current subscriber #

[Felix Stalder]

As of today:

1663 subs/Regular
1139 subs/Digests
-
2802 subs/Total

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Stormy weather?

[Felix Stalder]

On 15.02.23 11:34, mp wrote:

The overarching context - as context seems to be such a hot term -
is trade war and the electrification of consumer civilization.

Making this about "Putin", i.e. a single person and his "unlawful" 
acts, is beyond intellectually lazy reductionism. It is ridiculous, 
even, unless, perhaps, performed as a deliberate act of distraction 
from the bigger picture.


Well, in autocracies, autocrats matters. But of course, not even an
autocrat acts in a vacuum of his own volition but within structural
constraints.

They are, as you say, the end of the neoliberal global order manifested
by the breaking apart of Chimerica, and the accelerating decarbonization
of the energy supply (which is happening, even if too late to avoid
massive damage).

These realities exist for everyone. That is the easy part of the
analysis. What characterizes a deep crisis, in my view, is that large
number of actors have a high degree of freedom how to react to it,
pursuing their own agenda, because there is no overarching system (be it
economic or military) that holds them in place.

Did fossil-dependent Russia have to invade Ukraine because of that? I
don't think so. It could have pursued the smarter strategy of Middle
Eastern fossil-states and capture the COP process to delay the
inevitable, or done something else. But it didn't. Someone, probably
Putin and other members of the elite, interpreted these constraints in a
way that made the invasion seem a smart move. Was he walking into a trap
that NATO created and he was too stupid to see? I doubt.

Why? Because, in my understanding, power doesn't operate by making these
long-term plans that then, miraculously, come to fruition. Power
operates much more often by being able to impose its reading on
unforeseen (or at least unplanned for) circumstances. In the reading of
the US (and Europe), the conflicts of 2008 (Donbas) and 2014 (Crimea)
were regional conflicts, while the 2022 invasion had a clear
geopolitical dimension, with power in Europe and control over the global
food supply at stake. I guess the Ukrainians understood quickly that
aligning themselves with this reading and portraying themselves as
defenders of freedom is their only chance for survival.


On 15.02.23 13:44, d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote:

It may not offer us much, but it just seemed that Clark’s approach 
might help us guard against us so over-regarding the explanatory 
power of large-scale historical forces that we underestimate the 
importance of amplifying our own collective and individual agency in 
confronting the power wielded by key (or elite) political actors. It 
might mitigate against the overwhelming feeling of impotence that 
sometimes seems to turn the least and the best us all into 
sleepwalkers.

















--
|  http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Stormy weather?

[Felix Stalder]

On 12.02.23 20:50, Brian Holmes wrote:
-- There's a war on in Europe, which is a proxy war that pits NATO 
against Russia, via the fighting force of Ukraine. Definitely check 
out the list of equipment which the US alone has sent: 
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sleepwalking-elites 
 (list 
begins in paragraph 3)



I know this is not your point here, but to see this only as a proxy
war really reductive and reeks of a "great powers" analysis in which
some countries/people are just have to accept the fact that they are 
subordinate.


The author of the NLR article comes right out with this world view:


Ten years ago, nobody could have imagined that Europe would risk
such a catastrophe for the sake of the Donbass – a region that few of
us would have been able to locate on a map.


I'm sure most Ukrainians knew already 10 years ago where the Donbas was,
but why bother with their view. Also, the war in the Donbas started
2008, so not to know where the Donbas was in 2012 is really an act
of metropolitan ignorance. It happens, nothing to be proud of.

So, this war is primarily one of Ukrainian survival. I'm sure that many
in the US security apparatus see it also as a proxy-war, but I think
also Biden's theme of democracy-vs-authoritarianism plays a role. I
don't think it's a given that a republican administration under Trump
would have done the same (even if some in the military would still have
liked to fight a proxy war).


On 13.02.23 08:45, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:


- the defeat of NATO could lead to a "decolonization" of Western
Europe (not that this by itself leads to positive results. Repressive
"liberal" fascism remains as likely an outcome as some sort of
independence.)


Oh my, what this is supposed to mean, only chatGPT can explain.








--
|  http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Modest prophet of doom

[Felix Stalder]

Hi Brian,

thanks for point out this talk (and connecting it back to the 
introductory book "Earth System Science", which I agree is great).


Applying 'systems thinking' around 'tipping points' to social dynamics 
raises very interesting issues about how radical change comes about.


The classic revolutionary/anti-capitalist perspective maintains that we 
need to change the fundamentals of the system in order to bring about 
radically different dynamic. Following the model of the great modern 
(American, French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban etc) revolutions, systemic 
change comes first, from which then new social dynamic emerge. This is 
an appealing model, because it sounds like you know what you do, but 
also a paralyzing one, because you need to the big things first, before 
the small things can be done.


The tipping point view would maintain that we can move towards tipping 
points within the existing dynamics in order to bring about radically 
different ones once the threshold has been passed. This is, in a way, a 
scary model, because tipping points are, almost by definition, 
unpredictable, because of the many interacting cascades they can set of. 
Given that some of these cascades can provide negative feedback, meaning 
dampening change, it's also hard to predict where exactly the tipping 
points lies and what exactly will be tipped. On the other hand, it's an 
appealing vision, because it suggest that even smaller changes, if 
applied strategically, can result in large-scale transformations.


Lenton makes a decent point about the tipping points towards renewable 
energies that might be passed soon. On the technical side, we might have 
passed it, all the necessary elements are here already [1]. I think the 
fossil fuel sector knows this hence it's lobbying hard to delay that 
point has long as possible. The question is, is that enough of a tipping 
point, or will it simply displace the resource hungry growth imperative 
of capitalism?


The tension between these two points of view is visible in a fascinating 
recent discussion "How to Save the Planet: Degrowth vs Green Growth?" 
[2]. While they never mention the contrast between revolution and 
tipping points, it's clearly operative. Green Growth argues for using 
the existing system dynamics to affect its direction (de-carbonization), 
where as de-growth see as an approach that has not worked out in the 
last 30 years and connects it to the capitalism need for growth.


On an analytic level, I lean towards the latter, on a level of political 
strategy, towards the former. But that's a rather in-congruent position, 
I'm afraid.



[1] 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/23/no-miracles-needed-prof-mark-jacobson-on-how-wind-sun-and-water-can-power-the-world


[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJrBR0lg6s


On 20.01.23 21:37, Brian Holmes wrote:
Among the small but highly influential group of scientists building on 
the Gaia theory of Lovelock and Margulis, Tim Lenton might have been the 
most unobtrusive - until now. At 49 he's quite young for the impressive 
quantity and quality of the work he has produced. For instance, he's the 
author of a very short but fundamental book on biogeochemical cycles, 
tracing the vast and intricate process whereby specific elements such as 
carbon circulate through the atmosphere, the oceans and the earth's 
crust - with important detours through living beings (1). He was also 
the lead author, with Rockstrom, Schellnhuber and others, of the 
inaugural 2008 paper on tipping elements capable of provoking phase 
changes in the earth system (2). You could further check out a recent 
article in The Anthropocene Review, co-authored with Bruno Latour, on 
the role of Life in the production and maintenance of habitable 
conditions on our planet (3). Lenton appears for Zoom talks in a spare, 
book-lined bedroom, as though he forgot he's no longer a graduate 
student and didn't notice whatever cascade of honors has ensued since 
then. He's concerned with other cascades.


Last summer Lenton was a co-author of a paper entitled "Climate Endgame: 
Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios," which examines the 
existential risk to humanity posed by runaway global warming (4). The 
key concept is that of so-called "tipping cascades," which are likely to 
begin in earnest at only 1.5 degrees centigrade of global warming (we're 
currently around 1.2 degrees). In such cascades, one fundamental change 
in earth system dynamics sets off another, leading to consequences far 
beyond those outlined in the increasingly dire IPCC reports. The main 
difference between the IPCC consensus and Lenton's view concerns the 
rates of possible change, which are essentially linear for the former 
(more CO2, more warming), while for the latter, they necessarily pass 
accelerative thresholds affecting not only temperature, but also, the 
intricate dynamics of biogeochemical cycles.


A couple weeks ago I started watching a talk 

Re: Spamming the Data Space – CLIP, GPT and synthetic data

[Felix Stalder]

I couldn't agree more. There is no such thing as authentic culture, 
particularly not on a world where desires have manufactured by consumer 
capitalism for generations.


This reminds me of a work by the Mediengruppe Bitnik, State of Reference 
(2017)


https://ww.bitnik.org/sor

It's a simple work, producing a chain of images where the last image 
serves as an input to search of a visually similar image, which is then 
becomes the input for the next search, and so on.


It's a way of navigating through the most dense nodes of Google's 
knowledge about the visual world. And it's thoroughly depressing: It 
starts from  Man Ray's The Poet (1938) only to jump immediately to stock 
images of people and products, celebrities, beauty clinics, real estate 
and some geometric figures and a few uplifting quotes. After 1321 
iterations it arrives at the image of an Nespresso machine.


None of these images as AI generated, but the commercial pollution had 
turned the image pool on which Google has trained its image recognition 
software already toxic.


I'm not suggesting that it's all the same same old, or that things 
cannot get worse,  but rather that however bad we think the current 
situation is, nostalgia is a bad form of critique.



all the best. Felix




On 21.12.22 01:26, Luke Munn wrote:
Interesting essay Francis, and always appreciate Brian's thoughtful 
comments. I think the historical angle Brian is pointing towards is 
important as a way to push against the claims of AI models as somehow 
entirely new or revolutionary.


In particular, I want to push back against this idea that this is the 
last 'pure' cultural snapshot available to AI models, that future 
harvesting will be 'tainted' by automated content.


Francis' examples of hip hop and dnb culture, with sampling at their 
heart, already starts to point to the problems with this statement. 
Culture has always been a project of cutting and splicing, 
appropriating, transforming, and remaking existing material. It's funny 
that AI commentators like Gary Marcus talk about GPT-3 as the 'king of 
pastiche'. Pastiche is what culture does. Indeed, we have whole genres 
(the romance novel, the murder mystery, etc) that are about reproducing 
certain elements in slightly different permutations, over and over again.


This is not a recent or purely digital phenomenon. I remember going to a 
show at the Neue Nationalgalerie, where oil paintings repeatedly 
reproduced the identical bird in different positions. "A variety of 
painting styles suggests the involvement of a number of assistants and 
several motifs can be repeatedly found in an unaltered form in many of 
his paintings. D’Hondecoeter’s oeuvre consequently appears as a 
conglomeration of decorative collages, produced in an almost mechanical 
seriality on the basis of successful formulas." Copy, paste, repeat.


Unspoken in this claim of machines 'tainting' or 'corrupting' culture is 
the idea of authenticity. It really reminds me of the moral panic 
surrounding algorithmic news and platform-driven disinformation, where 
pundits lamented the shift from truth to 'post-truth.'  This is not to 
suggest that misinformation is not an issue, nor that veracity doesn't 
matter (i.e. Rohingya and Facebook). But the premise of some halcyon age 
of truth prior to the digital needs to get wrecked. Yes, Large language 
models and other AI technologies do introduce new conditions, generating 
truth claims rapidly and at scale. But rather than hand-wringing about 
'fake news,' it's more productive to see how they splice together 
several truth theories (coherence, consensus, social construction, etc) 
into new formations. I'm currently writing a paper precisely on this 
issue with a couple of colleagues.


nga mihi / best,
Luke


On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 at 22:20, Francis Hunger 
mailto:francis.hun...@irmielin.org>> wrote:


Hi Brian,

On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 3:55 AM Francis Hunger
mailto:francis.hun...@irmielin.org>>
wrote:

While some may argue that generated text and images will save
time and money for businesses, a data ecological view
immediately recognizes a major problem: AI feeds into AI. To
rephrase it: statistical computing feeds into statistical
computing. In using these models and publishing the results
online we are beginning to create a loop of prompts and
results, with the results being fed into the next iteration of
the cultural snapshots. That’s why I call the early cultural
snapshots still uncontaminated, and I expect the next
iterations of cultural snapshots will be contaminated.


Francis, thanks for your work, it's always totally interesting.

Your argumentation is impeccable and one can easily see how
positive feedback loops will form around elements of AI-generated
(or perhaps "recombined") images. I agree, this will become
untenable, though I'd be interested 

Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse

[Felix Stalder]

Hi Goeffrey,

from a technical point of view, the problem with mailing lists is twofold.

First, maintaining a mail server has become progressively more work over 
the years.


Second, what a mailman mailing list does is, essentially, rewriting the 
header, ie making this mail appears as it came from 
"fe...@openflows.com" when it was actually sent from 
nettim...@kmx.kein.org. On the level of social communication, this makes 
sense, but technically, this is what a lots of spammers do as well and 
many large email providers block such mail. In addition, 'spoofing' 
headers makes it more likely to land on anti-spam blacklists which one 
of the reasons for the first point.


Socially, the problem is that email as a social (rather then 
administrational) medium is a bit of a historical artifact. I don't mean 
only that it's a generational thing, but for many people communication 
habits have shifted over the last decade or two. Personally, the emails 
that sit the longest in my inbox, and generate the most personal guilt, 
are the social ones which take time to answer, which I often don't have. 
And my impression is that I'm not alone here.


I totally agree that it's naive to assume technical solutions to social 
problems, but sometime some of the social problems are created by the 
specifics of the technical environment and changing these specifics can 
help to address them.


And, yes, you are right, I'm a bit bored with maintaining the 
infrastructure as is, so I would rather change it.



all the best. Felix




On 30.11.22 04:19, Geoffrey Goodell wrote:

Dear Doma, Felix, and Ted

I am confused by your recurring argument that the problem with Nettime is
fundamentally technical in nature, or indeed that there is a problem with
Nettime at all.  Speaking personally, Nettime works well for me.  I read
interesting commentary from people I respect, with the reassurance that I can
always add my voice to the symphony.

The fact that I do not post more often is mainly testament to the fact that I
am busy with other responsibilities.  I am sure that this is true of others
here as well.  This problem will not suddenly disappear with a shift to a
different choice of underpinning technology.  In fact, it will be exacerbated,
because although I run my own e-mail server, the tools for engaging with the
so-called 'fediverse' are not part of my workflow.  And so, a shift in
technology will inexorably induce a 'shake out' in which people are forced to
either adopt new workflows or face exclusion.  I would have thought that the
moral foundation of Internet ethics would be incompatible with the use of force
in this way.

As far as I know, the argument that 'fediverse' technology, such as that used
by Hometown and Mastodon, is superior to e-mail is weak at best and has never
been articulated to this group.  As far as I know, such technology is in the
hands of a handful of software developers and has not been subject to the same
rigorous standardisation process of the sort that led to the establishment of
e-mail.  I suspect that most people on this list did not use e-mail before
1977, by which point RFC 724 was already published [1].  Of course, this
standard has evolved over the years, in a direction that has benefited the
world and is now used by billions of people.  As far as I know, there has not
yet been a comparable community-based effort to standardise the implementation
of 'fediverse' protocols.  Here, we have precisely the sort of platform-based
tyranny by fiat that the Internet pioneers laboured to bury forever.

Finally, I find the argument that new technology can solve a fundamentally
social problem to be absurd and somewhat hypocritical based on the topic of
discussion on this list.  While I am not convinced that the so-called
'fediverse' is a solution looking for a problem, I am also not convinced that
it will make things better for us.

Perhaps some of the maintainers of the current infrastructure are bored of the
job to which they volunteered, years ago.  In that case, they should step aside
and leave the task of maintaining this list to others.  Surely there are
democratic and less-than-democratic ways to achieve this; let's try something.
Perhaps a call for volunteers might be a start.

But what I can say with certainty is that if you pack up and go somewhere else,
not everyone will follow you, and even fewer people will follow if you neglect
to provide a solid argument for why.  Whether you like it or not, Nettime is
more than a toy project of yours; it provides a valuable service that works.

Let's stick together.

Best wishes --

Geoff

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc724

On Tue, 29 Nov 2022 at 11:34:35PM -0100, nettime's mod squad wrote:

Dear nettimers,

Nettime was founded at a time when, as quaint as it sounds, email was exciting.
That's long since gone for those who experienced it, let alone for those who
didn't. Discussion-oriented mailing lists like this are, in a word, over,
technically 

From Commons to NFTs: Desire and Ownership.

[Felix Stalder]

This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave at the “Commons to 
NFTs” conference, organized by Aksioma in Ljubliana, 12.11.2022, for the 
a launch for the eponymous book we edited together.


Program: https://aksioma.org/from-commons-to-nfts
Video Streams: https://www.youtube.com/user/aksioma007/streams
The book: https://aksioma.org/from-commons-to-nfts/publication


Alienation and how to (not) overcome it!
--

A few days ago, the large crypto-exchange FTX collapsed, after it was 
discovered that its investment division had used a self-issued currency 
– created out of thin air – as a collateral to borrow real money for 
speculation. $ 8 billion, give and take a few hundred millions are 
missing [1]. Ups. Sorry. In many ways, this should surprise nobody. As 
one scrolls down “web3 is going great” there is the overwhelming 
impression that “crypto”, in all its manifestations, is nothing but a 
series of frauds with a few basic schemes – theft, Ponzi, rug-pull, 
wash-trade – endlessly varied. And on this level of generality, it’s 
probably the most accurate thing to say, but this level of generality is 
usually not particularly interesting.


I want to go a bit deeper. Because there is a lot more animating the 
crypto sphere than simple, rational, if often criminal, calculations. 
Rather, running underneath and through these get-rich-quick-schemes are 
strong currents of desire of a different future, and these desires are 
surprisingly similar – at some level – to those that have been animating 
many commons projects over the last 25 years.


The desire I’m talking about is a desire for freedom, or more precisely, 
a desire to flee what are seen as fundamentally unfair, oppressive 
social institutions. Or, even more precisely, the desire to overcome 
alienation and live an authentic life. That we actually don’t really 
know, or agree on, what it means to live an authentic life, is precisely 
why so many different ideas and practices can be infused with this desire.


This desire to overcome alienation is, perhaps, the most powerful and 
long-running desire animating digital culture. And there are two version 
of this desire that that found their way into digital culture by way of 
the American counter-culture of the 1960s: A a communitarian and a 
libertarian one.


But, of course, the prototypical modern desire for authenticity didn’t 
originate there. So it’s worth to go back a little bit further, to the 
late 18th early 19th century. Then, as s reaction to the enlightenment 
and "the cult of reason", romanticism as a counter-movement emerged. It 
offered a critique of reason and rationality, focusing on what would 
later be called the “instrumentality of reason” which it argued was 
draining the world of meaning and turning everything into mere means 
(human and natural resources). What was offered instead, was what one 
could call the worship of mystery, as something that was precisely 
beyond the reach of that kind of instrumentality.


From the beginning, there were two version of mystery. One was, what I 
would call, the mystery of transcendental power, and one was the mystery 
of deep communion. Now, these mysteries have a lot of things in common, 
that’s why it’s easy to flip from one into the others, but it’s worth 
keeping them apart for the moment.


The mystery of transcendental power, was, of course, initially religion 
and it’s institutions, most importantly, the Roman-Catholic church. The 
fought the secularizing tendencies of the enlightenment, as they claimed 
to represent a power beyond reason. The mode of  accessing this type of 
mystery has always been submission. Over time the form of the 
transcendental power shape-shifted a few times and there are now 
conflicting version of it. Besides religion, there is the charismatic 
leader, that transcends the laws of history, and, most importantly for 
our purposes, there is also the market.


Emanating from the Austrian School of Economic, particularly Hayek, the 
market was seen as a mysterious higher power. The market’s functioning, 
they claimed, was beyond comprehension. For mere mortals to intervene 
would inevitably lead to disaster, that is, to “the road to serfdom.” 
Its main feature -- a hand-- was, to complete the famous cryptic image 
of Adam Smith, ‘invisible’, much like the hand of god. At least the one 
that doesn’t belong to Diego Maradonna.


The mode of authentic living in this perspective is to accept and submit 
to the unquestionable, absolute power (in whatever form one believes in 
it) and seek most direct connection to it, either by removing 
intermediaries, or accepting only traditional forms of inter-mediation. 
Once this submission has taken place, one enters a community of true 
believers and within this community, there is equality in submission. At 
the end of times, the chosen community will survive, or, if everyone 
joins this community here 

Re: Technopolitics of the future

[Felix Stalder]

On 27.10.22 20:50, Brian Holmes wrote:
Indeed. The point is now to think those politics, and make their 
possibilities recognizable.


I think it's pretty obvious that we are living in a period that is 
characterized by what one could call, with a nod to Durkheim, "total 
social crises". Meaning, they are not longer restricted to a single 
sphere -- so neatly separated in the modern liberal thinking -- but play 
out across the full-range of social domains. Thus any analysis needs to 
able to understand their interplay.


But what are these domains?  David Harvey's recent talk on "Marx’s 
Historical Materialism"


http://davidharvey.org/2022/01/new-podcast-david-harveys-anti-capitalist-chronicles

summarizes that very clearly, differentiating among seven sets of 
relations (though there is more than one way to slice the pie):


- technology
- nature
- relations of (re)production (waged and unwaged labor)
- mental conceptions
- relations of everyday life
- political (class) relations
- and systems of governance.

All these sets have what Marx calls a "metabolic relation" to each 
other, meaning they are dependent on one another and their concrete form 
can only be understood to through their interdependence. One cannot 
understand the shape and dynamics of the state without its relation to 
capital and vice-versa, or, increasingly, without eco-system pressures.


While these domains are related, they also follow their own dynamics, 
but in that movement, they transform the others as well, or are held 
back by them. Geo-egineering, for example, is a technological response 
to eco-system pressures in order to preserve relations of productions 
and class relations. Black Lives Matter aims to transform mental 
conceptions in order to dismantal racist/colonialist systems of governance.


Take, for example, the pandemic. It's zoonotic origin indicates a deep 
problem with our relations to nature. In response, massive technological 
development (mRNA vaccines, deepening of digitization etc) was 
coordinated by the government. At the same time, changes in everyday 
life (lockdown, masking, 'distancing', etc) were introduced, and mental 
conceptions started to shift. Of course, a massive economic crisis could 
only be averted by government intervention and the boundaries between 
productive and reproductive labor shifted.


While you could say the feedback loop built into the "metabolic 
relations to nature" triggered the pandemic, it's actual dynamics can 
only be understood by taking into account the dynamic relations between 
the different domains. The relation between the state and capital was 
evident both in the state's willingness to finance the vaccines, and in 
it's commitment to enforce patent monopolies. The importance of mental 
conceptions became evident in the public reactions to the vaccines. The 
point is, one cannot reduce on sphere to the other. There is no 
structure - superstructure relationship.


Neoliberalism (or liberalism more generally) is ideologically unable to 
address such total phenomena, because of its constitutive commitment to 
separating the domains.


In the 20th century, in the West, there have been, as far as I can see, 
three ways of reacting to such 'total crises'. Fascism, Keynesian and 
'war efforts'.


At the moment, all three approaches to 'total politics' are bein persued 
at the same time. The fascist writing is on the wall, it's, at the core, 
an us-vs-them zero sum game. "We" prosper because "they" suffer. The 
green new deal is a modernized form of Keynesianism, but more holistic 
(or 'total') by focussing on the interrelation between all the domains. 
What Europe is trying to do is a kind of 'war economy', in relation to 
the actual war but also as a way to speed up the energy transition. 
While I agree with the direction, I doubt that a technocratic approach 
can work, not the least because it cannot shape many of the domains that 
are actively involved shaping the problem. If people freaked out because 
of a vaccine that was perceived being forced top-down, just wait for the 
energy restrictions imposed.


But then again, the transformation of the mental conceptions, the 
understanding of a transformed relationship to nature, are also quite 
far developed.


The task, it seems, is to bring these bit and pieces, the cultural, the 
technocratic and segments of the economy, in such a relationship they 
can pull the rest into a different direction, and phasing out these 
sectors, particularly of the economy, that cannot or do not want to adapt.









--
|  http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets 

Re: Technopolitics of the future

[Felix Stalder]

On 20.10.22 23:18, Brian Holmes wrote:


I recall speculation on the list about whether a new technopolitical
 paradigm would ever take form. Would there be economic growth again?
 Would innovation return? Could global capitalism really develop new
 forms of self-regulation? Or is it stalked by entropy and decline? I
 think the discussion suffered from too much emphasis on computers
and finance as the drivers of change - leading to the conclusion
that, if Silicon Valley has already done its thing, if Meta is no
more than The Matrix Reloaded, then history must be over.


I don't think the conclusion was that 'history is over'. Rather the
venture-capital, consumer-facing, attention-economy model which
organized an important part of the innovative capacity over the last 40+
years, had exhausted itself. Indeed, innovation in in Silicon Valley has 
almost come to a stand still. Our phones, laptops, social media apps etc 
are more or less the same than five years ago. In response, lots of 
VC-capital is funding blockchain technologies, which, so far, have 
proven completely useless. A real dead-end.


It seems that the computing infrastructure that has been built out over
the last 30 years -- global connectivity and data centers -- is turning
into commodity services for other enterprises. Much like manufacturing
in the 1980s and 1990s. On a global scale, it kept growing, yet it
turned into a flexible, on-demand infrastructure. In this line, Google
is moving closer to the model of Foxconn, as a commodity provider of AI
and data analytic services. Hugely profitable, but the social direction
of the use of its capacities is determined by others.

The pandemic showed that quite clearly. Silicon Valley firms profited
substantially by providing commodity infrastructure but little
innovation. Zoom, which saw its stock price rise 5-fold during the
pandemic, is now back to pre-pandemic levels. The innovation that would
have embodied the logic of consumer-data focused Silicon Valley the
most, contact tracing via smart phones, failed completely, due to poor
data and modelling (turns out, epidemiological-relevant proximity is
hard to measure and model) and popular resistance (surveillance!).

