation for scaremongering about mass
immigration is based primarily on racist, eugenicist notions (see NOII?s
pamphlets on population and on eugenics), rather than on any threats to
the British environment. But they are not averse to making use of ?green?
arguments. The BNP, indeed, claims to be ?the only genuine green party?.

In the United States the Pentagon commissioned work by Peter Schwartz and
Doug Randall on the threat supposedly posed by environmental refugees,
entitled ?An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for
United States National Security? (October 2003). Its conclusion is:

It is quite plausible that within a decade the evidence of an imminent
abrupt climate shift may become clear and reliable? the United States
will need to take urgent action to prevent and mitigate some of the most
significant impacts? large population movements in this scenario are
inevitable. Learning how to manage those populations, border tensions that
arise and the resulting refugees will be critical. New forms of security
agreements dealing specifically with energy, food and water will also be
needed. In short, while the US itself will be relatively better off and
with more adaptive capacity, it will find itself in a world where Europe
will be struggling internally, large number of refugees washing up on its
shores and Asia in serious crisis over food and water...

It is (similarly) plausible that the motivations of the Pentagon for
publishing this report were its desire to make the case for more weaponry
and more armed enforcement of borders.

Resisting the politics of hate

The Green Party in Britain, not without some difficulty, has so far
resisted such pressures. Although it does not call for the immediate
abolition of immigration controls, and it seeks to define fair and
non-discriminationary controls (which we believe to be impossible), it
does have the abolition of controls as a long-term goal. Its policies on
migration are far in advance of the positions of the mainstream political
parties in the UK, and indeed are better than much that can be found in
many of the groups to the left of the Labour Party. The party?s manifesto
states that its vision is of a world in which conditions are such that
there is less pressure to migrate, and it states that:

The existing economic order and colonialism have both been major causes of
migration through direct and indirect violence, disruption of traditional
economies, the use of migrants as cheap labour, uneven patterns of
development and global division of labour.
?
The Green Party's highest priority is the creation of a just and
ecological world order in which environmental devastation is minimised and
needs can be met without recourse to migration.

Many, probably most, environmental activists have been very supportive of
migrants and refugees, and thoroughly sympathetic towards their struggles
and suffering and those of other deprived and vulnerable people. But they
have a battle to fight. And we believe it is problematic that some
environmentalists have lent their voice to the scaremongering about
millions of potential climate change migrants. They may do so not at all
because they approve of immigration controls or want more of them, but
because they believe that this could be a ?wake up call? to the ruling
classes of the world ? or in other words that the threat of mass
immigration would bring the impact of climate change home to where it is
being caused, and make governments do something about it. Such arguments,
we believe, although they are often well meaning, are dangerous. They give
comfort to the racists who, like the BNP, Migration Watch, Professor
Coleman, their supporters in the tabloid press and even the BBC, and
apparently also David Topple of Friends of the Earth, see immigration not
in reality as a threat to the environment, but primarily as a threat to
something called ?British identity?. The arguments reinforce the notion
that immigration is some kind of threat, rather than something to be
welcomed and supported. And, of course, if governments came to accept
that climate change was forcing many millions of people to flee from areas
that became uninhabitable, their response, in current circumstances, would
almost certainly be merely to intensify the brutality of their immigration
controls.

The need for radical change

We believe that climate change will only be stopped if there are radical
changes in the way society is organised. We have argued in our pamphlet on
?socialism and immigration controls? that to get rid of immigration
controls probably requires the overthrow of capitalism. Much the same, or
more, applies to saving large areas of the planet from becoming
uninhabitable. It would involve changing the nature of production, getting
rid of the multi-national corporations and replacing them with socially
useful and planet-friendly activity. It would mean organising production
on the basis of democratic decisions about what people need and want,
rather than on the basis of making profits for private corporations and
creating markets for their products (through advertising and through
making products which have deliberately short lives and need to be thrown
away at frequent intervals, and so on). It would involve a dramatic
reduction in the consumption of the rich, so as to protect and enhance the
interests of the poor in the rich countries as well as in the rest of the
world. It is inequality not migration which is the problem. Matthew
Connelly, professor at Cornell university, suggested on the BBC?s Today
programme that if the British are worried about ?overpopulation? in their
country, they should export the bankers and the rest of the rich, and
import subsistence farmers. Getting rid of capitalism would not only be
good for the environment, but has the potential to create a far superior
society, one in which poverty and exploitation are eliminated and people
are free to lead fulfilled and happy lives. There is an internationalist
common cause to be fought for, between workers across the world.

Finally, it would of course be better if people were not forced, by the
actions of the rich and their governments and corporations, to take the
drastic and often painful step of migrating. There is perhaps one humane
way to reduce the need to migrate. This is for the rich countries to stop
making wars, to stop stealing the wealth of the rest of the world and to
stop destroying the climate through their excessive consumption and greed.
But all of us should have the basic human right of free movement, the
freedom to decide for ourselves where we wish to live and to work, and
equal rights wherever we live and whatever our national origins.

There is one atmosphere. It knows no borders. Weather, climatic changes,
toxins are not governed by immigration controls. We all breath from this
one atmosphere but borders keep us apart and stop us addressing our common
global human problems.

--
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

--
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

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Academy of Fine Arts Vienna squatted!

2009-10-25T06:20:39Z

On Tuesday, October 20 2009 the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna was squatted, here is the statement and the demands of the occupants:

The Bologna process aims at an extensive convergence of european Universities with the Anglo-American education system. The aim is to enter competition in the global education market in order to strengthen universitie's economic position and increase their research dependent revenues. The establishment of regulative norms and the harmonization of standards are the basis and at the same time the precondition of this process: without standardization there can be no measurability, without measurability no comparability, without comparability no competition. Economization and the logic of competition are imposed at every level of knowledge production.

The result is intercontinental as well as inter-EU competition, in which single universities and their departments compete amongst themselves for the best results and statistics. The processes involved in the creation of an education economy with knowledge as the commodity correspond to the general tendencies towards privatization and commodification of all spheres of life under neoliberal capitalism. They lead to educational institution's increased dependency on their sponsors, cynically defined as the autonomization of universities.

In this context autonomy is a euphemism for the new forms of governing institutions. The autonomized universities are not autonomous in the sense of self-determined at all. They are rather directed to fulfil the needs of economy and industry, as well as to subjugate themselves to market logic: efficiency, competition and managerial ruling structures. The democratisation of universities, implemented in the 1970s, is successively abolished - democratically legitimized bodies are disenfranchised and replaced by top-down hierarchical structures.

In the composition of the Bologna 3-level study model, a paradigm change has manifested itself, in the last few years there has been a shift from a pluralistic ideal of education to an economy-oriented model of education. The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna has repeatedly and explicitly positioned itself against this degradation and the establishment of the Bachelor-Master system.

We refuse to subjugate ourselves to the logic of politics and economy!

We're fighting to define learning, teaching and research for ourselves!

We declare solidarity with the education protests in Bangladesh, Brazil, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Great Britain, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Croatia, Netherlands, Serbia, South Africa, USA!

**********

1. We oppose ourselves to university-based organisational structures that are determined by economic ends, as well as to the privatisation of teaching, research and knowledge production more broadly. We demand the full public funding and re-democratization of all educational institutions as well as the unconditional abolition of university fees!

2. We oppose ourselves to the pseudo-autonomy of universities. We demand the immediate withdrawal of §8* of the UG 2002!
§8.: 'Upon the proposal of the minister of education, the government may impose the installation of a branch of study on a university or several universities, given this is necessary on the basis of political decisions in the fields of education or science, and given there is no related former agreement as in a contract regarding university performance.'
We demand the freedom to define what teaching and research, as well as science and art, mean in the context of our universities.

3. We oppose ourselves to quality assessments concerning science and art when these operate by economic criteria. We are against the forced imposition of self-marketing strategies on universities, and against the conflation of education with competitiveness and elitism.
We demand the abolition of knowledge surveys and agreements on productivity!

4. We oppose ourselves to the degrading transformation of universities and schools into training facilities oriented by the labour market.
We want education as space for thinking, not training as the mere reproduction of workforce!.

5. We insist that the government refrain from taking teaching and art, science and research to be seperable as objects of thought and administration. We demand that the corresponding ministeries be merged immediately.

We insist that the rector defend the position of the Academy - and not his private view - when it comes to negotiating the terms of productivity with the ministry.

We demand that the rector make sure all existing courses of study remain in place, according to the decisions taken at the academy.

We demand that all financial activities within the term of the current agreement on productivity (2007-2009) be immediately revealed.

Edited by teachers and students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Sign the petition: http://www.malen-nach-zahlen.at/?page_id=144

http://www.malen-nach-zahlen.at (content is being translated to english ...)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=154379632337
http://twitter.com/malennach

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Fwd: [iai.europe.en] Against electoral fraud in Russia !