On the other hand, as Brian notes, the most significant techno-political
event was the development of the mRNA vaccines. First, because it
provided the single-most effective social response to the pandemic (e.g.
compared to China's Zero-Covid approach). Second, because it embodied a
new techno-political model (large-scale, publicly-funded, basic
research, public investment and coordination, extremely profitable
private enterprises), and a new set of conflicts, both within the 
countries at the center of the development (anti-vaxxers in the US and 
Europe) and geopolitically (neo-colonial distribution based on patents &

manufacturing/logistical capacity).

Does this provide a blue-print for a somewhat social-democratic Green
capitalism, as Brian seems to suggest? I'm not so sure. Mainly for four
reasons.

First, so far, all of this has been debt-financed, which works obviously
better in a low-interest environment. Unless a Piketty-style taxation of
wealth can be instituted, a key component of a new technopolitical
paradigm is missing (I think the US Democrats know this, but can
implement only the tiniest of steps, the European social-democrats
(outside Spain) don't even try it).

Second, the vaccines provide a somewhat unusual case of technopolitical
innovation, because there were no incumbents that had already sunk
trillions into soon-to-be outdated infrastructures that they wanted to
profit from a few decades longer. There is a war in Europe disrupting
energy supplies, and Germany does not even manage to institute a speed
limit on its Autobahn (despite popular support). Thus, the question is,
to what degree are democratic institutions still capable of expressing
"the will of the people"?

Third, there is this point that Amitav Gosh raised in the interview I
posted earlier:


The Left – and here I’m also talking about the Greens – made the
decision some time ago to move towards a technocratic centre. They
started doing all this wonkery and addressing policy to establish
their credentials as serious politicians and administrators. Of
course, it’s necessary to be serious about administration and
governance. But the problem appears when you leave out the political
impulse. The danger of technocracy is that you cannot tap into the
general discontent with the political class because you are
completely identified with the political class.


https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-colonial-roots-of-present-crises/

I think this helps to explain the anti-vaxxers. If vaccines -- a simple, 
drop-in, no-need-to-make-any-changes-in-your-personal-life solution 
provided for free -- cannot be sold on a technocratic argument, then 
what can? On a larger scale, in Italy, as Alex Foti noted, after every 
technocratic government, the far right won the 

Re: italian fascism in '22

[Felix Stalder]

Hi Alex,

Thanks a lot for this update.


however she is a naziliberista, combining a conservative economic
agenda with an identitarian social agenda, so she is trying not to
fuck up on the fiscal front.



That seems to be the winning formula at the moment. It's pretty much 
what we had here in Austria with the right-far-right coalition of 
Sebastian Kurz I. It's also pretty much what AfD offers in Germany and 
not too far from the line of the more capable politicians that might 
follow Trump.


In the Germanic countries, this formula has been unstable perhaps 
fascism is still so toxic the far-right's open border to it still 
attracts a lot of cooky people who tend to be unable to govern. But the 
toxicity is getting weaker and weaker, also here.












--
|  http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Dodomenta, Diary from Kassel

[Felix Stalder]

On 15.09.22 08:56, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

Folks, for those interested in a look at the discussions around 
documenta fifteen from outside the lumbung (dare I say, bubble), one

way to start is this interview (in German) with the chairwoman of the
 scientific committee which is the latest focus of attention:

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/documenta-debakel-wie-gehen-wir-mit-diskussionsverweigerung-um-dlf-kultur-ed86198f-100.html


It seems like this bridge has already been burned, from both sides.

The curators certainly made mistakes by not understanding the particular 
German context and the way the anti-semitism charge has been weaponized 
by the right (Netanyahu's toxic legacy). Still, I understand that they 
have little interest in having to submit everything to a German board 
for approval.


I'm in Kassel at the moment and I happened to see the films that kicked 
off this latest round of recriminations. I didn't think they needed 
"contextualization" because the context has been made really clear. They 
are historical documents from the international solidarity movement, 
particularly from a solidarity group in Tokyo. They do not represent an 
impartial historical analysis, but (mostly) voices of people in pain.


If you read German and want to get an impression of how the 
weaponization of anti-semitism works, just see how the HWK's very 
considered, very sophisticated conference "hijacking memory" (June 2022) 
was attacked. This is not about finding common ground, or better 
arguments. This is about silencing your opponent no matter how.


https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur-vergnuegen/hijacking-memory-wie-eine-konferenz-die-engpaesse-deutscher-debatten-aufzeigt-li.245534

While this has dominated the media sphere, on the ground, the exhibition 
is very impressive and truly a break from the template of the "global 
art show".


Problems that have kept the art system and theory busy for decades -- 
the relationship between art and life, or between engaged content and 
alienated form -- have turned out to be largely irrelevant. And a very 
different notion of art emerges, doing art, with a small 'a', as a 
necessity for collective survival, for inventing and constructing a 
different world, as a way of seeing a world after its breakdown, a way 
of relating to the history, present, and the future.


What also struck me is that many of the works, and the overall concept, 
are very sophisticated, but not in a theoretical way. As far as theory 
is concerned, I reached the lumbung overdose quite quickly, but then 
again, this concept is so vague, general, and ubiquitous that it manages 
to integrate very disparate practices into a common framework centered 
around open-ended processes and the values of collaboration.


So there is a strong common thread -- a hands-on way of thinking, a 
rough workshop aesthetic -- that runs through the entire show, and, for 
me, it works quite well. The wealth of detail and contexts, of histories 
that are not familiar to a western art audience (or, at least not to 
me), is totally overwhelming, but that is the world outside the 
globalized duty-free zones.


I couldn't relate to everything and the lack of engagement with 
technology and industry felt a bit retro, but the focus was clearly the 
artistic production of local solidarity movements and minority groups.


Still, a lot of works that are really moving. I cannot speak much to 
discussions, workshops, and other more engaging formats, as it seems the 
energy of the show has dissipated. 100 days are long.


Overall, documenta15 is a wholesale repudiation of the modernist notion 
of what art is and what exhibitions can, and should, do.


That this is fraught with internal contradictions (less than I expected, 
though) and creates a backlash is not surprising. That the backlash 
comes in form of the charge of antisemitism, is truly sad and tells a 
lot about contemporary Germany (good and bad things).




all the best. Felix












--
|  http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Down Memory Lane: Wired's Long Boom (1997)

[Felix Stalder]

To be fair, they also added ten "scenario spoilers" they knew could 
threaten this rosy assessment. They only take up half a page in a 13 
page article, but they are pretty good as far as scenarios go.


https://archive.org/details/eu_Wired-1997-07_OCR/page/n133/mode/2up



1) Tensions between China
and the US escalate into a
new Cold War - bordering
on a hot one.



2) New technologies turn
out to be a bust. They simply
don't bring the expected
productivity increases or the
big economic boosts.


3) Russia devolves into a klep-
tocracy run by a mafia or
retreats into guasi-communist
nationalism that threatens
Europe.



4) Europe's integration process
grinds to a halt. Eastern
and western Europe can't
finesse a reunification, and
even the European Union
process breaks down.




5) Major ecological crisis causes
a global climate change that
among other things, disrupts
the food supply - causing big
price increases everywhere
and sporadic famines.


6) Major rise in crime and terror¬
ism forces the world to pull
back In fear. People who
constantly feel they could be
blown up or ripped off are
not in the mood to reach out
and open up.


7) The cumulative escalation
in pollution causes a dramatic
increase in cancer, which
overwhelms the ill-prepared
health system.


8) Energy prices go through
the roof. Convulsions in the
Middle East disrupt the oil
supply, and alternative energy
sources fail to materialize.


9) An uncontrollable plague -
a modem-day influenza
epidemic or its equivalent -
takes off like wildfire, killing
upward of 200 million people.


10) A social and cultural backlash
stops progress dead in its
tracks. Human beings need to
choose to move forward.

They just may not ...




On 26.08.22 11:11, patr...@xs4all.nl wrote:

Aloha,

As we are approaching yet another, but this time a somewhat more 'clear 
and present' episode of our reality series 'The Winter is Coming', it's 
maybe nice to (re)read how they were thinking at Wired about The Radiant 
Future, US-version.

That was another millennium ...

Enjoy!
Happy End-of-Summer (or of Winter ;-) !
p+2D!


(Text dump by Joost van Baal-Ilić, with thanks)
original to:  https://www.wired.com/1997/07/longboom/
-
WIRED
The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020

By Peter Schwartz Peter Leyden
Ideas, July 1, 1997.


We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment 
for the

whole world. You got a problem with that?

A bad meme—a contagious idea—began spreading through the United States 
in the
1980s: America is in decline, the world is going to hell, and our 
children's
lives will be worse than our own. The particulars are now familiar: Good 
jobs
are disappearing, working people are falling into poverty, the 
underclass is
swelling, crime is out of control. The post-Cold War world is 
fragmenting, and
conflicts are erupting all over the planet. The environment is 
imploding—with
global warming and ozone depletion, we'll all either die of cancer or 
live in

Waterworld. As for our kids, the collapsing educational system is producing
either gun-toting gangsters or burger-flipping dopes who can't read.

By the late 1990s, another meme began to gain ground. Borne of the surging
stock market and an economy that won't die down, this one is more positive:
America is finally getting its economic act together, the world is not 
such a
dangerous place after all, and our kids just might lead tolerable lives. 
Yet

the good times will come only to a privileged few, no more than a fortunate
fifth of our society. The vast majority in the United States and the 
world face
a dire future of increasingly desperate poverty. And the environment? 
It's a

lost cause.

But there's a new, very different meme, a radically optimistic meme: We are
watching the beginnings of a global economic boom on a scale never 
experienced

before. We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually
double the world's economy every dozen years and bring increasing 
prosperity
for—quite literally—billions of people on the planet. We are riding the 
early

waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to
solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions
throughout the world. And we'll do it without blowing the lid off the
environment.

If this holds true, historians will look back on our era as an 
extraordinary

moment. They will chronicle the 40-year period from 1980 to 2020 as the key
years of a remarkable transformation. In the developed countries of the 
West,

new technology will lead to big productivity increases that will cause high
economic growth—actually, waves of technology will continue to roll out 
through

the early part of the 21st century. And then the relentless process of
globalization, the opening up of national economies and the integration of
markets, will drive the growth through much of the rest of the world. An

Re: Strom vs Morozov: knockdown punch

[Felix Stalder]

On 03.07.22 18:51, Brian Holmes wrote:

I am curious if other people see the same problems, and if there are
theorists and practitioners resolving them...



Finally, I also got around reading both texts.

in my view, Mozorov's analysis is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. I 
agree, as Brian does, with his core argument: the current wave of 
"post-capitalism" theory is rather shallow. For example, what are we to 
make of Mckenzie Wark's basic argument: Capitalism is over because the 
new elites no longer own the means of production, but the means of 
organizing the production. According to this line of thinking, 
outsourcing would be a "post-capitalist" practice and NIKE has never 
been capitalist. Not really.


But beyond that, Mozorov's take gets really confusing, not the least 
because he operates with strange dichotomies, e.g. extraction (feudal) 
vs production (capitalist), or rent (feudal) vs profit (capitalist). 
Then, to argue against neo-feudalist theories, he need to come down hard 
on the side of production/profit.


But then again, he seems to agree with Jason More that capitalism is an 
island of commodification relying for cheap resources on an ocean of 
non-commodified (re)production. But this really means that production 
and extraction need to be thought together.


This in turn, makes it easy to see that large parts of capitalism has 
always been extractive. First, and still foremost, of the natural 
commons, but increasingly also of the social commons. But extraction 
doesn't mean it's effortless. On the contrary, capitalist competitive 
pressures require transforming the environment for optimal 
extractability. This work started, arguably, with the colonial 
plantation and extends all the way to fracking.


The same is true for the social commons (including, as Jaromil pointed 
out, the software commons). Corporate social media might be an extreme 
case of reconstituting the environment to increase extraction, but it's 
merely the tip of the iceberg. Google (and an entire SEO-industry) 
giving you tips on how the set-up you website for optimal indexicability 
is not that different, or neither are our own attempts to tailor our 
social media posts to what we assume to be algorithmic sorting.


I can greatly recommend Vladan Joler's work called "new exractivism" on 
this topic


https://opensecret.kw-berlin.de/artwork/new-extractivism


What extraction allows capitalists to achieve are super-profits by 
working with resources which are produced at no costs. Collecting and 
commodifying, on the other hand, can be quite costly and requiring 
innovation (hence even oil companies do R).


The same is with the rent and production. These are not necessarily 
opposites, rather, they come together in the classic concept of 
'monopoly rent'. And if you look at the tech sectors, monopolies or 
quasi-monopolies (e.g. Apple) are standard. And a monopoly is the basis 
to achieve super-profit. Peter Thiel is upfront in this. His book is 
called from Zero to One, ie. a start-up (zero) which creates a monopoly 
(market of one). He's even more blunt when saying "competition is for 
losers".


And, this need for super-profits (be they extractive or monopoly-based) 
is driven by the power of the financial markets, it self an extractive 
processes that proceeds by transforming its environment for optimal 
extractability (ie. financialization, or, in web3, tokenization).



Takes makes the Ström piece so interesting, because he manages to think 
all of these processes together through the lense of cybernetic 
abstraction. (Which, also helps to understand why so many oppositional 
projects are about 'entanglement', 'bio-regions', or 
'reterritorialization' more generally. Ethno-nationalism is the 
far-right version of this).


He also doesn't construct a false distinction between informational and 
industrial capitalism. Let's not forget, the oil industry was an early 
and very influential customers of the tech-industry, much like the 
military and financial industry. Rather, one is a means to upgrade the 
other and in fusing of the two, both sides extends their reach.


I tried to formulate a similar idea -- less comprehensive than Ström -- 
in a recent small booklet called "Escape Velocity. Computing and the 
Great Acceleration." Available in OA here


https://aksioma.org/escape-velocity.computing-and-the-great-acceleration

And in terms of social power, I don't think "informational capitalism" 
is yet a match for "fossil capitalism". Just look at the what the US 
supreme court is doing: red meat for the declining white middle classes 
and free reign to fossil capitalism. I wouldn't be surprised if this 
court would come down against the social media giants at some point.



all the best. Felix







--
|  http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net 

The extradition of Julian Assange

[Felix Stalder]

This is a really sad, though not unexpected, development. It's hard to 
avoid the parallels to Navalny's treatment.


Besides all the press freedom implication and one man's suffering, the 
vilification of Assange is the most successful psy-op I've ever 
encountered personally. It's appalling.



Felix




https://freedom.press/news/the-extradition-of-julian-assange-must-be-condemned-by-all-who-believe-in-press-freedom/

The extradition of Julian Assange must be condemned by all who believe 
in press freedom


Trevor Timm
Executive Director

Today

The British home secretary has formally approved the extradition of 
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to the United States, in the latest 
development in a dangerous and misguided criminal prosecution that has 
the potential to criminalize national security journalism in the United 
States.


Previously, a major coalition of civil liberties organizations, 
including Freedom of the Press Foundation, implored U.S. Attorney 
General Merrick Garland to drop the case against Assange in the name of 
protecting the rights of journalists everywhere. So, too, have the 
editors of major news outlets such as The New York Times and Washington 
Post.


By continuing to extradite Assange, the Biden DOJ is ignoring the dire 
warnings of virtually every major civil liberties and human rights 
organization in the country that the case will do irreparable damage to 
basic press freedom rights of U.S. reporters.


The prosecution, which includes 17 charges under the Espionage Act and 
one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, covers events that took 
place more than a decade ago, but was brought only under the Trump 
administration — after the Obama Department of Justice reportedly 
considered charges but dismissed them for their dangerous First 
Amendment implications.


Reports suggest Assange may have at least one more avenue of appeal, so 
he may not be on a flight to the United States just yet. But this is one 
more troubling development in a case that could upend journalists’ 
rights in the 21st century.


You don’t have to like Assange or his political opinions at all to grasp 
the dangerous nature of this case for journalists everywhere, either. 
Even if you don’t consider him a “journalist,” much of the activity 
described in the charges against him is common newsgathering practices. 
A successful conviction would potentially make receiving classified 
information, asking for sources for more information, and publishing 
certain types of classified information a crime. Journalists, of course, 
engage in all these activities regularly.


There is some historical irony in the fact that this extradition 
announcement falls during the anniversary of the Pentagon Papers trial, 
which began with the Times publication of stories based on the legendary 
leak on June 13, 1971, and continued through the seminal Supreme Court 
opinion rejecting prior restraint on June 30, 1971.


In the months and years following that debacle, whistleblower (and FPF 
co-founder) Daniel Ellsberg became the first journalistic source to be 
charged under the Espionage Act. What many do not know is that the Nixon 
administration attempted to prosecute Times reporter Neil Sheehan for 
receiving the Pentagon Papers as well — under a very similar legal 
theory the Justice Department is using against Assange.


Thankfully, that prosecution failed. And until this one does too, we 
continue to urge the Biden administration to drop this prosecution. 
Every day it continues to further undermine the First Amendment.

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: The German "Open Letter" on Ukraine

[Felix Stalder]

On 19.05.22 07:13, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
Felix has called the coalition between the Greens and the conservatives 
"weird". I think it is weird only from the perspective of the 20th 
century assumptions about what it means to be left and right, 
conservative or progressive. These parameters have been shifting for a 
while, and when it comes to the relationship between the German Green 
party, and the economy, and pacifism, we might indeed see a phase 
change. This phenomenon looks "weird" only if you believe in "old 
physics". In the new time, we - and the "Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen 
Wirtschaft" - have to get used to the idea that Putin's war in Ukraine 
is spurring the defossilisation of the German chemical industry.



I agree, calling this alliance between Green and Conservatives "weird" 
is very superficial. There is a lot that is not weird. For one, the 
social basis of the Green and Conservative electorate overlap quite 
significantly, and it's no coincidence that they managed to win (and 
hold) power in one of the most conservative areas of German 
(Baden-Württemberg). Second, once in power, they tend enact policies 
that are largely in favor of capital. Again, see the Green's record in 
Baden-Württemberg, or, here in Austria. This sharply limits their 
environmental, feminist, humanitarian agendas. To be fair, this is also 
what gets them in power in the first place


However, to think the relationship is not weird because German industry 
will happily wean itself off fossil fuels is really mistaken. Again, 
look at what happened where they are in power. I don't see that they 
really managed to get the German car makers to shift to electric 
vehicles. It's more the opposite. In Baden-Württemberg they became 
boosters for conventional cars.


To the degree that this shift is happening in the automotive industry, 
it's more, sorry, Elon Musk's achievement than of the Greens. And, even 
then, electric cars are more about saving the industry then the 
environment (for that, it's too little, too late). Also, the most 
radical the Greens have done so far in relation to Russian fossil fuels 
is to ditch environmental regulations and built LNG terminals. Again, 
understand the pragmatics of it, but this is certainly no Energiewende 
"shock doctrin."


The weird part of the alliance, in my view, comes from the fact that 
their stance towards the war is motivated by fundamentally different 
concerns. For the Greens, the value-driven, idealistic, international 
solidarity dimensions are really important. Just listen to the foreign 
minister and how personally she feels the pain of the victims. I have 
nothing against that. But, this is paired with Conservatives whose 
motivations are nationalistic, militaristic and machistic. Finally, the 
post-heroism of post-war Germany can be laid to rest. Now, the young 
heroes are back in. Finally, move over 68er! This is literally the 
response of the conservatives at FAZ to Habermas. This is fundamentally 
incompatible with a feminist foreign policy if this means more than 
adding "rape" to the list of prosecutable war crimes (again, nothing 
against that).


But all of this takes place within a framework that asserts the nation 
state as source of identity and power. And, historically, this has never 
been 'progressive' at least not in the last 150 years of German history 
(I would count the 1848 revolution, failed as it was, a progressive 
version of the national impulse). This, I think, is what troubles 
Habermas, and it troubles me too.












--
|  http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: "fossil fascism" (was: The German "Open Letter" on Ukraine)

[Felix Stalder]

On 18.05.22 10:04, Alex Text wrote:

In this context he also speaks of Putinism as a variation of what 
Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective has called "fossil fascism" 
(while Malm do not consider the case of the Russian Federation at all).


For a review of Malm's book "White Skin, Black Fuel", see here

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/03/26/the-danger-of-fossil-fascism/

I totally agree with Alex that the term should be expanded much further, 
in the sense of comprising the ever more violent (in terms of 
accumulating social and environmental damage) institutional world of 
fossil fuels -- companies, state agents, international organizations and 
market makers -- as well as the eco-fascist wing of the extreme right.


I'm pretty sure that this perspective also opens up productive 
perspectives on the war in the Ukraine. It's not just that selling 
fossil fuels finances the war, but also how the inevitable energy 
transition provides am imminent path to decline. Slowing down this 
transition for as much as possible is clearly in the interest of 
Russia's oligarchy (and many others). The fact that it may play out in 
the opposite direction (similar to the current wave of Nato expansion) 
does not mean that this wasn't intended.


https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/30/weak-oil-the-looming-collapse-of-putins-petro-dictatorship

Also, one could even see this as an attempt to shift to a new (or at 
least acquire a second) strategic resource: grain. Before the war, 
Russia and Ukrain exported nearly a quarter of the world's grain. 
Controlling all of that is an important source of power.


https://bylinetimes.com/2022/04/21/putins-war-on-net-zero-controlling-europes-breadbasket-to-prevent-russias-fossil-fuel-collapse


All the more reason to support Ukraine and make sure fossil fascism 
doesn't win this war.



all the best. Felix








--
|  http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: The German "Open Letter" on Ukraine

[Felix Stalder]

This letter created an enormous amount of discussion in Germany, little 
of it productive, imho.


In the most charitable interpretation, the letter reflects an aversion 
to militaristic thinking, an version which defined the common-sense in 
de-nazified post-war Germany. Remember, the German left, at least the 
Social Democrats, always tried to soften, perhaps even overcome, the 
antagonistic logic of military blocks that dominated the cold war by a 
policy of "Wandel durch Handel" (transformation through trade).


That policy made, in my opinion, sense during the cold war, and probably 
also in its immediate aftermath, but at least since 2008, it has become 
a moral fig-leaf for naked German economic interests (cheap energy 
imports & exports of manufactured goods).


In a less charitable, but in my view more accurate, interpretation, this 
is an intellectually lazy attempt to claim moral high-ground and a 
willingness to throw Ukrainians under the bus to avoid having to rethink 
one's self-serving positions.


A much more substantial open letter was published on Jürgen Habermas on 
28. April in Süddeutsche Zeitung, in which he formulates the principle 
dilemma: Ukraine must not loose this war, the nuclear war needs to be 
averted at all costs.


Against this background, he advocates a cautious course which manages to 
achieve both goals. This has been widely interpreted as support for Olaf 
Scholz, but that is a very superficial reading of his position.


Because, his main concern is how the so-called "Zeitwende" works in 
favor of the hard right, which always despised the idea of German 
non-militarism and truly hated Willy Brandt for saying, in 1971, that 
"war can never the a means of politics" (remember, this was the cold war 
when the hard right did not accept the German-Polish border).


Habermas is, obviously, well-ware that this is approach does not work 
once war has broken out, but deeply concerned with the return of 
jingoism to German politics in weird coalition between the Greens and 
the conservatives. The far right/far left have been probably been paid 
by Putin and are now somewhat in a dilemma.


Hence he's focused on a cautious, but unavering support of Ukraine that 
avoids overreach and escalation.


The best English-language analysis of this debate I have seen is by Adam 
Tooze


https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/05/after-the-zeitenwende-jurgen-habermas-and-germanys-new-identity-crisis


all the best. Felix




On 17.05.22 18:22, Francis Hunger wrote:

Hi Brian,

I think this open letter shows a rift in leftist analysis in Germany. 
The more radical-leftist leaning weekly newspapers Jungle World and 
Analyse & Kritik have contributed valuable analysis:


https://jungle.world/artikel/2022/19/western-leftists-explain-things-you 
(paywalled)


https://jungle.world/artikel/2022/19/wenn-pazifismus-zum-luxus-wird

https://shop.jungle.world/artikel/2022/19/die-ukraine-ist-durch-angst-und-wut-geeint

https://www.akweb.de/ausgaben/682/was-wollen-linke-in-der-ukraine-solidaritaets-delegation-in-lwiw/






Am 17.05.22 um 17:50 schrieb Brian Holmes:
Below is a machine translation of the “Open Letter” to Scholz, signed 
by over 200,000 German personalities including Alice Schwartzer, 
Alexander Kluge and Siegfried Zielinski. The source is here:


https://www.emma.de/artikel/offener-brief-bundeskanzler-scholz-339463

I am curious as to the letter’s significance in German debates and 
also, about the many reactions to it which have apparently emerged 
since its publication on April 29. Some people on the list could 
inform us about this!


I can’t agree with this letter, because its core notion of universally 
binding moral law appears out of touch with the present-day reality of 
civilizational clashes, and perhaps more representative of the 1980s 
than now. However, I think that the mere rebooting of Atlanticist 
proxy wars, without any discussion of a global military, economic and 
political strategy for the rapidly emergent Anthropocene crisis, is 
equally out of touch.


It is true that the left has wrongly abdicated any consideration of 
military strategy. But one does not correct such an error by abounding 
in the Free World/Cold War logic of the 1950s. Russia’s geopolitical 
bid for Eurasia and its very capacity to make war are dependent on its 
fossil fuel production, distribution and consumption, which largely 
takes place under free-market rules. The US, and by extension, NATO, 
are similarly positioned, and the US is likely to come out of this war 
as both global cop and global gas station attendant, supplying Europe 
with LNG produced by an otherwise failing shale-gas industry. While I 
do not see an alternative to the current proxy war, beyond more 
vigorous and serious attempts at negotiation which are effectively 
lacking, I do see an immense failure to think about where ‘victory’ 
can all-too easily lead.


Nettimers, I would be glad to hear your thoughts about the current 

Re: FSB 'dissident' voice

[Felix Stalder]

David,

thanks for pointing this out. Quite strange, because this is the same 
person from bellingcat who shared the text in the first place, including 
some background how he checked the authenticity. Now he does not even 
mention this when discounting the document and how the media fell for it.