2009-10-24T01:39:41Z

Here is the more info:

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/managed-democracy-our-moscow-comrades-are-arrested-for-protesting-electoral-fraud-and-terrorism/

situation get more and more terrible

dmitry

2009/10/23 NL IAI <newsletter@...>

<http://www.habitants.org/>

> Against electoral fraud in Russia !
>
> English
>
> <http://eng.habitants.org/noticias/newsletter/1>
<...>

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G8 summit in Genoa from 19 to 21 July 2001, Giuliani and Gaggio v. Italy (Eur. Ct. H.R. May 28, 2009)

2009-10-23T09:49:09Z

Here is the decision of the European Court of Human Rights, an organ of
the COE, the other body, some money, some visible victory, but see
yourself:

http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=html&documentId=853404&portal=hbkm&source=externalbydocnumber&tabl

and here is the press release:

628

25.8.2009

Press release issued by the Registrar

CHAMBER JUDGMENT
GIULIANI AND GAGGIO v. ITALY

The European Court of Human Rights has today notified in writing its
Chamber judgment1 in the case of Giuliani and Gaggio v. Italy
(application no. 23458/02). The Court held

- unanimously that there had been no violation of Article 2 (right
to life) of the European Convention on Human Rights as regards the
excessive use of force;

- by five votes to two that there had been no violation of Article
2 as regards the State’s positive obligations to protect life;

- by four votes to three that there had been a violation of Article
2 as regards the procedural obligations under that Article; and

- unanimously that there had been no violation of Article 38
(examination of the case).

Under Article 41 (just satisfaction) of the Convention, the Court
awarded the first two applicants 15,000 euros (EUR) each and the third
applicant EUR 10,000 for non-pecuniary damage.

(The judgment is available in English and French).

1. Principal facts

The applicants, Giuliano Giuliani, his wife Adelaide Gaggio and their
daughter Elena Giuliani, are Italian nationals who were born in 1938,
1944 and 1972 respectively and live in Genoa and Milan (Italy).

The application concerns the death of the applicants’ son and brother,
Carlo Giuliani, while he was taking part in clashes during the G8 summit
in Genoa from 19 to 21 July 2001.

On 20 July, during an authorised demonstration, there were extremely
violent clashes between anti-globalisation militants and law-enforcement
officers. At around 5 p.m., under pressure from the demonstrators, a
group of about 50 carabinieri withdrew on foot, leaving two vehicles
exposed. One of them, with three carabinieri inside, remained stuck on
Piazza Alimonda. It was surrounded and violently attacked by a group of
demonstrators, some of whom were armed with iron bars, pickaxes, stones
and other blunt implements. One of the carabinieri, who had been
injured, drew his firearm and, after giving a warning, fired two shots
outside the vehicle. Carlo Giuliani, who was wearing a balaclava and
playing an active part in the attack, was fatally wounded by a bullet in
his face. In an attempt to move the vehicle away, the driver twice drove
over the young man’s unconscious body. When the demonstrators had been
dispersed, a doctor arrived at the scene and pronounced Carlo Giuliani dead.

An investigation was opened immediately by the Italian authorities.
Criminal proceedings were instituted against the officer who had fired
the shots and the driver of the vehicle for intentional homicide. An
autopsy performed within 24 hours of the death revealed that the death
had been caused by the shot and not by the attempts to drive the vehicle
away. The forensic expert found that the shot had been fired at a
downward angle.

At the public prosecutor’s request three expert reports were prepared.
The authors of the third report, submitted in June 2002, deplored the
fact that it had been impossible to examine the body, since the public
prosecutor had in the meantime authorised the family to have it
cremated. They concluded that the bullet had been fired upwards by the
carabiniere but had been deflected by a stone thrown at the vehicle by
another demonstrator.

On 5 May 2003 the investigating judge discontinued the proceedings. She
found that the driver of the vehicle, whose actions had resulted only in
bruising, could not be held responsible for the killing as he had been
unable to see Carlo Giuliani, given the confusion prevailing around the
vehicle. As to the officer who had fired the fatal shot, the judge took
the view that he had fired into the air without intent to kill and that
he had in any event acted in self-defence in response to the violent
attack on him and his colleagues.

2. Procedure and composition of the Court

The application was lodged with the European Court of Human Rights on 18
June 2002. A hearing was held in the Human Rights Building, Strasbourg,
on 5 December 2006 and the application was declared admissible on 6
February 2007.

Judgment was given by a Chamber of seven judges, composed as follows:

Nicolas Bratza (the United Kingdom), President,
Josep Casadevall (Andorra),
Giovanni Bonello (Malta),
Vladimiro Zagrebelsky (Italy),
Lech Garlicki (Poland),
Ljiljana Mijović (Bosnia and Herzegovina),
Ján Šikuta (Slovakia), judges,

and also Lawrence Early, Section Registrar.

3. Summary of the judgment2

Complaints

Relying on Article 2, the applicants alleged that Carlo Giuliani’s death
had been caused by excessive use of force and that the organisation of
the operations to maintain and restore public order had been inadequate.
In addition, they argued that the failure to provide immediate
assistance amounted to a violation of Articles 2 and 3 (prohibition of
inhuman treatment).

The applicants further complained, under Articles 2, 6 (right to a fair
hearing) and 13 (right to an effective remedy), that there had not been
an effective investigation into their close relative’s death.

Lastly, they alleged that the Italian Government had breached Article 38
of the Convention (examination of the case) by omitting to provide
information to the Court or by producing false information.

Decision of the Court

Article 2

Excessive use of force

The Court first reiterated the general principles established in its
case-law concerning Article 2. Next, on the basis of the evidence
produced by the parties, it analysed the reasons behind the
investigating judge’s decision to discontinue the proceedings. In this
connection it noted that the carabiniere who had fired the shots had
been confronted with a group of demonstrators carrying out a violent
attack on the vehicle he was in, that he had issued warnings, holding
his weapon in such a way that it was clearly visible, and that he had
fired only when the attack had continued. The Court agreed with the
investigating judge that the use of lethal force had not exceeded the
limits of what was absolutely necessary in order to avert what the
carabiniere had honestly perceived to be a real and imminent danger to
his life and the lives of his colleagues. It further found that it was
not necessary to examine in abstracto the compatibility with Article 2
of the applicable legislative provisions on the use of weapons by
law-enforcement officers, as the situation under consideration had
involved an individual decision taken in a state of panic. Accordingly,
there had been no disproportionate use of force and thus no violation of
Article 2 in this regard.

Compliance with positive obligation to protect life

In general terms, the Court observed that when a State hosted an
international event entailing a very high level of risk, it had a duty
to take all the appropriate security measures, while also safeguarding
any demonstrators’ rights to freedom of expression and assembly. In the
present case the Court had to consider whether in planning and directing
the public-order operation the Italian authorities had minimised the
risk of lethal force being used. In that connection it noted that,
according to the applicants, there had been a number of shortcomings in
the organisation of the operation and that no investigation at domestic
level had shed any light on those allegations. In the absence of such an
investigation, and bearing in mind that the operation had been very
broad-ranging and had placed the law-enforcement agencies under enormous
strain, the Court was unable to establish the existence of a direct and
immediate link between any shortcomings in the planning of the operation
and the death of Carlo Giuliani. In addition, the Court observed that
after the shots had been fired, the police officers present on Piazza
Alimonda had immediately called the emergency services. It was therefore
not established that the Italian authorities had failed to comply with
their positive obligations to protect Carlo Giuliani’s life.

Compliance with procedural obligations under Article 2

The Court noted, firstly, that the autopsy performed on Carlo Giuliani’s
body had not led to the determination of the precise trajectory of the
fatal bullet or to the recovery of a metal fragment which a scan had
clearly shown to be lodged in the victim’s skull. Moreover, even before
he had received the results of the autopsy, the public prosecutor had
authorised the Giuliani family to proceed prematurely with their close
relative’s cremation, thereby rendering it impossible to conduct any
further analyses. The Court further considered that the domestic
investigation had concerned only the precise circumstances of the
incident, being confined to examining whether those directly involved
should be held responsible, without seeking to identify any shortcomings
in the planning and management of the public-order operations. Italy had
therefore not complied with its procedural obligations in connection
with the death of Carlo Giuliani.

Articles 3, 6 and 13

The applicants alleged that the act of driving the vehicle over Carlo
Giuliani’s body and the failure to provide immediate assistance had
caused him suffering amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment. The
Court considered that it could not be inferred from the law-enforcement
officers’ conduct that they had had any intention to inflict suffering,
and found that, having regard to the circumstances of the present case,
the complaint fell to be examined solely under Article 2. Furthermore,
in view of its finding of a violation of Article 2 in its procedural
aspect, the Court considered that it was not necessary to consider the
case separately under Articles 6 and 13.

Article 38

Contrary to what the applicants had maintained, the Court considered
that the Government had cooperated sufficiently, allowing it to conduct
an appropriate examination of the case. Italy had therefore not failed
to comply with its obligations under Article 38.

Judge Bratza, joined by Judge Šikuta, expressed a partly dissenting
opinion. Judges Casadevall and Garlicki expressed a joint partly
dissenting opinion. Judge Zagrebelsky also expressed a partly dissenting
opinion. The opinions are annexed to the judgment.

***

The Court’s judgments are accessible on its Internet site
(http://www.echr.coe.int).