Felix

On 13.03.22 20:10, David Garcia wrote:
I might be confused but I wonder if this statement at about 37 min into 
this youtube seminar given by Christo Grozev calls the veracity of this 
FSB dissident into question ?


https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar/insights-bellingcat-russias-ukraine-ambitions 



I remember reading a less rough translation of this text by Igor Sushko 
which he posted as a twitter thread which I saw as a re-tweet from 
Felix. I remember thinking


that it was too good to be true. But as I was informed the source was 
Bellingcat this gave me hope that it might be accurate. It looks like I 
was right to be sceptical.


*--*

Greetings nettimers after an absence of oh, two decades.

I've been following a bit the last couple weeks of posts on Ukraine and 
related subjects and there's much to meditate on. And thanks to Ted 
Byfield for pointing me in the general direction of this discussion.


I wanted to call your attention to a rather remarkable document that 
Christo Grozev (of Bellingcat) dropped last Saturday, seemingly written 
by an FSB 'dissident' (to the extent that such a term can be used in 
that context):


https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500196510054637569 



Here's the rough-and-ready English translation:

https://pastebin.com/2agMRGmd 

...and there's a German translation in the twitter thread. Weirdly, the 
'voice' of the author immediately reminded me of the Scientist character 
in Tarkovsky's /Stalker/. You know the one, he smuggled a portable nuke 
into The Zone.


stinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: 
nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in 
Subject:



#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:


--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: The War to come ...

[Felix Stalder]

On 10.03.22 06:02, Brian Holmes wrote:


Here's the thing though. Should Nato really have denied entry to all 
those Eastern European states that requested it? Remember that most of 
those states, they had been taken over but not absorbed by the Soviet 
Union. They lived for decades under significant degrees of political 
repression. Did they have a valid reason to want to join Nato after 
1989? Looking at the brutality of the current war, it seems suddenly 
obvious to me that they did -- and by the same token, I have suddenly 
become less certain of what I always used to say, that Nato is an 
imperialist war machine that should be disbanded. Russia is also an 
imperialist war machine, for sure (and the two owe each other a lot). 
But maybe China is also an imperial war machine? And India, maybe not yet?


I don't think that NATO ever was an imperialist war machine. The US 
doesn't really need NATO for it's imperialist projects in Latin America 
or Asia.


NATO, it seems to me, was always a "cold war" war machine, aimed at 
confronting the SU/Russia, primarily in Europe. To the degree that this 
confrontation was not seen as vital after 1990 (either because the US 
read geopolitics as uni-polar, or the Europeans believed in trade 
leading to peace) NATO languished. Irrelevant for Trump, brain-dead for 
Macron, not worth investing for the Germans.


For the Eastern European countries, for very understandable, deep 
historical reasons, "confronting Russia" remained a vital concern also 
after the end of the cold war, hence NATO was always seen crucially 
important and they entered NATO voluntarily.


History has born them out, but was that really inevitable? Of course 
not, because nothing ever is, but the miss-conception of geopolitics as 
unipolar is certainly a big factor in this.


But the paradox is, to develop a real peace architecture in Europe, NATO 
would have had to deny Eastern European countries membership and work on 
some kind of large block-free zone between itself and Russia. I'm not 
sure such a project would have been popular in Poland, though.









--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Russia lost the war already

[Felix Stalder]

I agree, it's really unclear what "winning" or "loosing" might be here. 
Both extreme scenarios (winning = turning Ukraine into a Belarus-like 
client-state with little violence; loosing = restoration of the 
territorial integrity of Ukraine, and collapse of Putin-regime) seem 
very unlikely, but everything in between is possible, not the least the 
Hill-scenario which David quotes here.


I think what can be said that whatever is going to happen is going to 
take a long time and the even longer for the consequences to play out. 
But whatever it is, the neoliberal post cold-war order (the period of 
most of our adult lifes) is over: both in the sense that the economy and 
politics are different things, and that trade fosters peaceful 
co-existence. Biden, in a way, said that early in this administration, 
when he spoke about the struggles of democracy vs autocracy.


One of the inadvertent consequences, at least from a German point of 
view, is that this could, indeed, hasten the energy transition. The 
greens were always against North Stream 2, and now it's dead. Their 
argument about energy as a geopolitical issue always fell on deaf 
(neoliberal) ears (see above). No longer. Even the liberals are now 
calling renewables "freedom energies". Given that the problem is going 
to last a long time, it might be enough time to push the energy system 
over the edge (in a good way).


But the number of uncertainties are very high and the willingness of the 
Europeans to involve themselves in this war (for very good reasons!) 
might, or might not, increase the chances of a likely escalation.


Should there be some light at the end of the tunnel, it's an indication 
how long and dark this tunnel is (and that we have been in it for a 
while already).



all the best. Felix





On 02.03.22 11:17, David Garcia wrote:



"Andreas Broeckmann" wrote:


 Russia's war against Ukraine was lost from day one. The people in Russia
 must now decide how they want to get out of the mess their leadership
 created.

 Russia can never win this war. It will not be able to suppress the
 resistance of the Ukrainian people who, even if Russian troops were to
 occupy major parts of the territory, would continue to offer both
 civilian and armed resistance to this occupation. This resistance would
 not end.

Much as I would like to believe this narrative, I fear it is wishful thinking. 
As Fiona Hill
said in a MUST-READ interview in Politico. Putin may have a different vision of 
success
other than mere occupation.

"he (Putin) may not have sufficient force to take the country for a
protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole 
country, that
he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it 
as rump statelets
or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I 
know exactly

So what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really 
to divide it up.
He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other places where there’s a 
division of the country
between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces 
on the other.
That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a fractured, shattered 
Ukraine with
different bits being in different statuses.

Reynolds: So step by step, in ways that we haven’t always appreciated in the 
West, Putin has
brought back a lot of these countries that were independent after the Soviet 
collapse back under his
umbrella. The only country that has so far evaded Putin’s grip has been Ukraine.

Hill: Ukraine, correct. Because it’s bigger and because of its strategic 
location. That’s what Russia wants
to ensure, or Putin wants to ensure, that Ukraine like the other countries, has 
no other option than
subjugation to Russia."
  
Please read the full text.. It gives some idea of the extreme danger we are facing and how best to resist

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340
 




#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:


--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Yanis Varoufakis: What is techno-feudalism?

[Felix Stalder]

Hi Luke,

On 31.01.22 22:54, Luke Munn wrote:

Amazon.com, Facebook, etc. are not markets. As you enter them, you leave
capitalism behind. Within these platforms, one algorithm (belonging to
one person or to very few persons) decides what is on sale, who sees
which commodity is available, and how much rent the owner of the
platform will keep from the profits of vassal-capitalists allowed to
trade within the platform.

*This is incorrect and shows the risk of an economist/politician doing 
media analysis. There is not 'one algorithm' running Amazon or Facebook. 
In fact, many contemporary platforms employ hundreds of microservices, 
with teams assigned to one or more of these services, often in different 
coding languages or frameworks. Yes, the platform-owner exerts a 
significant degree of control over the conditions within it. 


Facebook is, literally, controlled by a single person. Does it matter if 
the actual work is carried out by distributed teams/technologies, 
sometimes with more, sometime with less coordination, sometimes even in 
competition with each other, if they are all integrated in, and oriented 
towards, the same bottom line?


But this 
does not annihilate pushback from producers (e.g. eBay lowering fees 
after protests from sellers, Uber being forced to class freelancers as 
employees in certain jurisdictions, etc). 



The fact that power is not absolute, that there are competing sources of 
social power and that the exact configuration of these is dependent on 
shifting alliances does not contradict the claim these companies have 
amassed the outsized amount of power and that this power is of a 
different kind.



Yanis's analysis also erases 
any competition between platforms (e.g. Netflix vs Hulu vs HBO etc). 
Platforms don't 'leave capitalism behind' - sure they introduce new 
conditions but also rely heavily on conventional aspects of capitalism 
(e.g. Uber beholden to investors, Google's revenue coming from 
advertising). *


I'm not sure if Netflix etc are the best examples, but the point here is 
that many of the platform companies don't compete in the market (though 
there is competition between them for monopoly position), but they are 
market-makers for others and that provides them with a different kind of 
power.  He calls it command power, but earlier attempts called this 
'power of the protocol', or even earlier 'control society'. This all 
goes in the same direction. Being able to shape people's action without 
telling them directly what to do.



Big Tech’s workers do not even collect 1% of their employer’s revenues. 
This is

because paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech
benefits from. Who performs the bulk of the work? Most of the rest of
us! For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free
(often enthusiastically)

*Also incorrect. In my PhD on Uber, Airbnb, and other platforms, cost of 
labor actually consumed a huge amount of the bottom line each year. 
Indeed, these frustratingly high costs were what fueled Uber's 
self-driving car pilot programs, and drove pundit speculation that human 
labor would soon be replaced. Of course, this turned into a nightmare 
and Uber stopped that program in 2020 I believe.


The 1% figure struck me also as very low, but it seems pretty clear that 
the number of workers in these companies is relatively low, given their 
international reach and number of people with whom they interact. 
Delivery is quite different from social networking and the inability to 
shed labor costs is one of the reasons many people have pointed out that 
Uber as not path to profitability expect by gaining a monopoly.



*This analysis not only erases the visible pool of working class labor 
that fuels platforms like Deliveroo, Uber, etc, but it also ignores the 
hidden labor that many platforms benefit from. Gray and Suri call this 
'ghost work'. We can think of content moderators forced to suffer 
through traumatic content day in and day out. Technically they work for 
third party companies that contract to Big Tech, neatly severing much of 
the responsibility for workers. There's also a raft of other IT services 
(e.g. data labelling, microtasks, crowd-work etc), with much of this 
hidden labor sourced from the Global South, with poor pay and precarious 
conditions.


*
*Sure, platforms also benefit from free labor in the form of reviews 
(although there's also a black market for these). But the danger here is 
that Yanis suggests that the problem is naive young Westerners doing 
free labor because we've reached some shiny and unprecedented new form 
of capitalism. The reality is that platform labor looks very much like 
older forms of labor - racialized, gendered, leveraging colonial 
disparities, etc. *


Sure, but wouldn't that outsourcing and racializing of labor at the 
heart of the most advanced industries amount to breaking of the 
capitalist promise (so dear to the US) that work provides the route to 

Yanis Varoufakis: What is techno-feudalism?

[Felix Stalder]

At the end of a long interview on crypto, conducted by Evgeny Mozorov, 
Yanis Varoufakis outline, quite succinctly, his argument for rise of 
"techno-feudalism". It centers around the seeming paradox: "Capital is 
getting stronger but capitalism is dying."


https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-feudalism/


__Q:
ecently, you’ve taken up the theme of ‘techno-feudalism’, pointing out 
that capitalism is no longer what it once was. If I understand your 
thesis correctly, what makes the current system ‘feudal’ is that A) 
markets are no longer key to the making of profits (e.g. the QE 
experience suggests as much), while B) tech platforms have amassed 
immense political power, which is unprecedented in capitalism. Is it a 
correct summary of your argument?  Are there other important dimensions 
to ‘techno-feudalism’ that this summary doesn’t capture?


__A:
The question is this: Is capitalism undergoing one more of its many 
metamorphoses, thus warranting nothing more than a new epithet, e.g. 
rentier capitalism, platform capitalism, hyper-capitalism or 
x-capitalism? Or are we witnessing a qualitative transformation of 
capitalism into a brand new exploitative mode of production? I think the 
latter. Moreover, this is not just a theoretical issue. If I am right, 
grasping the radicality of this transformation is crucial to opposing 
this new systemic exploitation.


Puzzlement is, of course, an understandable reaction to my claim – which 
needs a great deal of explanation and substantiation. Unable to offer it 
here in full (Nb. I am dedicating my next book to the subject), here is 
a flavour:


Capitalism is everywhere we look. Capital is accumulating rapidly and 
beating labour over the head everywhere and in cruel new ways. So, how 
come I argue that this is no longer capitalism – but, rather, something 
worse and distinct? Let me begin by reminding our readers that back in 
the 1780s, feudalism was everywhere and feudal lords were stronger than 
ever. However, surreptitiously, capitalism was already infecting 
feudalism’s roots and a new ruling class (the bourgeoisie) was in the 
process of taking over.


My claim is that, similarly today, capitalism – like feudalism in the 
1780s – is being usurped by a far more exploitative and very distinct 
new extractive/exploitative system (which I call techno-feudalism), one 
that is arriving complete with a new ruling class.


Critics of my thesis will point out, correctly, that capitalism has 
undergone many transformations – from its early competitive phase, to 
monopoly-oligopoly capitalism (1910–onwards), its Bretton-Woods period 
(during which finance was kept on a leash with capital controls, etc.), 
financialised capitalism (from 1980–onwards) and, more recently, rentier 
capitalism. All these capitalisms were distinct and interestingly 
different from one another. BUT, they were each a version of capitalism.


What makes a system capitalist? The answer is: It is a system driven by 
private profits (Nb. not rents) extracted within markets. (To compare 
and contrast, feudalism was driven by rents extracted outside of 
markets.) Has that changed? I believe so. What has replaced profit on 
the one hand and markets on the other? My answer: Central bank money has 
replaced private profit (as the system’s main fuel and lubricant) and 
digital fiefdoms/platforms have become the realm in which value and 
capital are extracted from the majority by a tiny oligarchy.


Let me explain this in greater detail:

Hypothesis 1: Central bank money replaced private profits as the 
system’s driver


Profitability no longer drives the system-as-a-whole, even though it 
remains the be-all and end-all for individual entrepreneurs. Consider 
what happened in London on August 12, 2020. It was the day markets 
learned that the British economy shrank disastrously – and by far more 
than analysts had expected (more than 20% of national income had been 
lost in the first seven months of 2020). Upon hearing the grim news, 
financiers thought: ‘Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print 
even more pounds and channel them to us to buy shares. Time to buy shares!’


This is just one of countless manifestations of a new global reality: In 
the United States and all over the West, central banks print money that 
financiers lend to corporations, which then use it to buy back their 
shares – whose prices are thus decoupled from profits. The new barons, 
as a result, expand their fiefs, courtesy of state money, even if they 
never earn a dime of profit! Moreover, they dictate terms on the 
supposed Sovereign – the central banks that keep them ‘liquid’. While 
the Fed, for example, prides itself over its power and independence, it 
is today utterly powerless to stop that which it started in 2008: 
printing money on behalf of bankers and corporates. Even if the Fed 
suspects that, in keeping the corporate barons liquid, it is 
precipitating inflation, it knows 

Re: Pyramid schemes: from Albania to the US

[Felix Stalder]

On 09.01.22 23:11, José María Mateos wrote:

I've just discovered the PDFs in the reader with sheer joy. In the 
nettime link to this collection (https://www.nettime.org/pub.html) it 
says that it can be bought as a book, but the link to the autonomedia 
bookstore is broken. Is there any possibility to obtain a copy? I guess 
not at this point, but it doesn't hurt to ask.


Amazingly, the book is still in print and can be ordered via the 
Autonomedia website.


https://autonomedia.org/product/read-me/


all the best. Felix



--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Pyramid schemes: from Albania to the US

[Felix Stalder]

The unraveling of large Ponzi schemes is a hugely destructive affair, 
all the more because such schemes thrive in societies were official 
institutions are either weak or captured by criminal interests and 
people are desperate. In the 1999 nettime reader, there is an account of 
the Albanian pyramid scheme which brought the country to the brink of 
collapse.


SUBJECT: PYRAMID SCHEMES:
ALBANIA 1996–98
FROM: GENC GREVA 
DATE: WED, 30 SEP 1998 11:22:29 -0400

https://www.nettime.org/nettime/DOCS/zkp5/pdf/markets.pdf

Of course, the situation today with crypto-currencies is much more 
extreme today, simply because of the size of the bubble that cannot but 
burst at some point. Below is an excerpt of a recent article that tries 
to think through the consequences for the US. And Europe is probably not 
that much behind.






The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism
The crypto market’s inevitable crash will pull America’s politics in an 
even scarier direction.

HAMILTON NOLAN JANUARY 4, 2022

https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-ticking-bomb-of-crypto-fascism

<>


The crash of crypto is bound to happen for the same reason that all 
Ponzi schemes eventually crumble: There is not an infinite supply of new 
people willing to pay ever-increasing prices for the stuff that you 
currently own. The more interesting question is not whether many 
small-time investors will lose a lot of money on their crypto 
investments, but what will happen when they do?


Here is what will happen when hundreds of thousands of younger investors 
are smashed by the crypto crash: They will be radicalized. This will not 
be experienced as simply a decline in prices, because crypto represents 
much more than a simple investment to its most fervent adherents — it 
represents a way out of the American trap. It represents the existence 
of opportunity, the possibility of economic mobility, the validation of 
the idea that you, a regular, hard working person without connections, 
can go from the bottom to the top, thanks to nothing but your own savvy 
choices. When that myth is shattered, disillusionment with the American 
system will follow. Unfortunately, given the realities of the moment, 
these newly disillusioned and radicalized and angry and broke people are 
far more likely to turn to fascism than to socialism.


Crypto, a portfolio of inherently worthless online tokens, is already 
sustained almost entirely by myth. Its value proposition is so 
inscrutable that when it melts down, almost any narrative could be 
crafted to plausibly explain it. It was the Fed! The government! The 
leftists who hate entrepreneurialism! It was the dark and devious forces 
of the shadowy deep state! Anything will do. It will enforce the priors 
of those who placed their faith in crypto as a good substitute for the 
American dream — a crowd of Barstool Sports readers and tech 
libertarians and the types of people who used to buy silver bars from 
Alex Jones before they turned to Bitcoin. The crypto-evangelist 
population skews heavily towards a sort of New Age libertarian, 
anti-government right wing-ism, and when they see their financial dreams 
evaporate, they will likely set their sights for revenge on the things 
they already despise. The broad effect will lead to a large number of 
newly angry, bitter, disillusioned, hopeless people who are too steeped 
in the culture wars to turn towards working class solidarity, and 
instead turn towards hate.




--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Social media and mass mobilization in Chile's presidential election

[Felix Stalder]

Hi everyone,

I'm sure many have followed the election in Chile. It was historic. Not 
"just" because it means the writing of the new constitution will 
continue which will have the potential to re-draw the political map 
(finally stepping out of the long shadow of Pinochet) and the dynamics 
unfolding on it. But also because Boric, from what I understand, really 
is a candidate of social movements, coming out of a decade of student 
struggles and 3 years of popular protests against neoliberal austerity. 
It is a testimony to the depth of these struggles that they survived the 
pandemic as an active social force.


Being a social movement candidate, the mobilization of many different 
groups as active players in the campaign played a large role, and this 
mobilization was largely done over social media, with videos, hashtags, 
and memes. This is not to suggest that Boric is a social media 
candidate, he clearly is one of social movements, but it is still 
helpful to counter the somewhat self-defeating attitude that social 
media amplify only "fake news" and the far right.


These are, of course, hugely problematic companies, but I think it's 
better to say that social media amplify social energy and for the last 
couple of years, particularly in the US and Europe, the right was far 
more energetic than the left.


What this election seems to indicate -- similar to the Corbyn Campaign 
in the UK and the municipalism in Spain -- is that positive (in the 
sense of having a vision, rather than just an enemy) social energy is 
built in a hybrid way, that large social mobilization are necessary for 
creating an understanding of a collective situation, but the social 
media campaigns can enable a new articulation of the way on which large 
numbers of people are embedded in the political process as 
self-articulating actors, rather than just spectators or "rank-and-file".


But I'm sure there are people who are much closer to the events in Chile 
and who can speak with more knowledge about the mobilization during this 
campaign. I would be curious to hear from you.


Felix





https://www.democracynow.org/2021/12/21/chilean_activists_on_gabriel_boric

Javiera Manzi, an activist with Chile’s largest feminist advocacy group. 
It’s known as the Coordinadora Feminista 8M, March 8th, International 
Women’s Day.


JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the coalition Boric is a part 
of, the “I Approve Dignity” coalition, what political movements are 
represented within it, and the importance the student movement in 
propelling volunteers and activists for that coalition?


JAVIERA MANZI: Yes. Apruebo Dignidad is a platform, a left platform, a 
very diverse platform, as well, that has a progressive agenda. And, for 
us, it’s important to say that it’s not only their victory. It’s a 
victory of people who never went to vote before. You see, this is the 
election with the most votation since the vote is voluntary here in 
Chile. And even though we can see the diversity there, and we can see, 
of course, the extent of the — and the diversity of different social 
movements even in Apruebo Dignidad but also outside the Apruebo 
Dignidad, that in a unity made possible this victory. For us, it’s very 
important to say that this is a victory of a way of a radical tenderness 
of the people and the aim of a radical transformation, and that feminism 
as well as environmental movements are in the — we are working towards 
that justice, social justice and social transformation.




--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

The Dawn of Everything (very short review)

[Felix Stalder]

So, I finished reading "The Dawn of Everything", the new book by David 
Graeber and David Wengrow. In many ways, it's the perfect book for our 
dark historical moment. It's all about historical possibilities, yet not 
in the future, but in the past. Thus, an escape and an inspiration. 
It's an amazing read, so full of detail that's impossible to summarize. 
You really should read it yourself.


I'll just focus on the structure here. The book aims to deconstruct the 
dominant linear narratives of human culture, in which the "agricultural 
revolution" (which wasn't revolution) and the emergence of cities (which 
were frequently used only for seasonal gatherings) inexorably lead to 
inequality, domination, and "the state". There are two conventional 
versions of this story: the loss of freedom/equality (Rousseau, Hariri, 
etc) or the gain of civilization (Hobbes, Diamond, etc). Graeber and 
Wengrow argue, in dizzying archeological and anthropological detail, 
that both are wrong and severely curtail our imagination of social 
potential. Their baseline assumption is that humans since the neolithic 
are our cognitive equals. No more, but also no less intelligent than we 
are, hence also no less capable of making decisions their own lives, 
individually and collectively. So, no more treatment of foragers as 
semi-apes living in small bands, unable to overcome by supposed 
constants like Dunbar's 150 people threshold (after which social 
stratification sets in).


And decisions they made. The historical record reveals a "carnival 
parade" of social forms, most of which do not fit the linear accounts. 
Thus, non-modern societies have something to teach us, because they have 
solved many of the problems we are grappling with. And, indeed, 
historically they have. E.g. they make a strong case that the 
enlightenment notion of personal freedom was first formulated by the 
indigenous critique of European culture, by people like the Wendat 
leader Kandiaronk. To structure the historical diversity of social 
forms, they develop the notion of three sources of freedom: the capacity 
to move away (and be received somewhere else), the capacity to refuse to 
obey commands, and the capacity to collectively remake social relations. 
At the same time, there are three sources of domination: violence 
(sovereignty), knowledge (bureaucracy), and charisma (competitive 
politics). It's easy to be reminded of Max Weber's definition of forms 
of legitimate power (traditional, charismatic, rational) here, but 
Graeber/Wengrow's notion is much more flexible because these sources are 
not mutually exclusive, but rather they can be layered in top of own 
another.


While the three freedoms are related (take away one and the others will 
start to crumble), the sources of domination are not. Often, only one of 
them played an important role, while others were absent. Sometimes two 
were co-present and only in the modern state, all three come together. 
And, this is their political point, they don't need to stay together in 
the future.


While the book is great, it has a glaring hole in it. What is almost 
entirely missing is the discussion of how this "carnival parade" of 
social forms structured the relation to the environment, or, more 
generally, how they were embedded in, and impacted on, the metabolic 
system. While for much of the historical period they cover, this might 
not have been too much of a concern, it is clearly one for us now and if 
we are to remake our social relations, then this will be a key dimension 
to transform. But it would probably be too much to ask from one single 
book, already long enough, to cover everything, even with this title.




--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: “Meta”

[Felix Stalder]

I agree. While there is ample technical room -- and a distinct social 
need -- to improve the teleconferencing "experience" (sorry, Olia), but 
you don't need a sad metaverse for that.


But what strikes me still is the doggedness with which US IT sector 
persues this vision. I took the occasion to look into Gelertner's 1992 
Mirrorworlds -- which I admit I had only know through Lutz Dambeck's 
film "Das Netz" -- and it's almost the same vision. And I am sure there 
are many more like that, as Michael has pointed out.


I think there is a weird combination of control desire on multiple 
levels (FB to control the metaverse, managers to control their remote 
workers etc) and belief in technical singularity, in the sense that 
computer simulation becomes indistinguishable from physical reality, not 
just in terms of intelligence, but everything else too. Connected to the 
latter, there is also this notion that we are already living inside a 
simulation created by a much higher intelligence. A kind of IT version 
of the many worlds theory, but I don't know if anyone takes that 
seriously or if the discussion of this is more like a Silicon Valley 
parlor game.



all the best. Felix






On 02.11.21 03:26, Brian Holmes wrote:
Alphabet was realistic. Meta looks desperate. I have the same impression 
as you, Michael. It will come to nothing.


--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

meta(verse)

[Felix Stalder]

I'm sure most of you have heard by now that Facebook is renaming itself 
"Meta" and promoting a platform called "Metaverse", basically, a shared, 
but heavily customizable VR/AR world.


If you haven't seen the video from the keynote, have look. You won't be 
able to get through the entire 80-minute show (I tried, and failed) but 
here are a few minutes to get the flavor of how dated this future feels. 
There is nothing in there that you couldn't do in Second Life and it 
even looks pretty much the same.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g

The best way to feel of the emptiness of the vision is probably through 
a series of super-cuts of the most frequently doled out platitudes: 
experience, the physical world, commerce/community, the future, and a 
few more.


https://twitter.com/sam_lavigne/status/1453901401977937921

The sheer backwardness and ugliness of the entire vision are depressing 
no matter whether you look at it from an aesthetic, social, or economic 
perspective. And all of this is made worse by the company's track record 
on these things so far.


The plan is pretty obviously a land grab by the company but the curious 
thing is why they believe that such land would exist in the first place.


This happens exactly at a moment when the political class seems to have 
given up preventing global heating to pass dangerous tipping points of 
no return. So, this is clearly meant to paper over an increasingly 
dystopian world to keep selling the promise of "creativity" and 
"self-expression" as a carrot, and a "new economy" as a stick. With 
Uber's and Airbnb's promise to monetize your spare resources as a way to 
deal with real-life precarity ringing hollow (indeed, monetizing your 
life _is_ precarity), the new economy of 3D creators is another promise 
to pull yourself up on your own bootstraps.