Press contacts

Stefano Piedimonte (telephone: 00 33 (0)3 90 21 42 04)
Tracey Turner-Tretz (telephone: 00 33 (0)3 88 41 35 30)
Kristina Pencheva-Malinowski (telephone: 00 33 (0)3 88 41 35 70)
Céline Menu-Lange (telephone: 00 33 (0)3 90 21 58 77)
Frédéric Dolt (telephone: 00 33 (0)3 90 21 53 39)

1 Under Article 43 of the Convention, within three months from the date
of a Chamber judgment, any party to the case may, in exceptional cases,
request that the case be referred to the 17-member Grand Chamber of the
Court. In that event, a panel of five judges considers whether the case
raises a serious question affecting the interpretation or application of
the Convention or its protocols, or a serious issue of general
importance, in which case the Grand Chamber will deliver a final
judgment. If no such question or issue arises, the panel will reject the
request, at which point the judgment becomes final. Otherwise Chamber
judgments become final on the expiry of the three-month period or
earlier if the parties declare that they do not intend to make a request
to refer.

2 This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.

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[iai.europe.en] Against electoral fraud in Russia !

2009-10-22T13:17:47Z

<http://www.habitants.org/>
Against electoral fraud in Russia !

English

<http://eng.habitants.org/noticias/newsletter/1>
* * ?? * Building together the World Assembly of Inhabitants!
<http://eng.habitants.org/the_urban_way/building_together_the_world_assembly_of_inhabitants%21>
* * ?? * Inhabitants of Europe
<http://eng.habitants.org/news/inhabitants_of_europe>
* * ?? * World Zero Evictions Days 2009
<http://eng.habitants.org/zero_evictions_campaign/world_zero_evictions_days_2009>

Against electoral fraud in Russia: ???Give back Astrakhan to its
inhabitants!???

On October 11th, local elections were held in many regions of Russia.
Voter fraud was so widespread, that for the first time voters took to
the streets to express their anger. An appeal to support the ???Astrakhan
Maidan??? tent camp

* ?? * Against electoral fraud in Russia: ???Give back Astrakhan to its
inhabitants!???
<http://eng.habitants.org/news/inhabitants_of_europe/against_electoral_fraud_in_russia_give_back_astrakhan_to_its_inhabitants%21>

???Managed Democracy???: arrests in Moscow for protesting electoral
fraud

Today, October 16, an action took place next in Moscow next to the
monument to the heroes of Plevna. The goal of the action was to protest
the falsifications perpetrated by the United Russia party during
regional elections that took place across Russia on October 11.

* ?? * ???Managed Democracy???: arrests in Moscow for protesting electoral
fraud
<http://eng.habitants.org/news/inhabitants_of_europe/managed_democracy_arrests_in_moscow_for_protesting_electoral_fraud>

Message to send to Dmitry Medvedev, President of Russian Federation

Object: To put an end to the arbitrary reign in Astrakhan, support
citizen structures, organize new, free and democratic elections

* ?? * Message to send to Dmitry Medvedev, President of Russian
Federation
<http://eng.habitants.org/news/inhabitants_of_europe/message_to_send_to_dmitry_medvedev_president_of_russian_federation>

The International Alliance of Inhabitants is a global network of
associations and social movements of inhabitants, cooperatives,
communities, tenants, house owners, homeless, slum dwellers, indigenous
populations and people from working class neighbourhoods. The objective
is the construction of another possible world starting from the
achievement of the housing and city rights.

You can manage you subscription using the Newsletter Tool
<http://list.opencontent.it/tools/profile.php?lang=en>.

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Fwd: Parts of the University of Vienna occupied

2009-10-22T11:10:31Z

Begin forwarded message:

>after a manifestation of students today against the bologna-process and
>in solidarity withe the squating of the academy of fine arts two days ago,
>parts of the university of vienna have been occupied spontanously. right
>now there are 2000 students taking part in the occupation. about three
>hour ago the police has left the university. right now the students are
>discussing how to act during the next days and there will be a party in
>the university tonight as well. further information probably will follow.
>
>last not least, the academy of fine arts in vienna is still squated.
>
>website of an autonomous students group
>http://freiebildung.at/wordpress/
>
>video of the occupation
>http://qik.com/video/3290414
>
>live-tickers on twitter and facebook
>http://twitter.com/Unibrennt
>http://twitter.com/gewure
>http://www.facebook.com/pages/Audimax-Besetzung-in-der-Uni-Wien-Die-Uni-brennt/
>
>further media-coverage
>http://derstandard.at/fs/1254312155865/Studenten-besetzen-Audimax-der-Uni-Wien
>
>greetings, rainer
>
>Eduard Freudmann schrieb:
>>information in german language, an english translation will follow.
>>
>>
>>---------------------
>>
>>Der Bologna-Prozess strebt die weitgehende Konvergenz mit dem
>>angloamerikanischen Bildungssystem an. Ziel ist es in den
>>Wettbewerb des globalen Bildungsmarktes einzutreten um die eigene
>>wirtschaftliche Position zu st?rken und forschungsabh?ngige Ertr?ge
>>zu erh?hen. Die Etablierung regulativer Normen und die
>>Harmonisierung der Standards ist hierf?r gleichzeitig Grundlage und
>>Voraussetzung: Ohne Standardisierung keine Messbarkeit, ohne
>>Messbarkeit keine Vergleichbarkeit, ohne Vergleichbarkeit kein
>>Wettbewerb. ?konomisierung und Wettbewerbisierung werden bis in die
>>letzten Winkel der Wissenslandschaft getragen.
>>
>>Daraus resultiert nicht nur der interkontinentale Wettstreit
>>sondern auch jener zwischen den EU-Mitgliedsstaaten, innerhalb
>>derer wiederum die einzelnen Universit?ten untereinander sowie
>>deren Institute ihrerseits um die besten Ergebnisse und Statistiken
>>konkurrieren.
>>Diese Prozesse zur Schaffung einer Bildungs?konomie mit Wissen als
>>gehandeltem Gut, entsprechen den allgemeinen Bestrebungen von
>>Privatisierung und Kommodifizierung aller Lebensbereiche im
>>neoliberalen Kapitalismus. Sie f?hren zu einer verst?rkten
>>Abh?ngigkeit der Bildungseinrichtungen von ihren ErhalterInnen, was
>>zynischerweise als Autonomisierung der Universit?ten betitelt wird.
>>
>>Autonomie ist in diesem Zusammenhang ein Euphemismus f?r die neuen
>>Formen der Steuerung von Institutionen. Die autonomisierten
>>Hochschulen sind alles andere als autonom im Sinne von
>>selbstbestimmt. Vielmehr werden sie dazu angewiesen, die
>>Bed?rfnisse von ?konomie und Industrie zu erf?llen sowie sich
>>selbst der Marktlogik im Sinn von Effizienz, Wettbewerb und
>>manageriablen Leitungsstrukturen zu unterwerfen. Die in den 1970-er
>>Jahren durchgesetzte Demokratisierung der Universit?ten wird
>>sukzessive abgeschafft, demokratisch legitimierte Gremien werden
>>entrechtet und durch wirtschaftsorientierte Top-Down-Hierarchien
>>ersetzt.
>>
>>In der Beschaffenheit des dreistufigen Studienmodells der Bologna-
>>Architektur manifestiert sich der in den letzten Jahren vollzogene
>>Paradigmenwechsel von einem pluralistischen Bildungsideal hin zu
>>einer spezialisierten wirtschaftsorientierten Ausbildung. Die
>>Akademie der bildenden K?nste hat sich wiederholt und eindeutig
>>gegen diese Degradierung und gegen die Etablierung des Bachelor-
>>Master-Systems ausgesprochen.
>>
>>
>>Wir weigern uns, uns der Logik von Politik und Wirtschaft zu
>>unterwerfen!
>>
>>Wir k?mpfen f?r unsere Selbstbestimmung von Lernen, Lehren und
>>Forschen!
>>
>>Wir solidarisieren uns mit den Bildungsprotesten in Bangladesch,
>>Brasilien, Deutschland, Finnland, Frankreich, Griechenland,
>>Gro?britannien, Indien, Iran, Italien, Japan, S?dkorea, Kroatien,
>>Niederlande, Serbien, S?dafrika, USA!
>>
>>Wir sind gegen wirtschaftsorientierte Organisationsstrukturen an
>>Universit?ten und gegen die Privatisierung von Lehre, Forschung und
>>Wissensproduktion. Wir fordern die staatliche Ausfinanzierung sowie
>>die Re-Demokratisierung aller Bildungseinrichtungen und die
>>bedingungslose Abschaffung von Studiengeb?hren!
>>
>>Wir sind gegen die Pseudo-Autonomie der Universit?ten. Wir fordern
>>die sofortige Abschaffung des ?8* im UG 2002!
>>?8. "Die Bundesregierung kann auf Vorschlag der Bundesministerin
>>oder des Bundesministers einer Universit?t oder mehreren
>>Universit?ten durch Verordnung die Einrichtung eines Studiums
>>auftragen, wenn dies aus ?bergeordneten bildungspolitischen oder
>>wissenschaftspolitischen Gr?nden erforderlich ist und keine
>>diesbez?gliche Einigung im Rahmen einer Leistungsvereinbarung
>>erfolgt."
>>Wir fordern die Freiheit, Lehre und Forschung, Wissenschaft und
>>Kunst an den Universit?ten selbstbestimmt zu definieren.
>>
>>Wir sind gegen die Qualit?tsbeurteilung von Wissenschaft und Kunst
>>anhand ?konomischer Kriterien. Wir sind gegen die zwangsverordnete
>>Selbstvermarktung der Universit?ten und gegen die
>>Wettbewerbisierung und Elitisierung der Bildungslandschaft.
>>Wir fordern die Abschaffung von Wissensbilanzen und
>>Leistungsvereinbarungen!
>>
>>Wir sind gegen die Degradierung der Universit?ten und Schulen zu
>>arbeitsmarktorientierten Ausbildungsst?tten. Wir sind f?r
>>selbstbestimmtes Lernen, Lehren und Forschen ohne Regulierung,
>>Normierung, Zeit- und Leistungsdruck.
>>F?r Bildung und Reflexion gegen Ausbildung und Reproduktion!
>>
>>Wir fordern die Regierung auf, Unterricht und Kunst, Wissenschaft
>>und Forschung nicht getrennt voneinander zu denken und zu
>>administrieren. Wir fordern die unverz?gliche Zusammenlegung der
>>zust?ndigen Ministerien.
>>
>>Wir fordern vom Rektor, bei den Leistungsvereinbarungen gegen?ber
>>dem Ministerium die Position der Akademie zu vertreten und nicht
>>seine Privatansichten.
>>
>>Wir fordern vom Rektor die Aufrechterhaltung aller bestehenden
>>Diplomstudien, gem?? den an der Akademie getroffenen Beschl?ssen.
>>
>>Wir fordern die unverz?gliche Offenlegung s?mtlicher
>>Finanzaktivit?ten des laufenden Leistungsvereinbarungszeitraums
>>2007 bis 2009.
>>
>>
>>Verfasst von Lehrenden und Student_innen der Akademie der bildenden
>>K?nste Wien.
>>
>>----------------------------
>>
>>http://www.malen-nach-zahlen.at
>>http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=154379632337
>>http://twitter.com/malennach

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Stop police violence against migrants and activists in Greece

2009-10-22T03:58:43Z

Twitter petition http://act.ly/pq

Sign here http://www.petitiononline.com/nomadic1/petition.html

To: The Greek Minister of Citizen Protection

Following the December revolts in Greece, police violence against migrants
and activists in Greece is becoming more and more intense. The xenophobic
turn of the mainstream media combined with the electoral rise of the extreme
right wing party LAOS have played a vital role in legitimizing police
violence against both foreigners and citizens who dare to protest.
Ironically these tactics are part of an overall plan to "protect the
citizen" by openly demonstrating the ability of the state to control those
who participated in the December revolts. While ?scoop? operations and
deportations take place daily all over the country subjecting migrants to
different forms of physical and psychological violence, activists who react
against it are also becoming subject to the arbitrary violent and
terrorizing tactics of the police. Recently Mohamed Kamran Atif, a migrant
from Pakistan, has died after being tortured in detention at the police
station of Nikaia. During the protest march organized in response, several
activists were arrested and imprisoned. Few days later Dimitris Parsanoglou,
a sociologist and anti-racist activist, has been arrested and detained
without a legal representative for three days because he protested against
the arbitrary arrest and beating by the police of a migrant in a central
spot of Athens.

We ask from the Greek government to

- stop police violence against migrants and activists
- stop ?scoop? operations and arbitrary deportations of migrants
- stop arbitrary arrests and imprisonment of activists of all nationalities

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Fwd: not on TV tonight

2009-10-22T01:12:39Z

dear all,

my sister sent the following around following the failure of the art
press in the Netherlands to report on her contribution to the
Istanbul Biennial, which poses questions about the legacy of the
Dutch military intervention in Indonesia after WW II. It's remarkable
how the Dutch colonial past still has the potential turn up like an
unwelcome guest, embarrassing all of us into silence, reduced to
staring into our drinks. Not that we're trying to avoid the subject
of course...