But is not just the dated dream of virtual reality replacing physical 
reality. What's more, chasing this dream will make physical reality even 
worse. For a lot of reasons, waste of resources, diverting attention 
towards crap, universalizing bias, and so on.


Underlying all of this is this notion of the world as a model. Sure, we 
all operate with (implicit or explicit) models of the world in order to 
make sense of it and be able to act in it. I'm not advocating for some 
sort of unmediated "real".


The problematic element is to have a single model which is supposed to 
replace all others. It's not just that such a model is necessarily under 
complex (the metaverse is cartoonishly so), but that very notion of a 
single model is biased, violent, and will create ugly backlashes. 
Perhaps this is the lasting influence of cybernetics, which as its 
ultimate horizon has such a unified vision where everything could be 
brought into its purview based on the reductionist notion of "information".


Against this, a plethora of voices -- feminist, anti-racist, ecological, 
indigenous, and more -- have sprung up to argue against the 
impossibility of such a unified view (often denounced as colonialist). 
They advocate for the co-existence of a wide range of 
"being-in-the-world", each embodying a different model of the world, if 
you will, that cannot be flattened into a single one. Rather, they 
retain a considerable degree of incommensurability (the tick sees the 
world like no other living being, as J.v.Uxeküll argued as early as the 
1930s) that can only be brought into one to the other through practices 
of mutual respect (because one can never fully grasp or contain the 
other) and care (because each model/world is in itself incomplete and 
depended on others as environment).


Against this life-affirming irreducible complexity that escapes 
cybernetic control is the sad vision of the metaverse, which is both 
extremely reductionist and centrally controlled. Yet, even in its most 
glossy presentation, this vision is utterly unconvincing. Perhaps this 
is a reason to be optimistic and continue to seek ways beyond 
"communication and control".










--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Philippe Aigrain, 1950-2021

[Felix Stalder]

I met Philippe quite a few times in the 00s, when we both worked on 
issues of copyright and the digital commons. We became friends easily. A 
man of profound humanity and intellect, curious and generous. He was in 
it for the long-term. Now cut short. How very sad. Felix



On 27.07.21 15:49, J.C. DE MARTIN wrote:

I leave briefly lurkedom to mourn a dear friend,
a great person, a wonderful intellectual and an effective activist.

This is our center's obituary (in Italian):
https://nexa.polito.it/philippe-aigrain-ricordo

This is La Quadrature's in memoriam:
https://www.laquadrature.net/2021/07/15/in-memoriam-philippe-aigrain-1949-2021/ 



juan carlos


juan carlos de martin
nexa center for internet & society
polytechnic of turin



On 27/07/21 15:30, patrice riemens wrote:
Philippe Aigrain, the French world known champion of the digital 
commons died two weeks ago in a mountain accident. He was 71:


https://www.liberation.fr/societe/philippe-aigrain-le-sens-du-commun-20210712_WSLMCXM33BFAVFHZVGUTAT6LAE/ 


(not paywalled, for once, and afaik)

I learn about his death from Geert Lovink who send me this article 
from Le Monde Diplo:



Original to:

https://mondediplo.com/2005/11/13commons


The internet and common goods
Own or share?
by Philippe Aigrain

Enforcing intellectual property law in the digital age means fighting 
ever more effective and powerful new modes of creation made possible 
in part by collaborative development through the internet.



Is there any limit to property? Current developments might suggest 
not, as property rights are steadily extended. Property rights, in the 
form of patents, copyright and, to a lesser extent, brands, apply to 
ever wider fields and are protected by ever stronger laws, police 
powers and technological tools. Resistance to the patenting of 
medicines, software, plant varieties and cell strains has been active 
and determined. But it is up against a concerted offensive by 
multinational companies, patent offices, specialised legal 
consultants, the United States government and the European Union, all 
working together to reinforce and extend property rights.


New technologies are helping to make copyright law more strictly 
enforceable, preventing the use of copyright material even for 
legitimate ends (1). When it comes to violating intellectual property 
rights, everyone is guilty until proven innocent, from users of 
peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to farmers whose crops have 
accidentally become mixed with genetically modified varieties for 
which they do not hold licences (2).


Jean-René Fourtou, the CEO of Vivendi Universal and chairman of the 
International Chamber of Commerce, addressed directors representing 
pharmaceutical, media and software multinationals at the United 
Nations in October 2004. He announced a global war on intellectual 
property piracy, calling on business leaders to unite and form a 
massive lobby working to influence governments (3). This will be a 
pre-emptive war that lumps independent producers and users in with 
industrial counterfeiters and organised crime, imagining a single 
enemy that will be defeated via tightly and ingeniously enforced 
property mechanisms.


There has been resistance to this offensive. Campaigns for access to 
medicines in developing countries have had some success, as have those 
against the patenting of software or living organisms. Increasingly, 
patent applications for GM crops or biotechnology products are 
rejected. But resistance is fragmented; campaigns only rarely succeed 
in pulling together as parts of a single cause.


On the technological side, there is a strong pull away from ownership 
of published works or recorded media. New forms of collaborative 
innovation, whereby ideas and expertise are freely shared, are proving 
more productive than traditional ways of working. Once dismissed as 
the work of an eccentric fringe of naive scientists who didn’t 
understand the harsh reality of economics, these cooperative 
approaches are now being taken more seriously. They have the 
particular advantage of orienting innovation towards the general 
interest and the preservation of cultural diversity, rather than being 
tied to profit incentives.


Academic research has convincingly established the superiority of what 
Yochai Benkler calls “commons-based peer production” (4) in a wide 
range of information technology development. In this model, every 
stage in the development of a product is freely accessible to all, and 
anyone who wants to use or modify it may do so as they see fit. The 
product is in this sense a common good, and is often protected against 
patenting by any individual or group.


The development of diametrically opposed visions vying for 
pre-eminence will have profound implications for the future not only 
of technology, but also of the world’s economies and social systems. 
Two scenarios are proposed. One vision’s most fervent supporters are a 
small group of large 

Defeat for the right may presage real change in Chile

[Felix Stalder]

[The entire process to replace the Pinochet (aka extremely neo-liberal) 
constitution is quite unusual and an outcome of mass protest just before 
the oviduct-shutdowns. An independent assembly (which has been selected 
now) has one year to draft an new constitution which will tend be put to 
a binding public vote. And apparently, there is appetite for real 
change. Does anybody have first-hand impressions of this? Felix]




https://www.laprensalatina.com/defeat-for-the-right-may-presage-real-change-in-chile/

Santiago, May 17 (EFE).- The poor performance by right-wing parties in 
last weekend’s elections for an assembly to draft a new constitution 
creates possibilities for deep structural change in Chile.


The rightist bloc, largely made up of the parties in President Sebastian 
Piñera’s ruling coalition, won only 37 of the 155 seats in the body.


When the assembly convenes in late June or early July, the 48 
independents will be the largest group, followed by the left (28) and 
center-left (25).


Another 17 seats will be occupied by representatives of Chile’s 
indigenous people.


Given that most of the independents have expressed progressive views, no 
one would be surprised to see them work with the left, center-left and 
indigenous delegates toward a new charter that favors social justice, 
women’s rights and the environment.


Santiago resident Marcela Acevedo told Efe Monday that she expected 
favorable results from “the eruption of the independents.”


“We don’t want the same people as always and that can be seen reflected 
in the voting,” she said.


Another inhabitant of the capital, Fernando Gomez, said he hoped to see 
the constituent assembly conduct its business in a “focused and calm 
way” to make possible the “deeper changes that Chile is seeking.”


Under the rules governing the process, each proposed article of the new 
constitution must be approved by a super-majority of two-thirds of the 
delegates.


That requirement is likely to make complex, many-sided negotiations the 
rule for the assembly, which is supposed to begin work by the start of July.


“A constitution does not have to be of the left, it has to be a 
constitution that represents the majority of Chileans,” attorney Daniel 
Stingo, the largest vote-getter among the delegates, said after the 
results were announced.


Though he is a member of the leftist Democratic Revolution party, Stingo 
ran for the constituent assembly as an independent.


The convention has 12 months to draft a constitution that will then be 
submitted for approval by voters in a referendum sometime in 2022.


But before a single article has been proposed, the Chilean investor 
class has cast a massive vote of no-confidence in the process.


The Santiago stock market’s benchmark index plunged 9.6 percent within 
minutes of the start of trading on Monday, while the value of the peso 
experienced its biggest drop against the dollar since November 2019, 
when the nationwide protests that ultimately forced the Piñera 
government to open the door to the constitutional convention were at 
their peak.







--
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: challenge accepted (re art & the info economy)

[Felix Stalder]

On 30.03.21 19:00, Sandra Braman wrote:

> - a postmodern economic (or "referential economy") approach developed
> *de facto* in the early 21st century although its incipient phases
> had been noticed and theorized by postmodern theorists decades
> earlier, focusing on the nature of the information dominating the
> information economy itself as it becomes referential rather than
> empirical; Robert Shiller won a Nobel Prize for, among other things,
> writing about the "narrative economy" but that is not the same thing
> . . . he is actually just delivering that discipline's decades-late
> arrival to the narrative turn
> 
> - an ecstatic economy approach in which the fact of information
> itself is all that matters (the fact of assertion, not assertion of
> fact), with no need for either referentiality or empiricism (the
> wilds of misinformation) or, one might argue, for inclusion of the
> human in the loop (thinking about proof of work blockchain,
> computation for the sake of computation at astoundingly large and
> growing energy cost)


This periodization of economical thinking about information --
neoclassical (Machlup, 1962), political economy (Bell, 1973), networked
approach (Piore, 1984), post-modern (Schiller, 2000) and ecstatic
(Nakamoto, 2008) -- reads like series of ever higher levels of
abstractions and one could probably do an art history that parallels it,
à la Buchloh's take on conceptual art as the aesthetics of administration.

Stripped of its critical intentions, it's quite possibly also the
history that the NFT guys would promote, arguing that their wares are
the cultural expression of the most advanced processes of a new phase of
human development and hence worth the evaluations they currently receive.

Abstractions are, of course, always precarious, because what is being
abstracted away does not materially disappear, it is just made invisible
and abstractions rest upon things remaining invisible.


On 31.03.21 06:37, Brian Holmes wrote:

> The struggle is on, whether the real of impending civilizational
> breakdown will be admitted into consciousness and acted on, or
> whether the current system morphs into a higher power.

In relation to the "ecstatic" view, the struggle is over whether the
energy costs associated with blockchain tech matter or not. If they
don't matter, then the abstraction works, if they do, then the
abstraction falls apart by having to readmit into the calculation
exactly what has been removed.

This motivates the comical, imho, arguments of the blockchain camp at a)
the energy costs are much smaller than usually counted, b) they will
dramatically sink in the near future due to technical improvements, and
c) energy doesn't matter because of the excess production of green energy.

Latour introduced the notion of the "earthbound people of the
Anthropocene vs the humans of the Holocene" and the "ecstatic" view
clearly belong the the latter. The question is how advanced technologies
-- the tools at hand at this critical juncture -- can help to advance
earthboundedness. There is clearly no necessary contradiction between
earthboundedness and technology, earth system science, critical zone
theories etc, could not be done without sophisticated modelling and big
data. Even more, earthboundedness must be achieved in relation to
temporal and spatial scales that defy direct experience, hence it needs
to be mediated, creating an immediate and pressing aesthetic challenge.

But with blockchain, I honestly fail to how it can contribute. Anything
useful the blockchain could do, say, protect private data in an IoT
world, could be done more easily with improved social institutions and
democratic control.




-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

The ecstasy of ownership

[Felix Stalder]

The ecstasy of ownership

I'm still stuck with the whole NFT thing. But I want to move away from
context of art, which has such a long history of conspicuous
consumption, speculative bubbles, and dubious objects that it's very
tempting to see this basically as the continuation of all of that, a
bubble, inside another bubble, inside yet another one, pumped up by
fraud. And there is probably much to that way of reading it.

But what about Jack Dorsey's first tweet? Worth $2.5 millions. What kind
of object is that, and what is driving the desire to own it? I think
it's fair to say that it's a historically significant document and that
it makes sense to preserve it for posterity because it symbolizes
something larger. But why buy it? In this particular case, there was an
element of a charity-auction to it, people buying overpriced stuff in
order to raise money for a worthy cause. So, there is that. Rich people
patting each other on the back so that some flakes of their "net worth"
can fall off the table. There probably also some fraud in there. But
even if you take all of that into consideration. Don't think it can
explain everything.

There is more to it, and that "it" has to do with ownership raised to a
kind of metaphysical category. Or, to be more precise, it's an
expression of a culture -- let's say libertarian tech bros -- in which
all relationships to the world, and possibly to the self too, are
expressed as private property. In which all different forms of social
value are expressed through paying lots of money for a title of
ownership. The "ownership society" is an old conservative phantasy, in
which everyone acts like a little proprietor, and here it's realized in
its most extreme form. It's the ultimate flattening of human desires
into a desire to own. Making fun of the fact that by buying an NFT one
barely acquires anything is kind of besides the point, because the
desire to own does not express a desire to control (the standard
privilege of ownership), but expresses a desire relate, a desire to be
recognized as part of history. Bragging rights, as they call it. An
earlier generation of very rich people has expressed a similar desire by
donating money to worthy institutions and then having a room or an
entire building named after them.

The difference is not between digital and analog, though, but between
different ways of imagining human relations (mediated through objects)
and the degree to which ownership as the only imaginable type of social
relation has come to dominate certain sectors of society.

As a contrast, take something like ubu.com or monoskop.org. These are
also projects in which someone -- Kenneth Goldsmith or Dusan Barok,
respectively -- expresses an unusual degree of attachment to, and
valuation of, certain digital artifacts that are meaningless to most
others. They also invest significant resources, decades of their own
labor, to realize their desire. But the desire towards these objects is
not expressed as ownership, but as care, as a self-appointed obligation
to create an environment in which these objects can unfold their
potential for which they are so highly valued.

I think there is a kernel of that desire also in some of the NFT
purchases, even if buried under piles of bullshit. And they stand for an
existential poverty, a poverty of imagination, of language, and of
sociality. It's an ecstasy of ownership, and it anything good is to come
out of this, it is to render the very notion of ownership meaningless.



-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: what does monetary value indicate?

[Felix Stalder]

Last post in this subject, I promise.

The NFT in the blockchain, recorded for eternity, does not contain
artwork itself, but metadata pointing to the art work. It basically
says, the file over there is the 'originalcopy' and I own it. Of course,
everyone can still copy the art work over there (assuming it's a public
location), but only that file on that location is the "original" one. Of
course, if that server disappears, then the meta data point to nowhere,
and becomes impossible to distinguish between the copies that might
float around somewhere.

One way to sidestep this is not to point to a location, but to a hash,
which can stored anywhere in a decentralized file system.

In Beeble's case, the token contains metadata that points to such a hash
(a IPFS file). This has the advantage that it's not depended on a server
which may or may not be around for very long, so it removes the
dependency of the particular entity which host the server mentioned in
the token.

So, so this is the file that the token points to:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPAg1mjxcEQPPtqsLoEcauVedaeMH81WXDPvPx3VC5zUz

{"title": "EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS", "name": "EVERYDAYS: THE
FIRST 5000 DAYS", "type": "object", "imageUrl":
"https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmZ15eQX8FPjfrtdX3QYbrhZxJpbLpvDpsgb2p3VEH8Bqq;,
"description": "I made a picture from start to finish every single day
from May 1st, 2007 - January 7th, 2021.  This is every motherfucking one
of those pictures.", "attributes": [{"trait_type": "Creator", "value":
"beeple"}], "properties": {"name": {"type": "string", "description":
"EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS"}, "description": {"type": "string",
"description": "I made a picture from start to finish every single day
from May 1st, 2007 - January 7th, 2021.  This is every motherfucking one
of those pictures."}, "preview_media_file": {"type": "string",
"description":
"https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmZ15eQX8FPjfrtdX3QYbrhZxJpbLpvDpsgb2p3VEH8Bqq"},
"preview_media_file_type": {"type": "string", "description": "jpg"},
"created_at": {"type": "datetime", "description":
"2021-02-16T00:07:31.674688+00:00"}, "total_supply": {"type": "int",
"description": 1}, "digital_media_signature_type": {"type": "string",
"description": "SHA-256"}, "digital_media_signature": {"type": "string",
"description":
"6314b55cc6ff34f67a18e1ccc977234b803f7a5497b94f1f994ac9d1b896a017"},
"raw_media_file": {"type": "string", "description":
"https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUwqtFucG1RMS6T87vi1CdvadfL7qA"}}}


Which, again, is just metadata pointing to, well, a webserver
(makersplace.com). In other words, the seller, in order to have any
object at all, is dependent on makersplace.com to remain online. In this
case, it doesn't really matter, because buyer and seller is, in effect,
the same person. But in other cases, the buyer becomes dependent on the
seller for as long as s/he hold be token. Of course, the "originalcopy"
could also be stored in decentralized file system, but apparently, this
is not done very often. Some people have called this structure
"long-game extortion."

See, https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122

On 16.03.21 10:41, Florian Cramer wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 5:49 PM Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
>> I'm sure many have followed the NFT art saga over the last couple of
>> months and seen today's headline that somebody just paid $ 69,346,250
>> for a NFT on a blockchain, meta-data to claim ownership of the
>> "originalcopy" of a digital art work.
> 
> Thanks to Amy Castor's article (which you also mentioned/linked to,
> https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/),
> we now know that the buyer didn't actually pay $69,346,250, but "$60
> million in ETH and $9 million in fees, also in ETH" - a significant
> difference IMHO. The whole Christie's sale thus boils down to a conversion
> of one type of ETH token into another type of ETH token within the
> portfolio of a crypto currency investment firm, and using the art market
> transaction as means of pumping the value of the latter.


-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: what does monetary value indicate?

[Felix Stalder]

On 14.03.21 14:25, Rachel O' Dwyer wrote:
> The article includes a discussion of economic *'signalling' *that was
> prompted by conversations with Ruth Catlow which chimes with Felix's
> questions about what the digital art purchase 'says'.


Doma alerted me to this analysis, and if it's correct, then this is
basically a "pump-and-dump" scheme.

https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme

I suspect there is more to it, more layers of scamminess, but so far the
story goes like this:

The buyer, MetaKovan, and the seller,  Metapurse, are entities
controlled by the same person, Vignesh Sundaresan.

Metapurse is a fund which owns digital art works. It's mission is to
"democratize access and ownership to artwork." Quite a statement to make
in relation to digital art, but the entire story is full of scammy
rhetoric.

You can buy into this fund, called B20, then you own a tiny portion of
its art works. You do this by buying special B.20 tokens. The value of
these tokens reflects some speculative position on the underlying value
of the art works held by the funds or profits to be made from selling
these works.

There are 10 million tokens minted. 56% of these are owned by
Metapurse/MetaKovan who thus controls the entire process in terms of
writing to the blockchain. 2% are owned by Beeple himself (oh!). In
December, Metapurse bought Beeple's art work for 2.2 million. On January
23, Metapurse sold 1.6 million tokens at $0.36 a pop.

After the sale, which greatly inflated the value of the "assets" held by
the fund, the value of the tokens rose to 23.00 and then fell back to
16.00. Given that buyer and seller are controlled by the same person,
the actual costs for the purchase are only the feeds to be paid to
Christie's, some 9 million.

You can do he math yourself, but the profit margins are staggering, if
Sundaresan manages to to get cash out his own tokens while it lasts.

What I find remarkable is the role of Christie's in generating the
narrative. Auction houses seem to have specialized in this lately,
perhaps they always have. But, remember Sotheby's sold a Banksy work
that shredded itself (Oct 2018). Well, almost shredded. The story went
around the world, greatly enhancing the value of the work. It's hard to
phantom that Sotheby's did not examine the art work before hence
realized that there was something hidden in the frame. Or, when
Christie's auctioned off the "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" in December
2018. The value is really generated by the story, told by a blue-chip
auction house.

The fact that all of this is so scammy doesn't seem to matter, because
it's the money that makes it real, the sheer scale is self-validating,
even if the money itself is barely real to begin with.






-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: what does monetary value indicate?

[Felix Stalder]

On 13.03.21 15:14, tbyfield wrote:
> If I drew a venn diagram of how uninteresting mass digital art, the
> art-systems economics, and cryptographic para-currencies have become,
> you'd think it was just a circle

Ted, you, of all people, know that 'interesting' is not an attribute of
objects, but of questions, and that Venn diagrams indicate the absence
of any.

My question, which may well be uninteresting nevertheless, did not
concern digital art, art-system economics, or even cryptocurrencies,
para or not.

I was wondering if there is anything to be learned about what
constitutes monetary value, and for whom, by considering that somebody
is willing to pay, somebody is willing to facilitate and somebody
willing to accept, a cryptocurrency supposedly worth U$ 70 million for a
piece of meta-data conferring ownership over the 'original copy' of a
digital image.

One could say, as you do, it's all noise, non-value being paid for
non-art. A transient non-event.

One could say, as Brian suggested, this real, a form of conspicuous
consumption of a new elite with infinite money at hand, with art playing
its classic role of conferring status to money. If this is the case,
then two things would interest me. Why has NFT art become an object of
prestige? I mean, for this amount of money, one could have bought a
pretty mean yacht. So, what does it tell us about this social milieu
that such a purchase confers bragging rights? And, since money is power,
what are they planning to use this power for?

Or, perhaps, something different, money has somehow morphed into an
expressive medium in its own right. During the game-stop saga, I was
struck by people saying that they don't care if they would be losing
money because they were here to make a point. This is a very unusual
investment intention. Of course, this might well be a cynical strategy
where somebody told others they shouldn't care about losing money, so
s/he could gain more, and more easily, but even then, the fact that a
lot of people believed that somebody would think about investing in this
way, tells us something.

What value does 1000 bitcoins confer to the person holding it? At the
moment, seemingly U$ 60 million. Almost enough to buy an original copy
of a gif. But sell your bitcoins now? No way. As a believer in bitcoin,
you are convinced that if you hold it just long enough, then it will
become worth 600 million, 6 billion, or 60 billion. Particularly when
the next crash wipes out fiat money. On the other hand, you also know
that it could crash to zero in no time. If the Chinese government
decides to promote their crypto, bans bitcoin, and executes some
traders, things can turn quickly. So, it's a kind of quantum state,
everything and nothing at the same time. Why, then, not spend some of it
on a gif? no more, no less real, than the money that was spent on it.











-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

what does monetary value indicate?

[Felix Stalder]

I'm sure many have followed the NFT art saga over the last couple of
months and seen today's headline that somebody just paid $ 69,346,250
for a NFT on a blockchain, meta-data to claim ownership of the
"originalcopy" of a digital art work.

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/first-open-beeple/beeple-b-1981-1/112924

I don't want to start a discussion on the revolutionary vs reactionary
character of this emerging art market. All of that has already been
said. If you want a close approximation of my perspective, I refer you
to this:

https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3

What I'm more interested in here is to ask two things.

What -- after a decade of quantitative easing and crypto-currencies
rising into the stratosphere -- monetary value is indicating for the
segment that profited the most from these developments and what does
that mean for the rest of us?

And, assuming that this is not a cartoon version of a potlatch where
wasting resources serves to put rivals to shame, how many different
scams -- money laundering would be an obvious contender -- are being
layered on top of one other to create this?

Quite puzzled. Felix









-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Aesthetics of the Commons. Book Launch and Review

[Felix Stalder]

-engaged practices can
blend to produce much-needed perspectives of futurity and hope. It
features topics ranging from the politics of open-source digital
libraries (Olga Goriunova’s text) to offline communal agricultural
spaces that seek to preserve and activate cultural heritage (Daphne
Dragona’s text). Throughout, authors refer to each other’s research and
build on it in their own considerations, which constructs a network of
mutual interest and, in a way, care. Again, the content of the
publication confirms its ethos – to consider context, recognise
difference, and construct strong bonds through these acknowledgements.

After reading Aesthetics of the Commons, I felt compelled to reconsider
my relationship to ideas of care and solidarity. Even though they are
practices that many people (like myself) identify with and valorise, we
rarely act on them outside of the realm of what seems feasible and
low-effort. Gary Hall and Daphne Dragona both identify the commons as a
potentially transformative response to the escalating political,
environmental, and social crises. We are under immense stress as we
observe the world turning in a threatening direction. We are anxious
about our financial situations under an unsupportive system that values
wealth above all else. We look for community but struggle to find it due
to online distractions, echo-chambers, paywalls, or offline limitations
that keep meaningful projects from flourishing.

This publication shows that utopian world-building can take place, in
archives and libraries built with consideration and care, and amongst
communities in networks that share much in common, or share very little
yet still choose to support one another, envisioning a better future. I
am now compelled to consider how these networks of solidarity may look,
and whether I came across them recently. Knowing more about how they
manifest, I feel informed to join an effort to help them strengthen and
persevere, pushing against commodification and privatisation. What is
your object of care? What happens when you apply the idea of the commons
to it? Aesthetics of the Commons offers a glimpse into how to mediate
the relations between your object of care and its complex, changing
surroundings, through practices that are open, radical, and hopeful.


References

[1]Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank, Shusha Niederberger, eds.,
Aesthetics of the Commons, (Zürich: Diaphanes) p. 32

[2]Judith Siegmund, “Which Aesthetics of the Commons?” in Aesthetics of
the Commons, p. 96


-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: GameStop Never Stops

[Felix Stalder]

For me, what binds these three movements -- BLM, #StopTheSteal, and
#Gamestop -- together is not that they are populist (though, depending
on your definition, they might be), but that they advance radical
institutional critiques of the main pillars of contemporary society: the
police, democracy, and the (financialized) economy. Somewhat eclipsed by
these (partly because of covid), but obviously also in that mix are the
climate justice protests, from XR to Fridays for Future (in the US,
there are also indigenous earth defenders, but I think they operate on a
different plane, but I don't know enough about them).

And they do so not as an exercise in polite, learned theory, but mass
participation, at considerable personal risk. So, a lot of this critique
is dirty, mixed with lies and delusions, but, overall, it is a very
forceful and very far-ranging critique. I mean, statues were torn down
that stood in their place for more than a hundred years. That is a
pretty fundamental critique in action. Quite a few people have taken the
red pill (i know, this image has been appropriated by the far-right...)

Another thing that I think binds these four movements together is they
grievances run so deep that they cannot be solved by addressing the
immediate aims of each movement. As necessary as it is to shift budgets
from policing to social services, this alone will not address the issue
of systemic racism. In the same way as hemming in short-selling will not
address the problems of a financialized economy or switching to electric
cars addresses the climate crises.

In many ways, these are problems that cannot be fixed under the current
set of rules. But the scale of the critique that is now out in the open,
dispersed among millions of people, coming from very different angles,
also is an incredible opening. The question is, opening for what? It
could be for major internal violence, authoritarism, but also for
something more hopeful.

In Denmark, today, a new wind energy project was green-lighted. An
artificial island, 80 KM out in the sea. Producing energy, if fully
deployed, for 10 million homes. It should also contain storage
facilities where excess capacity can be turned into fuel (I presume
hydrogen).

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2021/02/04/breaking-denmark-greenlights-north-sea-energy-island-hub/

It is in part financed by pension funds. So, billions of € will move out
of the financial market and into actual production. With that, already
two issues are addressed at once. If new energy co-ops were added into
the mix, that produce energy locally and de-centrally, then issues of
democracy came into play, and, possibly, a reduction of environmental
pollution that affects most severely the most disadvantaged communities.

Maybe someone from Denmark, or otherwise closer to projects like this,
can add more detail, because it's certainly not a simple fix for everything.




On 04.02.21 22:12, Florian Cramer wrote:
> Finally, why not call BLM populist? 
> 
> 
> BLM probably fits Laclau/Mouffe's definition and notion of populism as
> agonistic. But since the movement is reclaiming minority rights, I don't
> think it fits Müller's and Mudde's definition of populism as positioning
> a majority of "the good people" against a small corrupt elite. Occupy's
> slogan of the 99% would be populist according to that definition, the
> East German 1989 protest movement with its slogan "We are the people",
> too, and QAnon would fit the definition as well, but (in my opinion) not
> BLM and other minority activism.
> 
> -F
> 
> 
> 
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
> 

-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

GameStop Never Stops

[Felix Stalder]

I find the GameStop saga endlessly fascinating, on so many levels.

For one, it's a fitting continuation of the year of American discontent,
that started with #BLM, continued with #StopTheSteal, and reached now
Wall Street with #Gamestop. Politically, these movements are, of course,
very different. The first reacting to deep historical, systemic
injustice and violence, the second bought into a political lie and the
third one, well, that's hard to say.

But all three express, in their own way, a belief, shared by large
segments of the population, that "the system" -- the institutions of
policing, democracy and the financial system -- are fundamental rigged
against them, and that they have to do something against it, even at
considerable personal risk. If you followed all three over the year,
even only superficially, you got a crash course in institutional
critique on an epic scale.

Here's pretty good segment from hill.tv, a relatively respectable
Washington outlet, that makes pretty much this argument:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTT4it_f7Jc=youtu.be

In terms of GameStop, I think a good starting point is to assume that
there are predominantly bad-faith actors involved, that everything
expressed is part of an agenda, that may, or may not, be in line with
what is expressed. Additionally, we are in an environment that is fully
artificial, made up of ultimately arbitrary, but consequential rules. If
you are a deeply immersed gamer, or belief that we are living in a
virtual simulation, as people like Musk apparently do, then you are
right at home.

That doesn't mean that this is not political. It's a lot of things at
the same time. An insider-game between billionaires, a populist revolt,
a get-rich-quick-scheme, total market failure, and the free-markets
fully functioning. It's ultra cynical and naive, deeply individualistic,
and full of expressions of solidarity. It's deadly serious and hugely
entertaining. It's all about money and the recognition, after a decade
of quantitative easing and crypto bubbles, that money is somehow
meaningless. It expresses itself in spreadsheets and memes, and, no
doubt, soon also in congressional hearings.

While I don't expect this one event to have immediate, dramatic
consequences, I expect this to simmer on for a long time and light other
fires, in unexpected places.





OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: HODL: the other insurrection

[Felix Stalder]

On 28.01.21 20:46, carlo von lynX wrote:
> The average member of the population is enraged.
> About this or that, there are plenty of reasons to
> be. But by becoming object of manipulation, this
> person has done the worst it could possibly do to
> better its situation.

It's getting very hard to say who is manipulating whom. In a way, it's a
feeding frenzy on the the billions of at least one very large hedge
fund. The question is who is getting how much of that and how. As we are
living increasingly in an oligarchy (nowhere more so than on Wall
Street), it's generally safe to assume that, on some level, such events
are fights among oligarchs .

A very good look at the institutional side of this

https://marketsweekly.ghost.io/what-happened-with-gamestop

And the short version of the argument is: "It's not David vs Goliath.
It's Goliath vs. Goliath, with David as a fig leaf."

It's worth reading the entire thing, lots of details on the criminal
record of many of the main firms, the effect of Trump admin's
deregulation and what is called the "K-shaped Revovery."

Anway, Cory Doctorow has summarized and put into some context this
argument here:


https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1354848494192738304.html

<...>

Recall that all of this is only possible because Robinhood lets average
joes buy and sell stocks for free. How can Robinhood give away a service
that costs it money and still stay in business? (Hint: They're not
making it up in volume).

The answer is: surveillance. Robinhood partners with institutional
investors and lets them spy on what the average joes are buying and
selling. Sometimes, this is just "market intelligence" ("Hey, people
like fidget spinners") but the main event is front-running.

If you're paying Robinhood to tell you what assets its customers are
about to buy, you can go out and buy them up first and sell them for a
profit to Robinhood's customers.

Or you can buy some of that asset up because you know its price will go
up once Robinhood's customers orders are filled.

Or both.

Citadel Securities is Robinhood's main institutional investor partner.
Founded by billionaire Ken Griffin, they combine tech (high-frequency
trading), an "asset manager" (they spend other peoples' money) and a
"market maker" (they sell things like options).

Citadel gets to see all those r/wallstreetbets buy orders before they're
filled. They can fill some of those orders, making a profit. They can
buy some of the same stock for themselves, making a profit. They can
sell options, making a profit.

A little bit of this profit comes at the expense of average joes: if
there wasn't a front-runner marking up the stocks they buy, the average
joes would pay a little less. But the average joes are still profiting
from the destruction of the shorts.

Citadel is merely taxing their winnings. The real losers here, though
are Citadel's competitors, funds like Melvin Capital, who were seriously
short on Gamestop and went bust thanks to all of this. Guess who bought
Melvin at fire-sale prices? That's right, Citadel.


So the third story goes like this: there are a lot of average joes.
They're numerous, pissed and smart. They move a lot of money against
shorts and make it go farther thanks to the force-multiplier effect of
options.

THEN all this activity is multiplied again by Citadel, a fund that is no
better (and no worse) than Melvin or the other targets of the average
joes' wrath. Citadel's bots are triggered by the average joes' activity,
which turns kilotons of damage into gigatons.

It's not clear whether the average joes know they're triggering
Citadel's bots, or whether this is just Citadel's bet on frontrunning
average joes paying off for Citadel. It's possible Citadel is the joes'
patsy, and the joes are ALSO Citadel's patsies.


<...>




-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

HODL: the other insurrection

[Felix Stalder]

It's hard not to see parallels between the events at the US Capitol
earlier this month and the current events on Wall Street surrounding
#Gamestop.

A bunch of people -- mostly regarded as fools (QAnons and daytraders) by
professionals -- storming the citadels of power, coordinated over social
media, creating havoc in the process.

In both cases, this story is probably over-simplistic, with systemic
actors contributing to, and hoping to profit from, these events. In the
first case, it was obviously Trump and other Republican politicians. In
the case of Gamestop, the largest shareholder, hence major beneficiary
of the rise in share prices, is Black Rock, not exactly a Wall Street
outsider.

While I don't want to emphasize the parallels, reading the two events
together, shows just how fragile the institutional arrangements in the
US have become, how deep popular anger runs, how much short-term power
can be generated over social media, and exposes the deep rifts among
core groups in the power structure. It's not just republicans against
democrats, but also Silicon Valley CEOs against Wall Street.

Like republicans and democrats, Silicon Valley and Wall Street are
deeply intertwined, but also in a real power struggle against each
other. In the long run, this might be the more important one.






-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: The Left Needs a New Strategy

[Felix Stalder]

On 16.01.21 17:40, Dmytri Kleiner wrote:
> You can't do "a China" in your country. You can, however, work to
> improve the conditions of people in your country, while working against
> the aggression of your country abroad.


Yes, obviously we cannot, and should not, "do" China. In the same way
that we cannot, and should not, "do" Silicon Valley outside, well,
Silicon Valley.

So, what exactly is the lesson that China holds for "us", that is,
cultural/knowledge workers (I assume, most of nettime's subscribers fall
into this category, if it is, indeed, a category) in the West. And, more
precisely, what should be learned from China that cannot be learned from
other successful "developmental states", such as S. Korea or Taiwan?

Felix






-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Felix Stalder]

On 08.01.21 20:46, Dan S Wang wrote:

> Donald Trump is addicted to Twitter, pure and simple. He doesn't want to
> govern, he wants to tweet. He hates government meetings, legislative
> processes, presidential ceremonies--but loves having his rapid-fire tweet
> storms. More than any aspiring teen IG influencer, Twitch streamer, or
> Facebook friend hoarder, Trump is addicted to hearts and retweets by the
> millions. 
> 
> Some fear once out of office Trump has enough capital (wait a minute, what
> about that half billion in debt that's coming due??) to start a major news
> and social media platform of his own. But he's not thinking about the
> platform launch a year from now. He's too busy composing in his head his
> next few tweets, and like any addict, already getting a charge from the
> anticipation of the effects. For him it's Twitter or nothing.

By now, I would venture to say that "trumpism" is finished.

By trumpism, I don't mean a specific ideology but a method. Trump never
had a coherent ideology. I think he was, basically, a resentful,
narcissistic entertainer/marketer who skillfully repeated the phrases
that elicited the loudest cheers. Sure, all three of them, his
resentfulness, his narcissism, and his marketing skills were on an epic
scale, but, nevertheless, this does not amount to an ideology. Sure, the
loudest cheers came from various corners of the racist, misogynist, and
nationalist right, each with its own deep and traditions in America, but
what bound them together was shared resentment and grievances, not ideology.

The methodology is to create enough chaos, spectacle, volatility,
uncertainty, FUD (different names of the same underlying idea) so that
one could bend reality to adhere to one's wishes. There was no need to
care about facts because they would be created after in the aftermath of
action. This is a world of speech acts. Simply declaring things makes
them real. This is the world of entertainment, the world of finance, and
the world of politics, at least for their most powerful actors. Creating
rumors about falling prices can make prices fall, long enough for the
skillful insiders to profit from it. By the time they move back up, the
next thing can be created. The same method can also operate in politics.
If you apply just enough pressure, you can legislate almost anything
into reality. For Trump, the preferred way to execute this method was
using marketing to shape TV which would then be translated into money.
During his time in politics, the preferred marketing platform was
Twitter, geared towards TV as reality feeding back into various
money-making schemes.

This method, however, is entirely parasitic. It assumes that there is an
underlying support system capable of absorbing and smoothing over the
shocks, steadying the environment enough so that the next shock can be
applied. That support system can either be a legal team, a credit line,
or a well-functioning organization/administration that keeps the boat
afloat no matter what. This is, of course, a world of privilege, where
others constantly clean up so quickly that nobody really cares that the
master trashes the place.

And I think what happened on Wednesday was that the support system broke
down. It's kind of ironic, it was the police, largely sympathetic to the
demonstrators, that led it happen. Everyone could see that the place is
being trashed. I think this is the reason why quite a few people, like
Brian, were happy with this event. And I tend to agree with them.

I think, trumpism understood this way, as a form of violent, parasitic,
entitled mode of operation, is much larger than Trump as a person. So
it's ending might be more interesting than a president being abandoned
by his allies during the final days of his term.

He is both a symbol and an expression of late-stage capitalism. And it's
now most obvious form of parasitism lies in its relationship with the
natural environment. There is a parallel reckoning that the biophysical
systems that support human civilization are no longer capable of
absorbing the shocks inflicted by the particular method through which
this civilization operates. There are only so many hurricanes, floods,
droughts, and wildfires until even the Koch brothers understand that
weakening environmental regulations is a pyrrhic victory, expressing the
same kind of dead-end that the protestors found Nancy Pelosi's office to
be. Enough for some shallow gloating, but then?

The experience of a badly managed pandemic is another moment of
realization that a vital support system, whose existence was taken for
granted, can, indeed, break down at catastrophic costs, not just to
others, but to oneself.

This creates an extraordinarily open situation, in which even large
fractions of the core groups -- those with financial, social/political,
and cultural power -- realize that their respective status quo has
become untenable (marginalized groups knew this all along).

However, who can come up with a 

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Felix Stalder]

The point we can all agree on is that it is too early to tell.

I think there are two main open developments, in terms of immediate
political dynamics. that will decide the direction this takes.

The first is whether the republican party will fracture, because,
clearly, not everyone is having a change of heart suddenly. Yesterday,
after the house reconvened, the majority of republican representatives
still voted to reject the electors from Arizona (57%) and Pennsylvania
(65%). This was not enough to stop the certification process, but it's a
very sizeable number. And it represents the mood of broad swaths of the
public. A you-gov snap poll [1] indicated that only 60% see "the
storming of the Capitol building as a threat to democracy", and among
republicans, the number drops to 27%. That does not mean that the rest
openly supports it, but a vast majority of republicans do not see it as
a major event. Whereas 93% of Democrats do.

[1]
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/07/US-capitol-trump-poll

Of course, this is a small poll taken in a very fluid situation, but it
doesn't immediately indicate that the politicians in their gerrymandered
districts have much to fear for now. Also, the stock market did not
signal immediate panic, further reducing short-term pressure.

The other question is if the democratic party, and Biden in particular,
is willing/able to use the new slim majorities to enact transformational
change. I think there is a strong inclination among the Obama centrists
who seem to be dominating the new administration to see Trump as an
aberration -- creating by the Russians, Cambridge Analytica or some
other force unrelated to them -- and go back to the status quo before
Trump. The only area where there seems to a real political will to
implement change, rather than simply 'restore decency', is climate
change, which, of course, would be a catalyst for much wider changes if
taken seriously.

But without deep change, the structural forces that created both popular
resentment at the decline of living standards and elites who feel they
don't need democracy any more, are not going away. And given the
extremely fractures media landscape, better messaging will not do the
trick.







On 07.01.21 19:25, Brian Holmes wrote:

> It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.
> 
> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to
> come, yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have
> happened. I had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly
> like this.
> 
> The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the
> world of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we
> left behind the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged
> in political theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits
> posturing from Senator Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from
> the rhetorical playbook developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s.
> But then the play-acting devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out
> by crude, stupid and very obviously manipulated people. They were
> directly incited by the highest powers, via social media for sure, and
> television, and radio, and print journalism, and above all by the
> hottest channel of all: live rallies. The theater had consequences. The
> possible became real. And so a choice between conflicting realities
> could finally occur.
> 
> Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk,
> there was no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented
> the uprising also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious
> planning for collective violence. Instead the entire country got a close
> look at an inchoate, yet very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid
> and delusional. Sure, we had seen these folks already, many times. Yet
> this time there was no equivocation as to who was leading. When Pence
> and McConnell took their last-minute stand in favor of the Constitution,
> Trump sent his thugs to oppose them. And with their actions, Trump's
> people - the real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally lanced the boil
> of Trumpism.
> 
> When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle
> and San Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that
> climate change was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at
> the Capitol, it became obvious that a politics based on staged and
> calculated insurrectionary rhetoric leads to real violence and
> institutional breakdown.
> 
> Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it
> would be realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total
> social fact." The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective
> ritual in which the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with
> the charismatic or magical expression of values. For Mauss this is a
> dynamic ritual with 

made for TV, made for social media

[Felix Stalder]

I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
clear that this event was made on, through and for social media. The TV
cameras, few as there were, were literally outside, observing, clutching
their pearls, while a thousands social media cameras were inside, doing,
celebrating.

And from what I saw, it was an overwhelming success. What everyone said
was impossible, it happened. The certification was delayed. Protestors
-- some of them very well known figures -- walked, quite leisurely, into
the core of the democratic institutions to subvert its more fundamental
process (transfer of power) talking triumphant images, edged on by the
president (we love you!) and aided by the police who clearly had great
sympathies for the protestors, taking selfies with them and helping them
to disperse once all the pictures had been taken. And some of the
pictures are truly iconic, hard to unsee.

This was clearly not an accident, not by the protestors, not by the
police and not by the supportive politicians who more or less continued
afterwards as they did before. This is part of a strategy that has
consistently showed itself to be more resourceful, more versatile, more
popular and more audacious than outsiders imagined.

Yes, the certification is bound to be completed. Yes, the democrats also
have the slimmest of majorities in the senate. But the narrative of
Trump against the political elites just got even more convincing to the
indented audiences and it got more radicalized. With the tacit support
of the police, the right wing militias are growing, standing by as a
force of intimidation for everyone else.

But I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.







-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Thoughts on coups

[Felix Stalder]

On 24.11.20 04:14, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Here's my two cents: Keynes aimed to save capitalism from itself. Double
> down on Keynes, unleash vast new creative energies on the basis of fiat
> money, and maybe, instead of sapping capital's foundations, we can push it
> over the top into ecosocialism.

There are probably two distinct political strategies here. And it would
be interesting to work out their relation.

The first is move capitalism towards a different regime of accumulation,
one based less on extractivism and consumerism but rather more on
renewable energy and "eco-system services" for repairing some of the
damage already done (I know, this term is conventionally used in a
different sense). A little bit of this we are already seeing, with the
EU's project to become a first climate neutral continent by 2050, China
commitment by 2060 and new Biden admin making similar gestures. So far,
actual effects, in terms of reducing the output of CO2 and and
ending/slowing down the loss of biological diversity, have not been
achieved. The big question is: is that too little too late, unable to
overcome very real system barriers to substantial change? Or can this be
made into the beginning of a self-accelerating shift in the energy
regime of global civilization?

In the longer run, it's hard to imagine how capitalism can still be
capitalism without treating "nature" as an externality. So the question
then becomes, what are the condition under which a 'greener capitalism'
can be pushed into something else. In a way that is like an update of
the old Marxian idea that capitalism will produce productive forces on
which communism can be realized.


all the best. Felix


-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |


OpenPGP_0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC.asc
Description: application/pgp-keys


OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

why is it so quiet (in the US)

[Felix Stalder]

Hi everyone,

I must admit, amidst post-terror assault on civil liberties and covid
cases spiraling out of control here in Austria, the US election drama
has moved a bit lower in my attention, but not that much.

>From what I understand, the numbers show that Trump lost. Period. No
recount will change that.

But, the game of the Republicans is to create so much doubt about the
fairness of the elections (without any evidence) to make it impossible
to certify them in time. Frivolous lawsuits are great at gumming things
up. This would then allow the Republican dominated legislatures in swing
states to appoint their own electors which would bring Trump the
majority. In the mean time, the minister of defense, who previously
refused to send in troops against mostly peaceful protestors, has been
fired and replaced with a loyalist. Apparently, similar moves are in the
wings for the FBI and CIA.

I know, Trump is often portrayed as an incompetent child, and the
strategy is totally outlandish, but the Republican party has shown to be
a pretty ruthless and successful power machine playing both a short and
a long game, and it's exactly the outlandishness of the strategy that is
its strongest point.

In the mean time, the democrats pretend all of this to be irrelevant (an
'embarrassment' at worst) and happily appoint a transition team full of
corporate insiders like it's 1992.

Am I totally misreading the situation?

Felix






-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: California passes Prop 22

[Felix Stalder]

Since we are still waiting, time to think a bit more about the platform
capitalists' victory in California.

Essentially, what it allows them to do is to offload many costs as
externalities. Most directly, onto the workers who are denied benefits
and insurance. This allows them to pursue an extremely inefficient model
(taxis as a form of mass transit). Little surprise, this is not just
economically inefficient -- low wages and no profits -- for everyone but
management and investors. There are also massive geo-system
externalities. This model is also ecologically inefficient, so much so
that even "carbon neutral" cars (paid for by low-paid drives) will not
turn things around.

Felix



https://earther.gizmodo.com/prop-22-shows-why-big-tech-is-the-climate-movement-s-ne-1845573939

<...>

Prop 22 is expected to put more cars on the road, which is particularly
concerning because a recent study [1] found that Uber and Lyft were
responsible for about half of San Francisco’s increase in congestion
between 2010 and 2016. Transportation is also the largest contributor to
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Allowing these companies to expand
without giving workers’ the ability to organize is a huge obstacle to
the fight for a just and carbon-free transit sector.

The climate plans rideshare and gig economy companies have put forward
are far from sufficient to meet the scale of the crisis, a crisis that
they will have a larger hand in making worse due to Prop 22. The plans
do nothing about the apps’ wasteful business models, which depend on
workers driving around aimlessly for miles while waiting to pick up
customers. A recent report [2] from Union of Concerned Scientists found
that due to this, car trips from ride-hailing services create nearly 70%
more climate pollution on average than the trips they displace.
Switching to electric vehicles would help, but like fossil fuel firms
attempts to offload the responsibility for climate action onto
consumers, the apps’ pledges put the onus on their drivers to make the
costly switch.

Climate organizers lost this fight against these gig work apps, but then
it won’t be the last one to wage. These companies are becoming some of
the most powerful in the country, and they’re using that power to lobby
for more legislation and ballot measures that protect their interests.
Measures similar to Prop 22 are already in the works in other states.

The climate movement will face an uphill battle to defeat these
measures, but in some ways, it’s well-poised to take up the challenge.
Thanks to the centrality of labor rights in the Green New Deal and some
unions’ shift toward acceptance of climate policy, the overlap between
climate and labor groups’ interests is clearer than ever.



[1] https://www.sfcta.org/projects/tncs-and-congestion
[2] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/ride-hailing-climate-risks



On 05.11.20 08:56, Felix Stalder wrote:
> While we all wait for the counting to finish (and the law cases to
> start), here's the best article I could find on the major victory for
> the platform capitalists in California, overturning a state-wide labor
> law (AB5) which would have forced them to reclassify most gig-workers as
> employees (with benefits) rather than contractors (without benefits).
> This will likely affect not only the gig economy more widely, but it
> also shows how power is leveraged. Not good. Felix
> 
> 
> 
> UBER AND LYFT HAD AN EDGE IN THE PROP 22 FIGHT: THEIR APPS
> 

-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |


OpenPGP_0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC.asc
Description: application/pgp-keys


OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

California passes Prop 22

[Felix Stalder]

While we all wait for the counting to finish (and the law cases to
start), here's the best article I could find on the major victory for
the platform capitalists on California, overturning a state-wide labor
law (AB5) which would have forced them to reclassify most gig-workers as
employees (with benefits) rather than contractors (without benefits).
This will likely affect not only the gig economy more widely, but it
also shows how power is leveraged. Not good. Felix



UBER AND LYFT HAD AN EDGE IN THE PROP 22 FIGHT: THEIR APPS

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/4/21549760/uber-lyft-prop-22-win-vote-app-message-notifications

The apps told California voters to vote yes on Proposition 22. And the
voters listened.

Uber and Lyft spent over $200 million on the ballot measure to keep
their drivers classified as independent contractors, but their most
effective bit of lobbying may actually have been just a few lines of code.

In the weeks leading up to Election Day, the companies used their
respective apps to bombard riders and drivers with messages urging them
to vote for Prop 22, the ballot measure. Its victory will set a
precedent for other states’ labor laws around gig work, as well as for
how huge companies with an easy way to communicate to millions of voters
can lobby against laws they don’t like.

The outcome on Prop 22 was never certain, with polling in the run-up to
the election showing the electorate sharply divided over whether Uber
and Lyft should treat drivers like employees. Most notably, at least a
quarter of voters said they were undecided just weeks before the vote,
according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Studies poll. This gave Uber and
Lyft an opportunity to define the issue to voters using their apps, said
Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU’s school of business and author of
The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based
Capitalism.

“I doubt whether the average voter would have weighed the pros and cons
of the labor law around AB5 versus the new initiative,” Sundararajan
said. “They feel positively towards the platforms, they don’t want to
see a disruption in something that they depend on, and so they vote for
the platform’s position.”

Prop 22 cements gig workers’ status in California as independent
contractors. The ballot measure, which won with 58 percent of the vote,
exempts gig economy companies from a state law requiring them to
classify their workers as employees. It also mandates that gig workers
receive new benefits, such as minimum hourly earnings. Critics say these
benefits fall short of the full protections that come with employment,
as they may have had to under another law, AB5 — which originally took
aim at gig work.

The companies splashed out a historic sum that probably influenced the
outcome. The companies’ “Yes on 22” campaign spent over $200 million on
billboards, digital, print, and radio ads. They also deployed dozens of
lobbyists, and sent voter mailers that critics said were misleading. At
the same time, Uber and Lyft’s top executives undertook a media tour in
which they threatened to leave the state if Prop 22 failed. And they
even sponsored academic research to support their claims about the
benefits of Prop 22. Labor groups, which opposed the law, raised only a
tenth as much money.

It’s notoriously difficult to secure a yes vote on a ballot measure in
California. Major companies have outspent their opponents by tens of
millions of dollars and still come up short. In 2010, for example, PG
spent $43 million to pass a measure to deter government-run power
providers, but the measure was defeated by a large margin.