cheers!
Lennaart

>Dear friends and colleagues,
>
>My work Instruction, an installation of a 30 minute projection, two
>large digital photographic prints and booklet with the script and
>its sources, is still on view in the International Istanbul Biennial
>until the 8th of November.
>
>The film of Instruction casts a group of young cadets from the
>Netherlands Defense Academy reading out and discussing an archival
>script - constructed from personal travelogues, broadcast
>transcripts or essays. It questions the position of an individual in
>a larger political framework and in a different political and social
>environment, in a condition where the individual is malleable and
>even vulnerable, but still under the challenge of ethical
>responsibility. The film thus performs an instructive function but
>maintains a certain ambiguity that leaves open questions for a
>public discussion yet to come.
>
>Tonight, the 21st of October, the VPRO will broadcast their program
>Trendspotting, featuring the Biennial in Istanbul. For this program
>they have interviewed me in the installation and prepared a fragment
>of my film for insertion. However, they have kindly let me know that
>they have decided not to use this material and there is no more
>mention of my contribution to the Biennial exhibition in the program.
>
>Without considering all the reasons for this decision to happen it
>is worth reflecting on it in connection to one of the layers of the
>work itself, which taps into the unresolved episode of the Dutch
>military intervention in Indonesia after the end of WW II, and
>especially the silence which surrounds this episode in the public
>debate in the Netherlands. The silence that is the result of all
>sorts of practical decisions, is something that keeps resurfacing
>around difficult issues from Dutch history. Information is never
>officially censored or repressed, but somehow it does not come to
>the surface for serious consideration in connection to the present.
>In this 2009 edition of the Istanbul Biennial there are many
>examples of works that offer critical and poetic possibilities to
>discuss similar issues from various local situations around the
>world. Instruction takes up an very natural place within this
>exhibition, and it is therefore all the more remarkable that the
>VPRO decided that it was after all more interesting to focus on the
>artistic positions from the Middle East and that it thereby did not
>allow a space anymore to compare this with a local example, coming
>from the Netherlands itself.
>
>In a similar way, the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland removed a
>passage that had already been written on my contribution from a page
>filling article on the Istanbul Biennial. By an editorial decision,
>based on the lack of space, the passage was lost from the article,
>which came out at the beginning of October. Coincidently thereby
>taking the possible introduction of the work Instruction and its
>themes away from the public view. A double page spread on the
>Biennial in Het Financieele Dagblad's weekly magazine does not
>mention any Dutch contribution to the exhibition at all.
>
>My own interest in the subject of what society itself actually does
>with its knowledge is triggered again by the recurrence of these
>examples.
>
>With best greetings,
>wendelien
>

--
-----

Lennaart van Oldenborgh
lenny@...

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part 2: online profiles

2009-10-21T10:51:34Z

Part 2:
online profiles: narrative/attraction/extension

Profiles attempt to establish presence. They script a sense of self
through elaboration of fragments of a personal history, setting forth a
diegetic world -- the world of the subject's life (their "story"). At the
same time, they attempt to solicit attention, contact, and relation
outside of the demands of this narrative, in ways that involve the
mobilization of affective attractions. They attempt to stabilize a sense
of self through past encounters, while attempting to "pitch" the self for
potential encounters.

This dynamic between narrative and attraction has been well-theorized in
the context of film history. Attractions are forms of exhibitionistic
spectacle -- direct address or performative display -- that can stand in
contrast to the coherency of narrative flow. They are not about narrative
time but experiential immediacy: in contrast to the mechanisms of
maintaining a coherent story, transporting the viewer into another time
and space, they solicit direct contact with the viewer in the
here-and-now, arousing immediate sensations.

And yet attractions work in conjunction with diegetic absorption as
affects work in conjunction with meanings. While attractions open up an
erotic and experiential dimension that sometimes works at odds with the
narrational, they assume power precisely by working through, or in
conjunction with, the narrative world, generating a productive tension
between the reinforcement (stabilization) of narrative coherency -- a
social world or self-construct -- and the solicitation of attention and
intensive exchange that might undercut or destabilize this coherency. In
some ways, this is the very dynamic of desire, in its flux between
presence and absence, availability and withdraw.

Through online profiles, people attempt to extend and reduce their social
worlds, opening up zones of intensive exchange that can be modulated. The
profile "stages" the self within a dynamic of stabilization and
destabilization; it facilitates a dynamically stabilized sense of self or
social world. It embodies a self formed through past encounters, while at
the same time opens up the self to immediate and potential encounters.
The profile functions as an interface that serves to structure a narrative
coherency, solicit contact, and conduct reciprocal flow -- for the purpose
of stabilization and destabilization, or consolidation and extensibility.

The self that results is actively defined in terms of its connections and
associations, in varying degrees of intimacy and intensity. The emphasis
is not on person but persona: as Mez Breeze has suggested, this self is
an assembly generated through clusters of distributed identity markers,
which does not add up to stable meanings or groundlevel actualities
because it also coalesces in terms of the volume, degree and intensity of
its connections. Less a reductive experientiality than a connective
extensibility.

A profile is both a portal and a facet of an assembling-self that reaches
out to presence itself through a dynamics of encounter. It hovers between
actual and potential; between diegesis and extension; between story and
solicitation. The encounter that it aims for is a real, imaginary, or
potential construct that exists both internally and externally, between
the internal narrative space (which has its own structured timeframe), the
solicitous address (which always exists in the immediate present), and the
unrealized potential. It functions between staging, soliciting, and
extending: between self-narrative, conductive solicitation, and
connective, intensive extensibility. As such, profiles are mechanisms for
the "staging of the self" within an encounter; the "pitching of the self"
for a desired encounter; and the "amplification of the self" within
networks of encounter. They are presencing mechanisms for developing
ecologies of self.

Jordan Crandall

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