But the gig companies’ digital reach and their use of in-app messages to
reach voters was unique, setting it apart from ballot fights of the
past. In the weeks leading up to the vote, Uber and Lyft served users
with a pop-up message threatening longer wait times and higher prices if
Prop 22 failed. They also claimed drivers would lose their livelihoods.
In order to request a ride, users had to tap the “confirm” button on the
message.

Uber and Lyft’s use of their apps to push a political message may be
legal, but it still felt improper, said Erica Smiley, executive director
of Jobs with Justice, a nonprofit that opposed Prop 22. “If anyone else
collected data from people for one reason, and then used it for another
political purpose, they would be in a world of trouble,” she said.

The fight was certainly asymmetrical. Anti-Prop 22 groups were able to
fund a modest ad campaign arguing against the ballot measure, but lacked
direct access to voters through their smartphones.

Uber was also lobbying its drivers through the app. In a lawsuit filed
recently, Uber drivers accused the company of pressuring them to support
Prop 22 through the app. The drivers claimed they were getting messages
reading “Prop 22 is progress,” as well as dire warnings about what would
happen to their jobs if Prop 22 were to fail. Like riders, drivers had

Re: 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'

[Felix Stalder]

Hi David,

Nobody doubts the difficulties you and many, many others are facing
right now and there is no use in competing in suffering. It's something
we all want less of.

I think the point re: Couldry and Schneir, was that already before
Covid-19, many people did not have the luxury of planning their lifes
against a stable horizon. I've always been amazed at my own capacity
(more structural than personal, obviously) to be able to deliver on a
promise to be at a particular spot, at a particular hour, far into the
future, across a large distance. But that has always been a rather
unusual position. And under Covid, it's downright rare.

But what struck me as really strange in this article is that everything
that Covid does in terms of making the future less certain, climate
change will do at orders of magnitude greater. Of course, many people
are living through climate disaster already, but it will help none that
many more will experience it the near future as well.

So, I generally think we should adjust our frame of reference to
understand the dislocations caused by the pandemic as an instance of
more dramatic things to come. Not all of them need to be bad.

Felix




On 28.09.20 14:22, d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote:
> Boohoo indeed Ingrid,
> 
> strange that you think this is a condition only suffered by white males
> in these weird and particular times.
> In the UK at least Black and Asian minorities are disproportionally
> affected by the pandemic and so also highly likely to
> be disorientated not just in the old but also in wholly new ways.

<...>



-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: discussing zoom fatigue

[Felix Stalder]

On 06.07.20 09:29, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

> folks, has somebody made a detailled, media-critical comparison 
> between these different systems and their functionality? (for the 
> teaching i did, we used "Cisco Webex Meetings")

Not that I know of, my not particularly subtle conclusion from many
hours of online teaching, meetings and conversations is this:

Zoom is the new powerpoint.

A business-focused application that is mistaken as general purpose
communication technology. And Jisti is the LibreOffice Impress, an open
source version of the same thinking, reminding me of Matthew Fuller's
famous verdict about what was then "OpenOffice": Free software, but not
free thinking.

In terms of teaching, it's scary how much of teaching can be done within
the business-meeting format. And if you stick to it, it works quite
well. But what is even more scary is thought that all teaching must be
conducted like a business meeting in order to 'work'. All other formats
of knowledge creation, like open discussions, handling objects,
communicating non-verbally, simply make you look stupid and groups feel
awkward within this framework.

As far as actual business-like meetings are concerned, of which there
are a lot in any university, I'm happy if they are conducted online.
They're often more alienating f2f.

Felix



-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |




#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: What is a global energy regime shift?

[Felix Stalder]

Someone bugged me off-list to provide some evidence to the sweeping
claims I make here. Let me try.

> It's of course hard to say where all of this is going, but the timing
> is certainly good because many pieces necessary for such a 
> transformation are in place. As far as I can tell, technologies for 
> clean energy have matured to the point where fossil fuels require 
> massive subsidies to remain competitive.

It feels like every week, there is a new study on the falling prices of
renewable energy. Here's one from International Renewable Energy Agency
(IRENA), which Reuters (MAY 29, 2019) quoted the following way:

"Onshore wind and solar PV are set by 2020 to consistently offer a less
expensive source of new electricity than the least-cost fossil-fuel
alternative without financial assistance."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-renewables-costs/solar-onshore-wind-costs-set-to-fall-below-new-fossil-fuel-energy-report-idUSKCN1SZ1ML

The decline is prices for the generation of renewable energy has
been dramatic and consistent over the last decade. Solar PV prices
have come down about 90% since 2010. Costs for wind and other clean
energy sources have declined significantly as well, though not that
dramatically. These number are easy to find.

This change in costs is the basis for plans like the one Brian
referred to, the investment-driven case for the renewable energy.
But even for the business case, it's clear that this will not happen
without sufficient change in the regulatory environment, aka, state
intervention.


> The climate change movement,particularly around Fridays for Future,
> made strong inroads into the managerial class, whose kids were out
> demonstrating. This made the issues much more concrete and personal
> than diagrams on climate reports.

Since this post had a European view, let me quote the numbers for the
German FFF movement.

52.8% are 14 to 19 years old
43.6% come from the upper middle class

https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/environment/who-is-behind-fridays-for-future

Add to this that 57.6% are female and Greta Thunberg seems like quite a
good representative of the movement.

I'm not entirely sure how they define here upper middle class, for
Germany the entire middle class is about 65% (defined as 70-200% of
median annual income.) This indicates to me that kids from the upper
middle class, which is typically regarded as the managerial class, are
vastly over-represented. Given that more than half are below 19 years
of age, I assume that most of them still live at home.

Now, of course, I don't know what kind of discussions go on at the
dinner table (should there still be one), but a lot of politicians
mentioned in media interviews that their kids brought these questions
home with more urgency. This is, of course, totally anecdotal and says
nothing about efficacy.

But two theoretical ideas in form my claim. First, taken from Manuel
Castells, that purposeful social change requires social movements as
social actors. And FFF is that and, second, that social change is most
profound when it enters the private sphere. I see this a bit like in the
late 1960s, when kids began to confront their parents/grandparents about
what *they* did during the Nazi period. 

None of this says that this is enough to effect real change, but I think
the creates some of the socio-cultural preconditions for it.


> The notion of climate justice is
> beginning to build bridges between different social movements.

This, as I understand is, is the entire purpose of the green new deal
and marks a substantial change from traditional green politics. And, at
least in the German speaking context, it appears to build bridges into
the unions and the traditional -- industry-oriented -- social democratic
parties. Of course, this is uneven, but it is different from 10 years ago.

Here is also where the character of the energy transition will be
decided. Will it be purely investment-driven and leading to a further
privatization of public infrastructures, or will be renew the sense of
social solidarity and public provision of basic goods.

This is where politics is, outside the self-destructive madness of the
far-right.

> And, extreme weather has became so extreme as a day-to-day reality 
> that cognitive efforts required to ignore are sharply rising. Last
> but not least, the covid-19 economic crisis shifted the conversation
> from whether the state should intervene into the economy to how it
> should be done.

OK, that seems self explanatory.


> In Europe, driven by Germany, this might lead to quite significant 
> changes in policy. It seems, the German government has learned some 
> lessons from the 2008 crises and is not calling for austerity at the 
> periphery, but for a massive investment program, that is at least 
> labelled as a green new deal. What surprises me the most is that
> there is hardly any opposition inside Germany, which will have to
> shoulder the bulk of the costs for this.

OK, this is 

Re: What is a global energy regime shift?

[Felix Stalder]

On 19.06.20 07:52, Brian Holmes wrote:
> And despite all the revulsion you may feel if you look into that website,
> isn't this direction a lot more viable than whatever the Trump/Brexit years
> have produced? How are we to stand with respect to this new wave?
> 
> Where does everybody see this thing going?

It's of course hard to say where all of this is going, but the
timing is certainly good because many pieces necessary for such a
transformation are in place. As far as I can tell, technologies for
clean energy have matured to the point where fossil fuels require
massive subsidies to remain competitive. The climate change movement,
particularly around Fridays for Future, made strong inroads into
the managerial class, whose kids were out demonstrating. This made
the issues much more concrete and personal than diagrams on climate
reports. The notion of climate justice is beginning to build bridges
between different social movements.

And, extreme weather has became so extreme as a day-to-day reality
that cognitive efforts required to ignore are sharply rising. Last but
not least, the covid-19 economic crisis shifted the conversation from
whether the state should intervene into the economy to how it should
be done.

In Europe, driven by Germany, this might lead to quite significant
changes in policy. It seems, the German government has learned some
lessons from the 2008 crises and is not calling for austerity at the
periphery, but for a massive investment program, that is at least
labelled as a green new deal. What surprises me the most is that there
is hardly any opposition inside Germany, which will have to shoulder
the bulk of the costs for this.

There is a race between restarting and transforming the economy. I
think structurally, changes are better in Europe (minus UK) than in
the rest of the world. Whether the political institutions here in
Europe have the will, capacity and power to grab the opportunity,
remains to be seen. But the fact that is has been identified and
articulated by core actors is reason for some optimism.




-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: what exactly is breaking?

[Felix Stalder]

On 02.06.20 19:48, tbyfield wrote:
> These kinds of language games aren't as silly as they might seem at
> first glance, because pop phrases like that hint — as if through a glass
> or scanner darkly — diffuse assumptions about where we see ourselves
> historically. A world where people are drawn to seeing anything and
> everything as *broken* is a world in the past tense; all you can do is
> *rebuild* — another word that tracks "is broken" with almost hilarious
> precision...

Perhaps I was unclear, or insufficiently versed US conservative
rhetoric, but my intention was not inquire about things that
are broken (and hence in need of fixing) but about historical
discontinuities, about possible breaks with established patterns that
open up space for new dynamics, for the better or worse.

For example, the decline of trsut in institutions of liberal democracy
-- parliaments, elected governments, the press, the judicial system,
science and so on -- has been long and steady. More than 60% of
Americans trusted in US gov on the late 1960s, less than 20% do it
today. Internationally, this is perhaps decline is perhaps even
steeper.

But for a long time, relatively little happened, Legitimacy eroded,
but the institutions staggered on. No reforms, no alternatives. But
this cannot go on for ever. At some point, something breaks. Quite
arguably, the breaking point was the election of Trump/Johonson etc.
Of course, one can argue that someone like Trump is the effect of the
post-Nixon turn of the republican party, but at some point, the effect
becomes the cause for something quite different. But which effect and
cause for what, if anything?


Felix





-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

what exactly is breaking?

[Felix Stalder]

I, like probably most nettimers, I have been observing the fracturing
of the US with increasing horror (knowing that Europe, over the last
70 years, has usualled followed the US, for good and bad). With the
horrific response to Covid-19, things to have now taken an even
darker turn, compounding all the simmering structural violence into
something, well, into what? Approaching civil war? There are certainly
enough heavily-armed militias around who are clamoring for it. Is this
a breaking point, and if so, what exactly is breaking?



-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |





#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Becoming Infrastructure, Grabbing Power

[Felix Stalder]

[And here, same story in the UK. Not surprisingly the UK and the US are
the most enthusiastic in transferring money and data to the private
sector, but I guess continental Europe is not far behind. Thanks to Pit
for the work-around.]


On 11.05.20 20:54, Felix Stalder wrote:
> 
> I'm sure many of you have noted the co-incidence of Google's closing
>  down its smart city project in Toronto [1] and Andrew Cumo
> announcing a major partnership with Google to reinvent the state of
> New York post-Covid [2].



The inside story of how CIA-backed Palantir embedded itself in the NH…
By Margi Murphy, US Technology Reporter, San Francisco

archive.is /9DpTM

Britain’s battle against coronavirus has had plenty of heroes. Peter
Thiel may be the most unlikely one of all. The Trump-supporting Silicon
Valley billionaire is the founder of Palantir, a data crunching company
better known for its shadowy work for intelligence agencies including
MI5 and the CIA – and helping track down Osama bin Laden.

Palantir’s technology is used by BP to boost efficiency and by the US
and UK armed forces to wage war.

So when the NHS revealed that Palantir was building emergency data
mining tools to help Britain cope with the pandemic – for no fee – there
were understandable reservations. What might be expected in return?

“Palantir has a lot of toxic baggage with its contracts with Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the way in which its software is being
used,” says Phil Booth, founder of Med Confidential, a campaign group
focused on heath data privacy.

In reality, Palantir’s offer of help for the NHS should probably not
have come as a surprise.

The company has been courting the UK health service – and its £120bn
annual budget – for years and its software has already won a place on
the Government’s online catalogue for civil servants to pick from.

Until now, however, despite lucrative contracts with other government
departments and lengthy discussions, there had never been an NHS project
which Whitehall felt required Palantir’s software.

In the past few weeks, that has changed – in what Mr Thiel must view as
a victory for the chief of Palantir’s UK business: Louis Mosley.

The UK boss of the secretive CIA-backed data company which is helping
the NHS tackle coronavirus is Louis Mosley, the nephew of the former
motor racing boss Max Mosley and grandson of Sir Oswald Mosley, the
Telegraph understands.

With no official title on the website or social media presence, Mosley,
36,  who has previously been pictured in Tatler, has been leading the UK
office of the Silicon Valley company for almost three years.

The former Tory activist worked in academia and finance before taking
the reins at Palantir, which was founded by early Facebook-backer Peter
Thiel.

Mr Mosley is not listed on the company's most recent documents filed to
Companies House, which name as directors the former Foreign Office
advisor Sir Daniel Bethlehem, who is understood to have an independent
role overlooking corporate governance, and Alexander Carp, Palantir's
chief executive.

Software engineering companies often have a flat hierarchical structure
owing to the nature of collaborative, project-based work, however it is
unusual for a company of Palantir’s size not to announce who is running
its European hub and London office with 600 employees and is in control
of most of the research and development of its premier data mining
platform, Foundry.

It all began with an invitation from Boris Johnson in March. As the
pandemic hit, about two dozen leaders from the UK technology industry
were invited to No 10 to be asked to help.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary and mastermind of NHSX – the health
services’s technology arm – and Johnson’s adviser, Dominic Cummings,
have made no secret of their wish to boost the UK health system’s use of
cutting edge tools.

Cummings is a long-standing fan of Thiel’s, praising him on a blog back
in 2017. One of the least sexy, yet most critical, challenges was
integrating bits of data from hospitals, laboratories and factories so
that the Cabinet could get a better grasp of how the virus was spreading
– and make better decisions.

Also on the wishlist was better contact tracing and modelling to help
predict how the disease would evolve.

The companies pitched and within days Google, AWS, Microsoft, Palantir
and Faculty AI were asked to start work immediately.

For Palantir, that meant putting 40 engineers to work – for a nominal
fee of £1. For just over a month, the NHS has been using Palantir’s
Foundry software to bring together lab test results, hospital and supply
chain data to see which hospitals need beds, gear or ventilators.

It is possible that the contact tracing data from the NHS app being
trialled on the Isle of Wight could also be integrated, leading to
earlier predictions.

It’s fair to assume Palantir won’t keep offering its services for free
forever. After all, there are wages to be paid. And wit

Becoming Infrastructure, Grabbing Power

[Felix Stalder]

I'm sure many of you have noted the co-incidence of Google's closing
down its smart city project in Toronto [1] and Andrew Cumo announcing
a major partnership with Google to reinvent the state of New York
post-Covid [2].

Naomi Klein wrote a piece for the Intercept [3] in which she basically
interpreted this through the lens of disaster capitalism, where the
crisis enables to implement long-existing plans that would previously
have been too controversial.

And, indeed, she dug out a few recent op-eds by Eric Schmidt who,
already prior to the crisis, demanded a vast new government spending
in research on AI (in order to compete against China and all the
learning they do via mass surveillance), and now, during the crisis,
makes a full move to position Silicon Valley as the savior of America.

In the WSJ, he now wrote [4]

“The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in
terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health,
the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your
life would be like in America without Amazon.” He added that people
should “be a little bit grateful that these companies got the
capital, did the investment, built the tools that we’re using now,
and have really helped us out.”

As much as I like Klein's analysis, I'm sure there much more going on
than simple disaster capitalism, in particular when the most ardent
capitalist are calling for Chinese-style state involvement.





[1]
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs-cancels-project-1.5559370
[2]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/06/cuomo-questions-why-school-buildings-still-exist-says-new-york-will-work-with-bill-gates-reimagine-education/
[3]
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
[4]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-real-digital-infrastructure-at-last-11585313825



-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |




#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Tracking People and Modelling Society

[Felix Stalder]

[This is a text that I've written for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
in Berlin. It takes up some of the issues we have discussed here. It
focuses on tracking of people and the modeling of society and I try to
think about democratic potentials here, rather than the more obvious
authoritarian ones. Felix]


Tracking People and Modelling Society

https://www.rosalux.de/en/publication/id/42057


At the moment, many people are sensing how the tectonic plates under
their feet are moving. It is hard to get one’s bearing on such
shifting grounds. Beginning with the virus itself, which is assumed to
have jumped from animals to humans (“zoonotic spillover”) sometime
last fall, there are simply too many actors in the complex dynamic
system of a planetary civilization whose paths have been altered
in hard-to-understand ways. This makes it impossible to plot the
cumulative effects of their interaction.

While a lot of things are fairly chaotic and improvised reactions
to fast-changing events, there is a certain structure to it, simply
because people and institutions draw on that material, political and
cultural resources which they have available. But which resources
to draw on, how to mobilize them and how to create new ones in the
process is the key question. While there is path-dependency and
continuity, even in the way actors can change paths, there is also a
moment of extraordinary openness. It is therefore important not only
to be vigilant against the authoritarian forces that are exploiting
this crisis, i.e. to defend democracy as it exists, but also to think
about ways of strengthening and expanding it right now.

One area where this is particularly urgent is the area of “big
data”, i.e. the collection and evaluation of large amounts of data
for the analysis of complex dynamics. In what follows, I would like
to focus on two areas of data practices where the changes currently
underway are particularly profound and enduring, and thus full of
potential: the way people are recorded informationally, and the type
of modelling we use to understand and influence society in real time.


Tracking People

The spread of the virus laid bare the shallowness of the notion
that we are all unique individuals, each master of our own destiny.
Rather than being able to rationally calculate our own paths,
unaffected by people with whom we do not choose to enter into explicit
relationships, the virus reveals the scale, scope, and intimacy of the
relationships we have with each other and many “other others” as a
basis of everyday life. Only now, the relatively privileged members of
society, locked into their own private spaces under a state of a range
of lockdown rules, are forced to confront themselves as truly atomized
individuals. And even they are experiencing first-hand how unnatural a
condition this is.

In order to follow and contain the spread of the virus, those
relations along which the virus can spread need to be cut, either by
interrupting relations across society as a whole by way of general
“social distancing” rules, or by trying to track the specific
paths by which the virus spreads through society. And since the
dominant way this virus spreads is human-human, it means tracing the
social relationships that come to define the singular person, which
extend far beyond those that are explicitly chosen.

There are two powerful, ready-made models for tracking people.
The first comes from the state. Since the mid-eighteenth century,
the state has been keenly interested in tracking its subjects for
purposes of taxation, conscription, security, and various kinds of
bio-political concerns including public health. With the expansion
of the state’s functions, not least through the welfare state, the
tracking of people across an ever-larger variety of contexts has
steadily increased. Increased mobility and social complexity shifted
this regime over time from static measures (such as border controls)
to dynamic measures (such as collecting communication meta-data). This
was part of a more general shift from a “disciplinary society”
centred around enclosing institutions such as the school, the
army, and the factory towards a “control society” focused on
tracking and manipulating cybernetic flows for some version of the
aforementioned purposes. Second, in the early 2000s, the most advanced
sectors of capitalism began to outstrip the state’s ability to track
people through the sphere of consumption. While the first platform
to keep track of individual consumers was created in the late 1950s
by the credit card industry, it has since spread across society and
consolidated into “surveillance capitalism”. Its main feature is
to re-organize ever-more dimensions of human activity to optimize
the tracking and manipulation of people, this time in the pursuit of
private profit. An approach that was spectacularly successful, if we
take corporate valuations or the source of extreme personal wealth as
indicators.

While these two models have 

Re: No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. (The Communist Manifesto 2015, written in RNA)

[Felix Stalder]

I wouldn't take a three year old Italian TV segment as a particularly
authoritative source. Rather more substantial studies acknowledge
that while it is possible to that a Virus escapes a lab, the genetic
make-up of this particular virus makes it very unlikely to be
fabricated in a lab.

OK, this is science, so they speak of "unlikely" rather then
"impossible" but latching on to this difference in terminological
conventions is the cheapest trick in the book. Felix


-


No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. A genetic analysis shows
it’s from nature

Scientists took conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2’s origins
seriously, and debunked them

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-not-human-made-lab-genetic-analysis-nature

By Tina Hesman Saey

MARCH 26, 2020 AT 6:00 AM

The coronavirus pandemic circling the globe is caused by a natural
virus, not one made in a lab, a new study says.

The virus’s genetic makeup reveals that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a
mishmash of known viruses, as might be expected if it were human-made.
And it has unusual features that have only recently been identified in
scaly anteaters called pangolins, evidence that the virus came from
nature, Kristian Andersen and his colleagues report March 17 in Nature
Medicine.

When Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at the Scripps
Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., first heard about the
coronavirus causing an outbreak in China, he wondered where the virus
came from. Initially, researchers thought the virus was being spread
by repeated infections jumping from animals in a seafood market in
Wuhan, China, into humans and then being passed person to person.
Analysis from other researchers has since suggested that the virus
probably jumped only once from an animal into a person and has been
spread human to human since about mid-November (SN: 3/4/20).

But shortly after the virus’s genetic makeup was revealed in early
January, rumors began bubbling up that maybe the virus was engineered
in a lab and either intentionally or accidentally released.

An unfortunate coincidence fueled conspiracy theorists, says Robert
Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. The Wuhan
Institute of Virology is “in very close proximity to” the
seafood market, and has conducted research on viruses, including
coronaviruses, found in bats that have potential to cause disease in
people. “That led people to think that, oh, it escaped and went down
the sewers, or somebody walked out of their lab and went over to the
market or something,” Garry says.

Accidental releases of viruses, including SARS, have happened from
other labs in the past. So “this is not something you can just
dismiss out of hand,” Andersen says. “That would be foolish.”


__Looking for clues

Andersen assembled a team of evolutionary biologists and virologists,
including Garry, from several countries to analyze the virus for clues
that it could have been human-made, or grown in and accidentally
released from a lab.

“We said, ‘Let’s take this theory — of which there are
multiple different versions — that the virus has a non-natural
origin … as a serious potential hypothesis,’ ” Andersen says.

Meeting via Slack and other virtual portals, the researchers analyzed
the virus’s genetic makeup, or RNA sequence, for clues about its
origin.

It was clear “almost overnight” that the virus wasn’t
human-made, Andersen says. Anyone hoping to create a virus would need
to work with already known viruses and engineer them to have desired
properties.

But the SARS-CoV-2 virus has components that differ from those of
previously known viruses, so they had to come from an unknown virus or
viruses in nature. “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is
not derived from any previously used virus backbone,” Andersen and
colleagues write in the study.

“This is not a virus somebody would have conceived of and cobbled
together. It has too many distinct features, some of which are
counterintuitive,” Garry says. “You wouldn’t do this if you were
trying to make a more deadly virus.”

See all our coverage of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak Other
scientists agree. “We see absolutely no evidence that the virus
has been engineered or purposely released,” says Emma Hodcroft, a
molecular epidemiologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
She was not part of Andersen’s group, but is a member of a team of
scientists with Nextstrain.org that is tracking small genetic changes
in the coronavirus to learn more about how it is spreading around the
world.

That finding debunks a widely disputed analysis, posted at bioRxiv.org
before peer review, that claimed to find bits of HIV in the
coronavirus, Hodcroft says. Other scientists quickly pointed out flaws
in the study and the authors retracted the report, but not before it
fueled the notion that the virus was engineered.

Some stretches of the virus’s genetic material are similar to HIV,
but that’s something that stems 

Re: Il Manifesto: Let's get the network data

[Felix Stalder]

I think trust should not be placed primarily in technological solutions,
an app where we can fine-tune our privacy preferences.

Rather, the focus should be on creating social institutions that are
capable of analyzing these system-wide dynamics, based on all this data,
and then develop policies within a democratic framework. I know, lots of
people will argue -- as liberal theory has for the last 200 years --
that personal privacy is a precondition for democracy, but that
Gutenberg Galaxy argument is really limiting our thinking.

Let's face it, that system-level, deeply privacy-invasive, knowledge
exists already, but since it's housed in closed institutions (profit
and/or security-focused) nobdoy on the outside (scientists, public,
democratic decision-making bodies) has no access to it. For about 15
years, we could observe the consequences of this, and it's a vast
accumulation of wealth and power in the hand of an unaccountable few, at
expense of public institutions left to play catch-up they cannot win.

That leaves us with either issuing soft appeals, or accepting
unaccountable backroom deals, like the one that the Trump-administration
may, or may not, preparing with Google and Palantier. The latter is
really a worst-case scenario.

I think we should think in a different direction. How about mandating
that big data companies make their data available for public-interest
research? What public-interest research is in practice, and how to
handle the inevitable privacy issues, could be left to decide to a
science review board. There is lots of experience with that. Wouldn't
that open a much more interesting discussion?


All the best. Felix





On 26.03.20 15:07, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
> folks, it's probably no surprise that we are getting, only this morning,
> two reposts that advocate a more aggressive employment of data-driven
> measures, both implying that data privacy may have to be curtailed in
> the service of public health. (i've excerpted the crucial passages from
> both messages below.)
> 
> in germany, the minister for health yesterday had to withdraw a law
> proposal that would have gone in this direction, in the face of strong
> protests, incl. from the ministry of justice.
> 
> i wonder what the options for technical solutions might be that could be
> more acceptable for people concerned about data protection and civil
> rights. (to me, the italian appeal to the benevolence of the GAFA seems
> all too naive, though understandable in the desperate situation in
> italy.) would it perhaps even be possible to think forward, to consider
> improvements to the technical systems that would give smartphone users
> (are we talking about anybody else?) a greater level of control about
> their data profiles, at least in the long run? or other real advantages?
> 
> just speculating...
> 
> -a
> 
> 
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Felix Stalder]

On 20.03.20 10:32, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

> But: if a major economic problem at the moment is that people have
> to pay their rent, or service the credits and mortgages they took
> out, why does the State, under these severe circumstances, currently
> make such an effort to help people pay tribute to capital, rather
> than suspend these obligations?

I think most of the current interventions are aimed at stabilizing
the system and preventing a cascade of breakdowns, but this requires
a cascade of interventions. So, the first intervention is to "flatten
the curve" by reducing social interaction.

The means to do so is to close venues, non-essential shops, introduce
restrictions on mobility etc. However, this starts a cascade of
economic breakdowns, with people losing jobs and other forms of
income. Pretty soon, businesses will go bankrupt because revenue dries
out. This will set in motion another set of breakdowns, as people and
companies are no longer capable of paying their rent, their utility
bills, their credit rates etc. This time, what breaks down is basic
infrastructure (imagine the utility company goes bankrupt), and
financial system (because of escalating bad debt).

So, the goal seems to be put the stop of this at the earliest possible
moment. Flatten the curve seems to be essential, that's the consensus
(even the US and the UK are doing this now), so the immediate knock-on
effects on businesses and incomes are unavoidable. The current
policies -- from extended forms of "Kurzarbeit" (does that exist
outside the German-speaking world?) to simplified unemployment
claims, direct payments to self-employed and gig-economy workers, to
"helicopter money" handed out everyone -- all seem to be designed to
protect these deeper infrastructural levels of the economy.

Of course, at these deeper levels, capital is concentrated heavily,
so there is class dimension to it, but I presume there is also a
recognition that the deeper you go, the more expensive it gets and the
more extensive the effects of a breakdown would be.

So, in my view, there is very little we can do about immediate crisis
policies -- anyway, they change extremely fast and largely without
public input -- but to prepare for the battle into what shape we want
together put the broken pieces once we reach this stage.

And there, in terms of economic and fiscal policy, the interest of
capital will be austerity, and the interest of the 99% will be new taxes
on the super rich and the financial markets.

All the best. Felix


-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |





#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Should the state use mobile phone data to monitor

[Felix Stalder]

On 18.03.20 20:34, Brian Holmes wrote:

> In the face of this, there seem to be two broad options for civil
> society response:
>
> -- Publicly refuse any infringement of previously existing rights,
> while privately maintaining the psycho-philosophical stance of the
> autonomous individual; or
>
> -- Participate critically in the elaboration of new population- and
> species-level norms for the being-in-common of a fully cybernetic
> society -- but on the ethical basis of what kind of "general
> intellect"
>
> If anyone is looking for a core problem in philosophy or political
> science to work on over the next few months, maybe this is it. I
> reckon the questions above are not exclusive alternatives. Instead
> they begin to mark out the contested/consensual space in which the
> new social paradigm will emerge. No ready-made answer on the basis
> of preexisting concepts and attitudes can fill that space.

This is indeed the question. I'm putting my efforts clearly into the
second option, for a lot of reasons.

The first option, though it still holds some appeal, mainly because
of its storied history, just leads to intellectual and political
dead ends. A recent case in point? Zuboff's otherwise brilliant
study on Surveillance Capitalism. It starts with a bang and ends
with a whimper, because all she can offer is an appeal to rugged
individualism, that opens no perspectives at all. Another case
in point? Lines in front of gun stores as a response of a public
health crisis. It is this psycho-political formation ("possessive
individualism") that got us in this mess (climate change, primarily)
and it's historical potential as a progressive idea as been thoroughly
exhausted. We have known that for half a century now, wave after wave
of social theory has shown this, but what used to be abstractions
for a long time, now has penetrated the core of Western everyday
experience (I say Western, because individualism was never meant for
non-Westeners). We really should say: good riddance.

Second, and more importantly, what the current health crisis makes
visible in high-speed mode is that there are, indeed, system-level
dynamics which impact all of us, and that there is, indeed,
politics that shapes these system-level dynamics. Of course, this
system-level politics has always existed, but neoliberal ideology
has systematically denied this fact. It has been successful in this
because it moved these politics out of the arena where they used to
be performed -- the nation state -- and hid it behind the curtain, so
to speak. What was left on the stage, visible to the audience, the
political public, was just noise, spin and entertainment. Now, with
crisis being primarily a *public*, rather than an *individual* health
crisis, these politics have moved to in front of the curtain again.
This is, in principle, a good thing and an opening.

Third, as Andreas, Lars and others have pointed out. Much of this
data has already been available. Either in the private data-centers
of the "quantification sector", or in the secret data centers of
the intelligence agencies. For at least a decade, they already had
detailed, system-level knowledge and the power that derives from
that and they used to further increase their own power in order to
grab a bigger and bigger slice of the pie. What is happening now, in
my view, is that this type of knowledge is moving into an area for
which there is at least some degree of public agency: public health
(perhaps more so in Europe than in the US). Again, in principle,
this is a good thing, because allows us to have a discussion about a
cybernetic politics has existed for a long time, but only in private
or in secret.

Fourth, by now a lot of people have looked at these "flatten the
curve" diagrams [1] or stared at the social distancing simulator [2].
Both are supremely abstract, boring graphics, but they are suddenly
connected to very intimate everyday life decisions. Should hug
friend, when I meet her, do I really need to go out this afternoon,
is it a good idea to invite friends over for dinner. The affective
power of this should not be underestimated. Stuff like that changes
consciousness. Similar, but much broader, deeper and quicker, than the
Fridays For Future changed consciousness when kids started to suddenly
confront their planet-destroying parents over dinner. I think such
changes in consciousness are necessary to create large-scale political
change in a democratic way.

How will all of this play out. We cannot know. Things are moving
really fast now and it really depends how long and deep this crisis
goes.

One of the indicators, and the fights we need to prepare for, is
what happens once the immediate crisis is over. Public budgets
will be loaded with debt, much more, and in addition to, the debt
still hanging around from the 2008/9 crisis. The instincts of the
ruling classes are to use this as the argument for the next round of
austerity. They might have a harder time this time, 

Re: Should mobile phone data be used to monitor public health

[Felix Stalder]

On 18.03.20 11:01, Laura Chimera wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 18 Mar 2020 at 10:25, Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
>> A1, the largest mobile phone carrier, is providing data to public
>> authorities in an effort to monitor these restrictions (contact
>> tracing might come later).
>>
> 
> What's your source on that? I'd love to read more about it
> 
> ~ L


Italy:

http://www.rainews.it/dl/rainews/media/Coronavirus-controlli-sui-telefoni-a-Milano-Il-40-della-popolazione-si-sposta-Aumento-contagi-36f5e30c-8b80-4b0f-a0c7-6f52ff7cea8b.html


Isreal:

https://www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/.premium-cellphone-tracking-authorized-by-israel-to-be-used-for-enforcing-quarantine-orders-1.8681979

Austria:

https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000115828957/mobilfunker-a1-liefert-bewegungsstroeme-von-handynutzern-der-regierung


I'm sure there's much more. let's collect some of that.

Felix



#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Felix Stalder]

Here in Austria, and in many other places as well, restrictions on
personal mobility are quite severe. At the moment, we are told to
stay at home, with exceptions only for a) going to work (where remote
work is not possible), b) shopping for necessities (food, medicines,
cigarettes, mobile phones) c) helping others do b) and going for walks
(alone or with people with whom one shares the apartment).

A1, the largest mobile phone carrier, is providing data to public
authorities in an effort to monitor these restrictions (contact
tracing might come later). This is quite unprecedented and most people
who care about data privacy are rather uneasy about it, for very
obvious reasons.

But I think we need to think beyond the classic surveillance / privacy
dichotomy, because, clearly, social network analysis is what you
want to do in order to trace the spread of a virus and fine-tune
mechanism for social distancing. The traditional methods of calling up
all people an infected person remembers having had contact over the
preceding week is not very effective and doesn't scale.

So, is there a possibility to use this data without it turning it into
an authoritarian power grab? I think there is, under the following
guidelines:

- Data needs to be deleted after immediate purpose of the analysis has
been achieved.

- The analysis needs to be restricted to questions developed by
an external team. So, no fishing simple because the data is now
available. Mission creep very often a problem.

- Questions, methods and results of the analysis need to be published
after the fact. This will allow public appraisal of the legitimacy of
the program.

- Data needs to be made available to at least two teams that are
completely independent from one another. This will allow for the
cross-examination of the quality of the different approaches.

If we manage to develop such a framework, which both acknowledges the
public health crises AND the democratic character of our societies,
then we might have created something that will be very useful for
other big data question that will inevitably come up in the future.

Is it likely that we manage to enact these? No. But simply calling for
the protection of personal privacy, or accepting the general state of
emergency, will be even worse.







-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
 | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |


--===6835030780368680459==
Content-Type: message/rfc822
MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: confirm 075b19f4574ebfa0493b86513b1eafeb3aaa259d
Sender: nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org
From: nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2020 10:20:14 +0100
Message-ID: 

If you reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact,
Mailman will discard the held message.  Do this if the message is
spam.  If you reply to this message and include an Approved: header
with the list password in it, the message will be approved for posting
to the list.  The Approved: header can also appear in the first line
of the body of the reply.
--===6835030780368680459==--

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: coronavirus questions

[Felix Stalder]

On 12.03.20 09:21, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:
> I have a couple of coronavirus questions. These are neither necessarily
> mine, nor did they arise in anticipation of satisfying answers.

> - What is the perspective on coronavirus seen from where you are? What
>   are the most interesting or surprising narratives that are emerging
>   in your neighborhoods or communities?


For me, the most interesting perspectives are those that see here the
potential for a collective shift in the political imagination, similar
and in addition to, Fridays for Future. Simply by raising question to
which markets and individualized competition (aka neo-liberalism)
provide no answer.

The individual fate and the collective fate are clearly not separable.
Just because one is personally not ill does not mean that one is not
quarantined. And, there is no use in being quarantined of the person
bringing the food is so precarious that s/he has to work despite being
ill (and bringing the virus right to the doorstep). And while Trump is 
generally entertaininģ for many, few are be willing to trust him on 
medical advice.

This makes a very strong case for basic social services and keeping
expertise within the public services.

Also, it's a good occasion to think about the value of purely economic
efficiency in global supply chains and the reliance of hyper-mobility
for even the most basic stuff (like standard generic drugs). So,
questions of resilience, coupling and de-coupling, of reducing
complexity within the system.

If it's possible to frame all these discussions, which have become
politically much more prevalent now, within the context of an ecological
transformation, the overall effect is quite positive.

What it takes to translate this shift in collective awareness into
political action is not clear, but for political action to become
possible, shifts in collective consciousness need to occur first. And
this is part of that, because it touches so many lifes such intimate levels.




-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Evo Morales

[Felix Stalder]

[I don't know much about the situation in Bolivia, but reporting in the
Western media seems incredibly lazy, portraying the situation as a
liberal uprising against an anti-democratic leader.

There is obviously much more context than that. Some of it is mentioned
in the below interview. Another aspect is that just a week ago, Bolivia
cancelled a very large project to produce lithium with a German company
after local protests again the project. Though that also is probably
more complex, because the German won the initial contract because they
were they only ones willing to refine the Lithium locally, rather than
simply export the raw material. Perhaps somebody with more direct
knowledge can add more information. Felix ]



https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/11/evo_morales_bolivia_protests_military_coup



Evo Morales was Bolivia’s first indigenous leader, was credited with
lifting nearly a fifth of Bolivia’s population out of poverty since he
took office in 2006. But he faced criticism from some of his former
supporters for running for a third and then a fourth term. Evo Morales’s
whereabouts are unknown. His home was ransacked Sunday. Mexico has
offered Morales asylum. Hours before resigning, Morales had agreed to
call for new elections, after the Organization of American States issued
a report claiming there was, quote, “clear manipulation” in last month’s
election results. According to the official results of last month’s
election, Morales won 47% of the vote and just narrowly avoided a runoff
election. But the OAS immediately questioned the election process,
sparking mass street protests. Critics of the OAS say the global body
did not provide any evidence of actual vote rigging.

We go now to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Mark Weisbrot,
co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, his latest
piece for The Nation headlined “The Trump Administration Is Undercutting
Democracy in Bolivia.” Talk about the latest developments, the
resignation of President Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of
Bolivia.

MARK WEISBROT: Well, this is a military coup. There’s no doubt about it
now, after the head of the military told the president and vice
president to resign and then they did. And I think it’s really terrible
the way it’s been presented, because, from the beginning, you had that
OAS press release, the day after the election, which hinted — or
implied, actually, very strongly — that there was something wrong with
the vote count, and they never presented any evidence at all. They
didn’t presented it in that release. They didn’t present it in their
next release. They didn’t present it in their preliminary report. And
there’s really nothing in this latest so-called preliminary audit that
shows that there was any fraud in this election. But it was repeated
over and over again in all the media, and so it became kind of true.
And, you know, if you look at the media, you don’t see anybody — you
don’t see any experts, for example, saying that there was something
wrong with the vote count. It’s really just that OAS observation
mission, which was under a lot of pressure, of course, from Senator
Rubio and the Trump administration to do this, because they wanted —
they’ve wanted for some time to get rid of this government.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain how the election went — Morales stopping the
election count, resuming it — and then what kind of majority he needed
to avoid a runoff.

MARK WEISBROT: OK. So, this is very important, because this has been
very badly described, I think, in most of the media. You have a quick
count, which is not even the official count of the election, and it’s
not binding. It’s not what determines the result. It’s just something
that is done while the votes are being counted to let people know what’s
going on at that time. And so, the quick count was interrupted, and when
it resumed — and it was interrupted with Evo leading by about 7
percentage points. And when it came back, his margin increased. And if
you read the press here, any of the articles, it’s reported as though
something terribly suspicious happened. He didn’t have enough votes — he
needed a 10-point margin in order to — a 10-point lead over the next
runner-up in order to win in the first round, and he didn’t have that
when the vote count, this quick count, was interrupted — or, the
reporting was interrupted, I should say. And then, you know, he got it
in the last 14 — last 16% of the votes counted. He reached 10%. But if
you look at what was really — so, this was reported as a very suspicious
thing. And this is what’s reported over and over again to make it look
like something was wrong.

But if you look at it, actually — actually, the whole vote count — you
see there was a steady trend of Evo’s margin increasing almost from the
beginning. And it didn’t change in the last 16%; it just continued
because — and you can look at the areas that were coming in — these were
rural and poor areas where Evo 

Re: The Watershed in Your Head

[Felix Stalder]

Hi Brian,

thanks for this update on your work and thinking.

It fits well into what I see as part of a larger (re)introduction of
physical space onto techno-political thinking.

One source is of this, exemplified by your work, is the rapidly rising
pressures of ecological devastation engendered by a capitalist economy
that sees particular space, and the particular places that make it up,
as just an other exploitable resource, to be discarded when used up.
I've become increasingly interested in the visual parallels between the
graphs showing the "great acceleration" and those showing the spread of
digital infrastructures, The same absurd hockey-sticks.

Another source, in my view, comes from the realization that a focus on
space, particularly city space, can create a new framework to think
about collective conditions at a moment when the collective dimension
has been squeezed out almost completely from social relation after a
half-century of neoliberal policy introducing (market-based) competition
everywhere.

I think there is also a third stream of thinking feeding into this
return of space: the need to balance the self-mirroring, dis-orienting
and easily malleable, hence manipulable, character of digital systems
which need to be reconnected to resistant materiality.

I think all three together provide a way of being, thinking and acting,
that perhaps offers an alternative to being sucked further and further
into the ecological and mental devastation offered by the technocrats of
Silicon Valley and Wall Street, while avoiding the backwards nostalgia
that wrecks much of the West, but also places like India and the
Philippines (to the degree that I understand their politics).

And esthetics -- languages and methods of making this other world
visible -- are an important aspect in this struggle than can only
succeed if it finds a language that informs action, a language to
express multiplicity (of actors, and of cultures) and belonging (that
is, a kind of care for the place in which one finds oneself) at the same
time.

All super urgent, because the far right is doing its own kind of spacial
politics, which leaves a lot of people drowning, metaphorically and
literally.

Felix







On 30.10.19 09:05, Brian Holmes wrote:
> [Dear nettime, we were old friends. But so much has changed in the
> tumultuous decade that's now drawing to a close. Here's what I learned.
> It's still tactical media in a way. There's some links at the end. If
> you like it, let's collaborate. In any case, good luck to all for the
> upcoming years on planet Earth - Brian]
> 
> https://anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/the-watershed-in-your-head
> 
> 
> THE WATERSHED IN YOUR HEAD:
> Mapping Anthropocene River Basins
> 
> The biogeochemical transformations of the twenty-first century demand a
> new analytic of society: not political economy, but political ecology.
> It's the study of the technological powers, organizational forms, and
> decision-making processes whereby human groups reshape their
> environments. But it's also a more difficult and sometimes incalculable
> approach to the multiple forms of agency exerted by non-human others,
> whether on themselves, on us, or on any other component of the living
> world. Political ecology mingles nature and culture in an unlimited
> feedback system at planetary scale, with consequences in all directions.
> How to achieve at least a beginner's literacy in its manifold concerns?
> How to express them with the exactitude of science and the passion of
> direct engagement? And how not to exclude the crushing banality of
> economics, which continues to produce so many unwanted changes in the
> earth system? Finally--it's no mere detail--how to inject the uncertain
> wonderment of art into this devastating panorama of ecological
> overshoot? The questions are immense, but that's the point. It's time to
> develop a cultural critique of too-late capitalism, aka the Anthropocene.
> 
> I'm going to give it a try in the first person.
> 
> I used to be involved in the critique of political economy and the
> practice of tactical media--a cultural cycle that had kicked off back in
> the '90s. Then in 2015 I began work on a serious reboot, mixing public
> science, environmentalism, and open-source cartography. The idea was to
> produce a web-based map about pipelines and oil infrastructure, under
> the title Petropolis. I wanted to learn contemporary reality in public,
> by locating fossil institutions in lived rural and urban spaces that
> could expand out to continental scale, but that could also be explored
> close up, by groups deliberately convened for experiments in collective
> perception. Yet the confrontation with petroleum infrastructure was
> paradoxical. On the one hand, it's absolutely necessary, because the
> crucial power structures of Anthropocene society remain functionally
> invisible, concretely unimaginable by most people, posing obvious
> barriers to any conceivable change. But 

"Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing." Letter of FB staff to Mark Zuckerberg

[Felix Stalder]

[I don't think appeals to leaders to act ethically are particularly
effective. Yet, this letter is still interesting as it documents the
rising concerns, even within the belly of the beast, over the total
commercialization of communication and its detrimental impact on
democracy. Because, no matter how imperfect in practice, democracy rely
on communication generating social meaning, rather than just cybernetic
effects. I don't think FB in its current form, not the least because of
its sheer scale, is able, or willing, to address this problem.]



https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-letter.html


We are proud to work here.

Facebook stands for people expressing their voice. Creating a place
where we can debate, share different opinions, and express our views is
what makes our app and technologies meaningful for people all over the
world.

We are proud to work for a place that enables that expression, and we
believe it is imperative to evolve as societies change. As Chris Cox
said, “We know the effects of social media are not neutral, and its
history has not yet been written.”

This is our company.

We’re reaching out to you, the leaders of this company, because we’re
worried we’re on track to undo the great strides our product teams have
made in integrity over the last two years. We work here because we care,
because we know that even our smallest choices impact communities at an
astounding scale. We want to raise our concerns before it’s too late.

Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing.

Misinformation affects us all. Our current policies on fact checking
people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to
what FB stands for. We strongly object to this policy as it stands. It
doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our
platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by
political figures is trustworthy.

Allowing paid civic misinformation to run on the platform in its current
state has the potential to:

— Increase distrust in our platform by allowing similar paid and organic
content to sit side-by-side — some with third-party fact-checking and
some without. Additionally, it communicates that we are OK profiting
from deliberate misinformation campaigns by those in or seeking
positions of power.

— Undo integrity product work. Currently, integrity teams are working
hard to give users more context on the content they see, demote
violating content, and more. For the Election 2020 Lockdown, these teams
made hard choices on what to support and what not to support, and this
policy will undo much of that work by undermining trust in the platform.
And after the 2020 Lockdown, this policy has the potential to continue
to cause harm in coming elections around the world.

Proposals for improvement

Our goal is to bring awareness to our leadership that a large part of
the employee body does not agree with this policy. We want to work with
our leadership to develop better solutions that both protect our
business and the people who use our products. We know this work is
nuanced, but there are many things we can do short of eliminating
political ads altogether.

These suggestions are all focused on ad-related content, not organic.

1. Hold political ads to the same standard as other ads.

a. Misinformation shared by political advertisers has an outsized
detrimental impact on our community. We should not accept money for
political ads without applying the standards that our other ads have to
follow.

2. Stronger visual design treatment for political ads.

a. People have trouble distinguishing political ads from organic posts.
We should apply a stronger design treatment to political ads that makes
it easier for people to establish context.

3. Restrict targeting for political ads.

a. Currently, politicians and political campaigns can use our advanced
targeting tools, such as Custom Audiences. It is common for political
advertisers to upload voter rolls (which are publicly available in order
to reach voters) and then use behavioral tracking tools (such as the FB
pixel) and ad engagement to refine ads further. The risk with allowing
this is that it’s hard for people in the electorate to participate in
the “public scrutiny” that we’re saying comes along with political
speech. These ads are often so micro-targeted that the conversations on
our platforms are much more siloed than on other platforms. Currently we
restrict targeting for housing and education and credit verticals due to
a history of discrimination. We should extend similar restrictions to
political advertising.

4. Broader observance of the election silence periods

a. Observe election silence in compliance with local laws and
regulations. Explore a self-imposed election silence for all elections
around the world to act in good faith and as good citizens.

5. Spend caps for individual politicians, regardless of source

a. FB has stated that one of the 

Re: Wash Post: Greta Thunberg weaponized shame in an era of shamelessness

[Felix Stalder]

Hi Freddy,

I can assure you that there is a lot of hate towards GT in Europe as
well, so this cannot be a problem attributable to the "American brain".

I think it's an issue of how to deal with the climate crisis.

I see basically three different approaches.

The center left and center right (the old political mainstream) do
acknowledge the problem, but are not willing to do anything substantial
about it. This is, in a way, the paradox of reasonable realism which,
rightly, acknowledges the problem but also difficulty of fundamentally
transforming society. Both things are real, but they add-up to a
terrible political message: we are dying and we will do anything about
it. No wonder the center is evaporating everywhere.

The populist-right is basically rejecting reason and realism, simply
rejecting all evidence, from daily experience and from science. Given
the strength of that experience, and the fact that it is getting
stronger, means that the populist right has reject normal discourse
(which would force them to accept facts) and go for crazy and crazier.
Trump is the perfect example. He did not even accept obvious,
photographic proof that there were fewer people at his inauguration that
at Obama. Why? Because this, not matter how ludicrous, allowed him to
avoid any consequences that would have followed from accept this fact.
GT stands for an attempt to bring facts, science, back into the
political discussion and to demand that consequences are being drawn
from these facts. Shouting at the girl is a way of avoiding entering
into this type of discussion.

Then are two movements that fully acknowledge the the climate crisis AND
are willing to take radical steps.

There is a left-wing movement around the notion the Green New Deal,
which connects the response to the climate crisis with other social
crises, particular that of inequality.

And then there is eco-fascism which connects the climate crisis with
what they perceive as crises of white, patriarchal identity.


I think centrist realism is defeating itself and I wonder how much
craziness people are willing to accept in order to be able to ignore the
obvious. Clearly, quite a lot! But I doubt the climate crisis as reality
can be ignored forever. Which will leave only the last two options on
the table.

Felix




On 26.09.19 17:04, Freddy Spierenburg wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 10:48:02AM -0400, tbyfield wrote:
>> Anyone who listens to all of that and immediately wants to
>> punish or attack Thunberg -- they're not having that reaction
>> because they think she's wrong, but rather because, deep down,
>> they fear she is right.
> 
> Does the author truly believe so or hopefully believe so? I
> personally don't know if people are angry because they fear she
> is right. I've more got a feeling that this lengthy 'Wait but
> Why' post explains what is really going on:
> 
>   https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html
> 
> 
> 
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
> 

-- 
 | || http://felix.openflows.com |
 | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Gig Workers Rising

[Felix Stalder]

I'm still amazed at the passing of Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) [1] in
California, eventually ensuring "gig economy workers are entitled to
minimum wage, workers’ compensation and other benefits." [2] If this law
becomes effective (as of January 2020), I think it constitutes a major
fork in the road.

Does somebody know the alignment of forces that made the passage of this
bill -- against the significant resistance  of the companies most
affects, Uber and Lyft -- possible?

One actor was "Gig Workers Rising","a campaign supporting and educating
app and platform workers who are organizing for better wages, working
conditions and jobs." [3] It seem like three out of four of their
demands are addressed in the law.

But who else and how was it done?


Felix


[1]
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB5
[2]
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/10/gig-worker-bill-ab-5-passes-in-california/
[3] https://www.gigworkersrising.org/about



Uber and Lyft executives make billions. But what about drivers?
https://www.gigworkersrising.org

Drivers are standing up to demand a fair return on the billions they
make for Uber & Lyft:

* Living wage
Uber and Lyft must pay drivers a livable hourly rate
(after expenses).

*Transparency
Clear policies on wages, tips, fare breakdowns
and deactivations.

* Benefits
Such as disability, workers comp, retirement, health care,
death benefits, and paid time off.

*Voice at work
A recognized independent worker organization, the
freedom to stand together without fear of retaliation
and a fair and transparent process for deactivations.




-- 
 | || http://felix.openflows.com |
 | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: radio nettime: 8 Sept 2019 12:00-13:00

[Felix Stalder]

I would try to reverse the question. Not what are the costs (which are
hard to calculate anyway), but what are the benefits. And if they
approach zero, then it's time to stop in a decent way (and archive the
list for good). There is no use to do useless stuff. There is enough of
that on the world.

For me, the benefits have decreased, but are they close enough to zero?
What could be done to increase them? What would constitute a benefit,
and to whom?

Felix


On 02.09.19 22:28, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> If the cost of running the list was exactly zero (let's not delve into
> details at this point), would you still kill it?
> 
> If yes, then we have an interesting case of potlatch, without bonfire.
> 
> 
> 
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #    is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
> 

-- 
 | || http://felix.openflows.com |
 | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

What's next for Barcelona?

[Felix Stalder]

Who can make sense out of yesterday's municipal elections in Barcelona?
The left-wing separatist candidate, Ernest Maragall, narrowly beating
Ada Colau. Is this another case of separatism crowding out ecological
and social issues, thus preserving conventional political structures
(even if with new parties...), or is there something else going on?



-- 
 | || http://felix.openflows.com |
 | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Guardian Live on Assange's arrest

[Felix Stalder]

On 11.04.19 20:18, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> 
> 1. Wikileaks servers could not be suppressed neither by rubberhosing 
> service providers, registrars, nor telecoms. They did try, for a
> long time. If they could, none of this would happen.
> 
> 2. Wikileaks sources were far better protected than anyone else's
> (and still are) by using custom submission technology.
> 
> #1 and #2 is what put rope around Assange's neck. Use of tools.
> Wikileaks works. Effective use of technology cannot be allowed, and
> an example needs to be set. Tweeting and blogging on corporate
> servers is OK.


Assange (and Wikileaks) has become a prime example of what military
theorist in the early 00s called a "super-empowered individual" capable
of marshaling technology and resources available to non-sate actors to
attack what they called a "systempunkt", meaning a node of a complex
systems whose failure would set of a cascade of events.

That much was clear early on:
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/contain-leaks-whistle-blowers-and-networked-news-ecology

Yes, in order to become super empowered, tools are necessary, but they
don't need to be super sophisticated. These ideas where originally
developed to describe Bin Laden and what made him  super-empowered were
followers willing with box cutters and rudimentary aviation training.

Assange is a hacker, so he used hacker tools, which are particularly
close to the operating logic of today's apparatuses of power. It's quite
a testimony of Assange's resourcefulness and willpower how long was able
to keep it up. It's very rare for non-state actors to openly challenge
powerful nation states and survive.

Anyway, there will be others who figure out system and how to effect
maximum impact (cascades) with minimal resources. That's in the nature
of complex, open systems.

Felix






-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Guardian Live on Assange's arrest

[Felix Stalder]

Democracy Now is doing interviews on this, which you can access via
their twitter feed.

https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/1116320933977841664/video/1

and there, Glenn Greenwald makes the point that Assange is neither US
citizen, nor is Wikileaks a US-based news organization, thus "the idea
that the U.S. government can just extend its reach to any news outlet
anywhere in the world and criminalize publication of documents … is
extremely chilling."

For Trump, it poses an odd political problem, because Assange is a real
hero to this base. I scrolled through the comments on Breitbart, and the
were all really positive about him, and saw is arrest as the works of
the "globalist" deep state.

Even if you don't like his dealings with Trump and would like to see him
properly prosecuted for his alleged rape in Sweden, I think Greenwald's
point is still the core one.

Besides the specific content of the leaks that came out of Wikileaks, I
think Assange has been the most innovative person in journalism, and
particularly the print media owe him a lot of thanks for pioneering a
model (research pools, database investigation, data journalism beyond
graphic design etc) that made them more relevant again.

All the best. Felix




On 11.04.19 14:32, Patrice Riemens wrote:
> On 2019-04-11 13:16, John Young wrote:
>> New TV link of Assange arrest:
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stTMt1tLT4g
> 
> 
> There are already 3 pages of minute-by-minute reporting on the arrest,
> pbly m few more to come:
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2019/apr/11/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-arrested-at-the-ecuadorean-embassy-live-updates
> 
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #    is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
> 

-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Managing complexity?

[Felix Stalder]

On 03.04.19 11:38, James Wallbank wrote:
> Felix, this is the sort of post that social media conditions me to want
> to click "Like" but also to feel that it's an inadequate response.
> 
> I'd only add (or perhaps, draw out):
> 
> * "Managing" is the wrong way to think about maximising human welfare
> (or, indeed, achieving any defined objective) when interacting with
> complex systems.
> 
> * Perhaps "Surfing" is a better concept - dynamically balancing on
> roiling, turbulent, unknowable medium to plot a course at least
> approximately intentional. Some of the time.


Hi James,

I'm glad the clunky set-up of a mailing list doesn't provide the option
to simply click "like" :)

I'm not a philosopher and I'm skeptical about defining terms too neatly,
but I think here, the terminology is crucial. Because it expresses how
we conceive the relationship to the larger socio-ecological environment
in which we are living.

I agree that "managing" is not a good term, with all its connotations of
"central management" or "top-down control". But surfing is deficient in
the other way, it doesn't really account for the enormous influence
humans have on the environment and it evades the political questions
about what kind of world we are living in. Human civilization cannot
just wait for the right wave to come along, but is part of what produces
the waves in the first place.


On 31.03.19 15:50, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

> However, self-organising systems are emergent - they can exhibit 
> fundamental properties that did not exist at all in an earlier state
> of the system.  As humans, we cannot be blind to what properties may 
> emerge, unless we say we have no ethical concerns at all if the
> system throws up properties such as unfair and degrading exploitation
> of others or ecological imbalances.
This is really important, in my view. Even as we try to develop a more
connected, systemic perspective, one in which agency is distributed and
heterogeneous,  I think it's crucial to acknowledge that humans are
still different from all other agents, in so far as they alone can
think, and act, on the level of the overall system and its emergent
effects, rather than just within their limited domains.

Clive Hamilton, in "Defiant Earth", stresses this point, arguing against
Haraway and others, who view humans as just one group of agents among
many others. He calls this "anti-anthropocentrism" and argues for a "new
anthropocentrism".

While I'm not sure that's the greatest of terms, what he means by it is
basically this: Because of their unique positions, humans need to take
responsibility for the earth, without assuming the ability to control it
(as in the the fantasies of "ecomodernist" geoengineers).

"Responsibility without control", seems like a good approximation to an
way of conceptualization how to life within a complex, nonlinear system.


Felix



-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Managing complexity?

[Felix Stalder]

On 30.03.19 21:19, Brian Holmes wrote:
> However, the surging sense of intellectual mastery brought by the
> phrase, "managing complexity," declines precipitously when you try to
> define either "management" or "complexity."

Complexity is relatively easy to define. As Jospeh Rabie already did,
the number of actors and the number of ways in which they can interact
with, and adapt to, one another defines the complexity of a "system".

This, of course, leads to the question how to determine the size of the
system. The first generation of cybernetics gave another answer to that
question than the second, as Ted pointed out.

Prem's suggestion that we are dealing with polycentric systems is
certainly right and makes it both easier and harder to define the number
of actors that make them up. Easier in the sense that it puts the focus
on densities and rates of interaction (higher at the center, lower at
the periphery) rather than on precise, yet elusive boundaries. Harder in
the sense that it stresses that each system contains numerous such
centers, shifting the problem from drawing boundaries to deciding the
inclusion/exclusion of centers.

Be that as it may. Let's assume that the number of actors and the ways
of interacting have increased over the last, say, last 70 years. More
important than the simple number of actors (which is hard to ascertain
anyway) is that the ways in which they are interacting has increased,
leading to an exponential, rather than linear rise on complexity.

In my view, there are a number of reasons for this.

* The chains of interactions have grown longer. Many (social and
ecological) systems used to be relatively local phenomena have become
global ones (as a consequence of the expansion of capitalism as
globalization).

* The intensity of interaction has been increasing (as a consequence of
the intensification of capitalism), taking many systems away from
"steady states" closer to the edge of "phase-transitions" (to use the
terminology from complexity theory). In this process, these systems
become more and more non-linear, increasing the need to understand their
internal dynamics (e.g who are the actors and how are they interacting)
while at the same time, making them less predictable.

* The social institutions that have traditionally limited the ways of
interaction by providing and enforcing rules and norms have weakened,
further increasing the leeway for agency (which, of course, not all bad).

Not knowing where to draw boundaries, or which centers are relevant to
the understanding of the system, is a part of the problem of not being
able to "manage" the many actors and their increasing ranges of
interaction and the predictable effects of their interactions. By
"managing" I initially simply meant the ability to track the actors that
make up the system and the ability to intervene in the system to move it
towards desired states. This is a somewhat technocratic view, I admit.

Joseph Weizenbaum argued in the 1970sthat the computer was introduced as
an answer to the social pressures which large corporations and
government agencies faced. Rather than accept social change, the new
computing infrastructure was putting central management on a new
footing. It could now keep track of many more elements and react much
faster to changes in the environment by reorganizing quickly the
relation of the elements to one another. This was, basically, the shift
from Fordism to Post-Fordism and by definition an increase in complexity
that came, as it always comes, at the price of an higher rate of
abstraction as a way of limiting that increase of complexity (a lower
number of variables per element are taken into account).

For similar reasons, I think, the shift towards markets and quantitative
signals (prices, ranking, indices etc) was so successful. It allowed to
manage the increase in social complexity by abstracting it away.

I think both systems (computers and markets) as ways of managing
complexity are reaching an upper limit, mainly because an ever
increasing number of actors are no longer conforming to their
abstractions (by exhibiting dimensions that we deemed irrelevant in the
process of abstraction, or by not behaving according to the models etc.).

These are not problems of implementation for technical limits to be
overcome by progress, but fundamental limitation of the these two
systems of abstraction/management.

Not everything can be expressed as a price. Even economists are now
arguing again about the difference between value and price. For
neo-liberals, is the same: the value of a thing is whatever somebody is
willing to pay for it, and therefor it cannot be too high or too low.


On 31.03.19 15:50, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

> AI systems do not sit well with consciousness, for AI makes its
> decisions on the basis of statistical correlations derived from
> computing power, and not on the basis of consciousness. AI systems run
> into problems difficult to foresee or comprehend once 

Re: rage against the machine

[Felix Stalder]

Thanks Ted, Scott and Morlock, this history is obviously more complex
and nuanced than the point I was trying to make, which was not
historical at all, but rather logical.

To my limited understanding, the black box in the airplane is not a
device to limit the complexity of the pilots' interaction with, or
understanding of, the plane by reducing a complex process to a simple
in/out relationship.

No, it's a flight recorder. During the flight, it has no output at all,
and in no way influences the processes of flying. It simply records
certain signals, including voice signals.

The plane would fly in exactly the same way if it wasn't there.

In this sense, it's a forensic, not a cybernetic tool. And as that, it's
function is actually exactly the opposite. It's a tool designed not to
hide but to reveal complexity, to make transparent what happens inside
the cockpit.

Just because there are procedural limits as to who is allowed to open
the box, and therefor it's "black" to some people (the pilots, the
airline technicians like Scott) doesn't make it a black box in the
cybernetic sense. Otherwise, every safe would be a cybernetic black box.

And because it's not a cybernetic object, it's not a good object to talk
about the problems of complexity and if/how we run a ever larger number
of processes at or beyond the outer limits of complexity that we can
manage. That was the only point I was trying to make.

But because Scott, who as detailed, first-hand knowledge of these
things, agrees with the cybernetic reading to plane's black box, I might
be mistaken here.

Felix


On 29.03.19 02:46, tbyfield wrote:
> Not so fast, Felix, and not so clear.
> 
> The origins of the phrase black box are "obscure," but the cybernetics
> crowd started using it from the mid-'50s. Their usage almost certainly
> drew on electronics research, where it had been used on a few occasions
> by a handful of people. However, that usage paled in comparison to the
> phrase's use among military aviators from early/mid in WW2 — *but not
> for flight recorders*. Instead, it described miscellaneous
> electro-mechanical devices (navigation, radar, etc) whose inner workings
> ranged from complicated to secret. Like many military-industrial objects
> of the time, they were often painted in wrinkle-finish black paint.
> Hence the name.
> 
> Designing advanced aviation devices in ways that would require minimal
> maintenance and calibration in the field was a huge priority — because
> it often made more sense to ship entire units than exotic spare parts,
> because the devices' tolerances were too fine to repair in field
> settings, because training and fielding specialized personnel was
> difficult, because the military didn't want to circulate print
> documentation, etc, etc. So those physically black boxes became, in some
> ways, "philosophical" or even practical black boxes.
> 
> Several of the key early cyberneticians contributed to the development
> of those devices at institutions like Bell Labs and the Institute for
> Advanced Studies, and there's no doubt they would have heard the phrase.
> In that context, the emphasis would have been on *a system that behaves
> reliably even though ~users don't understand it*, more than on *an
> object that's painted black*. Wartime US–UK cooperation in aviation was
> intense (the US used something like 80 air bases in the UK under the
> Lend–Lease program), so there was no shortage of avenues for slang to
> spread back and forth across the ocean. It's on that basis, a decade
> later, that Ross Ashby called a chapter of his 1956 book _Cybernetics_
> to "The Black Box." Given who he'd been working with, it's hard to
> imagine — impossible, I think — that he was unaware of this wider usage.
> (An exaggerated analogy: try calling someone looking at shop shelves a
> "browser.")
> 
> Some early aviators had come up with ad-hoc ways to record a few flight
> variables, but the first flight recorders as we now understand them
> started to appear around the mid-'50s. There's lots of folksy
> speculation about how these things — which weren't black and weren't
> box-shaped — came to be called "black boxes." I think the simplest
> explanation is best, even if it's the messiest: a combination of
> aviation slang and the fact that they were the state of the art when it
> came to sealed units. In the same way that the word "dark" clearly
> exerts some wide appeal (dark fiber, dark pools, dark web, dark money,
> etc), I think the idea of a "black box" held mystique — of a kind that
> would tend to blur sharp distinctions like the one you drew.
> 
> Anyway. Planes are interesting, but what led me down the path of
> studying these histories is what you point out — that the fusion of the

Re: rage against the machine

[Felix Stalder]

On 28.03.19 16:38, tbyfield wrote:

> Yes and no. In theory, plane crashes happen out in the open compared to
> other algorithmic catastrophes. In practice, the subsequent
> investigations have a very 'public secret' quality: vast expanses are
> cordoned off to be combed for every fragment, however minuscule; the
> wreckage is meticulously reconstructed in immense closed spaces;
> forensic regimes — which tests are applied to what objects and why — are
> very opaque. And, last but not least, is the holy grail of every plane
> crash, the flight recorder. Its pop name is itself a testament to the
> point I made earlier in this this thread about how deeply cybernetics
> and aviation are intertwingled: the proverbial 'black box' of
> cybernetics became the actual *black box* of aviation. But, if anything,
> its logic was inverted: in cybernetics the phrase meant a system that
> can be understood only through its externally observable behavior, but
> in aviation it's the system that observes and records the plane's behavior.
> 
> Black boxes are needed because, unlike car crashes, when planes crash
> it's best to assume that the operators won't survive. That's where the
> 'complexity' of your sweeping history comes in.

Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since
the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black
box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my
understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each other.

In the case of the black box in cybernetics, it stands for a
(complicated) processes of which we only (need to) know the relationship
between input and output, not its inner workings. In the case of the
airplane, the it's just a very stable case protecting various recorders
of human and machine signals generated in the cockpit. There is no
output at all, at least not during the flight.

There is, of course, a deep connection between aviation and cybernetics,
after all, the fusion of the pilot with the plane was the earliest
example of a system that could only be understood as consisting humans
and machines reacting to each other in symbiotic way. So, the main
thrust of the thread, and the rest of your post, are interesting, this
little detail irks me.

Felix



-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: EU == USSR v2.0 ?

[Felix Stalder]

On 27.03.19 22:05, Morlock Elloi wrote:

> EU is really another attempt at communism.

As I just wrote in another post, I think the US (and the UK and the EU)
far facing a similar structural crisis as the USSR faced in the 1970s.
Whether these countries turns out to be like the USSR, depends on their
ability to reform and respond the the nature of the crisis.

I'm not hopeful, but the analogy has nothing to do with communism. The
EU is a neo-liberal project, at its core (which, to me, is still better
than nationalism, but far from good).

Felix


-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: rage against the machine

[Felix Stalder]

On 24.03.19 14:28, Florian Cramer wrote:

> Travis suggests that the 737 MAX fiasco resulted from a combination of
> market economics/cost-optimization management and software 
> being used to correct hardware design flaws.

Yes. I think there are several factors involved that are in fact
indicative of a wider techno-political condition, it's just that in the
case of a plane crash, the effects and the investigation are
particularly public. I'm pretty sure, the set of problems involved here
is very common, it includes:

a) Lax oversight. A massive shift from government (aka public interest,
at least in theory) regulation to industry self-regulation. This is an
effect, as well as a cause of, the power shift between the two poles.

b) Consequently, the narrow interest of corporate actors (cost-cutting,
profitability, short-termness etc) dominate the equation of incentives.

c) Massive rise in complexity that increases the importance of
computation as a way of managing the resulting dynamics.

These three elements are, basically, the ingredients of the system of
neo-liberal globalization. And the most important aspect of this story
was that it has worked, not the least by being able to marginalize all
other systems over the last 40 years.

It's important to remember where this system came from, and here I keep
thinking of Castells brilliant analysis of the crises of
"industrialism", aka Fordism, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, which
occurred both in capitalist and socialist countries. The reason, so
Castells, was that Fordism as a mode of organization had reached the
internal limit of complexity it could handle. It was no longer able to
cope with the increasingly diverse and more rapidly changing demands and
pressures that characterized the socio-technical (and ecologic)
environment which it was supposed to organize. The Soviets went into 20
years of stagnation (basically, the era of Brezhnev) while the
capitalist countries went on a contentious processes of organizational
change, that reached its pitting point when Thatcher and Reagan came to
power.

By returning basically to a Hayekian notion of the market as a superior
information processors, by reducing the complexity of lived-experience
to the price signal, it emerged a system that was able to cope with, and
rapidly expand, the rising complexity of society.

The Soviet Union fell apart when belatedly trying to embark on similar
reforms (similar not in the sense of neoliberal, but in the sense of
acknowledging the rising complexity of society, by, for example,
recognizing the existence of civil society).

So, fast forward to today. I think we are witnessing a similar moment of
stasis, this time in the West.  The term gridlock describes both the UKt
as well as the US experience and the attempts to break through it are
seriously damaging the system. In a way, it's like punishing workers in
a dysfunctional system for not meeting their targets. It deepens the
dysfunction.  The EU is probably not far behind.

The system that has worked for the last 40 years is reaching the limits
of the complexity it can handle. The externalities produced by the
radical reduction of the lived experience to price signals are coming
back to haunt the system, which has no way of coping with it. The
attempts to put a price on "bads", say in the case of cap'n'trade have
failed. And similarly, the attempts to save the climate are failing.

The rise in complexity in itself is not a bad thing. Historically, as
far as I can tell, a reduction in complexity has always meant a
breakdown of civilization. That may well be in the offing, but that's
not a good thing.

But that also means that we need massive computation to cope, not
just to handle "hardware flaws", but to make the world inhabitable, or
to keep it inhabitable, for civilization to continue.

The problem, I think, is the combination of two massively reductionist
systems, that of price signals and that of digital simulation, that
cannot account for the complexity of the effects they produce and hence
generate all kinds of "black swans".

In the case of the plane crash, it's just out in the open, like in the
case of a massive stock market crash. The difference is only that in the
case of the plane crash, the investigation is also out in the open,
while in virtually all other cases, the investigation remains closed to
outsiders, to the degree that there is even one.


Felix



-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac





signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Felix Stalder]

On 08.02.19 03:27, Brian Holmes wrote:

> That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth 
> reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but
> it's fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go.
> Morozov has written the perfect intro for a critical read of what
> might become a landmark book- if the situation it describes does not
> again suddenly change beyond recognition, as it easily could.

I've read bit and pieces by now, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't
get better and is in line with her earlier articles and talks you can
find online.

Mozorov highlighted many of the problematic aspects of her approach,
which he boils down to her claim that the imbalance of power between the
individual user and corporations is a novel thing, and that prior to the
current phase, capitalism worked by making transparent offers to
rational consumers who would choose from these offers based on their
own, genuine needs and desires.

Thus her proposals to change the situation are all about restoring this
individual autonomy, through what she calls "right to the future" (aka
the ability to change ones life without being restricted by predictions
based on past behavior) and "right to sanctuary" (which, basically,
is an elaborate version of 'my home is my castle').

Mozorov puts lots of emphasis on her lack of engagement with other
theories of contemporary capitalism and her unwillingness to considers
options beyond the market. And, really, not even Wikipedia is ever
mentioned (expect as a source once) and Free Software only in relation
to Android and Google's strategy to dominate it. Thus, she never asks
why such alternatives exist and what could be done to support them. So,
the only alternative we get is Apple, the company, as Richard Stallman
famously put it, that "made prison look cool".

But not only does she barely engage with capitalism, she also does not
engage with the surveillance as a feature of contemporary life that
preceded "surveillance capitalism" by decades, if not centuries (a line
of thinking that stretches from Foucault to David Lyon et al). Strangely
enough, she also doesn't engage with the history of "behavioral
modification", which has played a major role in the history of
capitalism in the last 100 years. This ignorance is necessary to keep
her basic premise, about the sudden undermining of individual autonomy
alive.

Of course, there is much to like on the book as well, particularly her
claim that what we are living through is really a "coup from above: an
overthrow of the people’s sovereignty." But is this really the result of
"surveillance capitalism" or, more broadly, of neo-liberalism, as
post-democracy theory has been arguing since the late 1990s?

Nevertheless, it puts this again into the table and connects it to some
of the most powerful actors in the economy and it highlights the demands
for regulation. Which leads Mozorov to the following question:

> Should we accept the political utility of Zuboff’s framework while
> rejecting its analytical validity? I’d argue that we can proceed down
> that path only if we understand the price of doing so: a greater
> sense of confusion with regard to the origins, operations, and
> vulnerabilities of digital capitalism.

No. We need to come up with a better reading of the current situation
regarding informational capitalism.

Both Zuboff and Mozorov mention in passing Polanyi, though don't make
much of it. I think that concept of a fictitious commodity can be
usefully expanded. So far, this has mainly been done in relation to
knowledge [1], but this does not work well.

It works better with "engagement" as the commodity form of
"communication". I tried to develop this idea in a talk recently and
posted the relevant segment to nettime recently as "Engagement, a new
fictitious commodity"

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1901/msg00039.html

To expand a bit on this post: the old settlement between communication
as a social (non-market) activity and engagement as a commodity, created
by laws and ethical standards, broke down as new set of corporations
established a radical market-system for communication. Initially, this
was seen as a liberation, because the old settlement was unable to cope
with the rising diversity of cultural/political positions seeking new
forms of expression. But over time, the pressure to increase profits by
focusing solely on commodity production, and the pressures to operate in
such an environment placed on everyone, began to undermine communication
(as negotiation of shared meaning) more and more, to the degree that
within these radical market systems, almost all non-market element have
been destroyed, and hence, undermining societies ability to communicate.

Hence, we need to ask, what kind of resistance (aka double movement) and
new institutional arrangements do we need to protect and expand our
collective capacity to communicate. There are lots of possible answers

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Felix Stalder]

I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov

Felix

On 05.02.19 13:49, Patrice Riemens wrote:
> Original to:
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review
> 
> 
> 
> The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – we are
> the pawns
> Tech companies want to control every aspect of what we do, for profit. A
> bold, important book identifies our new era of capitalism
> By James Bridle
> Sat 2 Feb 2019, The Guardian
> 
> 
> The alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar.
> The smart thermostat in your bedroom, sensing your motion, turns on the
> hot water and reports your movements to a central database. News updates
> ping your phone, with your daily decision whether to click on them or
> not carefully monitored, and parameters adjusted accordingly. How far
> and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute,
> the contents of your text messages, the words you speak in your own home
> and your actions beneath all-seeing cameras, the contents of your
> shopping basket, your impulse purchases, your speculative searches and
> choices of dates and mates – all recorded, rendered as data, processed,
> analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages. The
> litany of appropriated experiences is repeated so often and so
> extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some
> dystopian imagining of the future, but the present.
> 
>     While insisting their technology is too complex to be legislated,
> companies spend billions lobbying against oversight
> 
> Originally intent on organising all human knowledge, Google ended up
> controlling all access to it; we do the searching, and are searched in
> turn. Setting out merely to connect us, Facebook found itself in
> possession of our deepest secrets. And in seeking to survive
> commercially beyond their initial goals, these companies realised they
> were sitting on a new kind of asset: our “behavioural surplus”, the
> totality of information about our every thought, word and deed, which
> could be traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every
> need – or producing it. In a move of such audacity that it bears
> comparison to the enclosure of the commons or colonial conquests, the
> tech giants unilaterally declared that these previously untapped
> resources were theirs for the taking, and brushed aside every objection.
> While insisting that their technology is too complex to be legislated,
> there are companies that have poured billions into lobbying against
> oversight, and while building empires on publicly funded data and the
> details of our private lives they have repeatedly rejected established
> norms of societal responsibility and accountability. And what is
> crucially different about this new form of exploitation and
> exceptionalism is that beyond merely strip-mining our intimate inner
> lives, it seeks to shape, direct and control them. Their operations
> transpose the total control over production pioneered by industrial
> capitalism to every aspect of everyday life.
> 
> The extraction is so grotesque, so creepy, that it is almost impossible
> to see how anyone who really thinks about it lives with it – and yet we
> do. There’s something about its opacity, its insidiousness, that makes
> it hard to think about, just as it’s hard to think about climate change,
> a process that will inevitably undo society as we currently understand
> it, yet is experienced by many of us as slightly better weather.
> Likewise the benefits of faster search results and turn-by-turn
> directions mask the deeper, destructive predations of what Shoshana
> Zuboff terms “surveillance capitalism”, a force that is as profoundly
> undemocratic as it is exploitative, yet remains poorly understood. As
> she details in her important new book, ignorance of its operation is one
> of the central strategies of this regime, and yet the tide is turning:
> more and more people express their unease about the surveillance economy
> and, disturbed by the fractious, alienated and trustless social sphere
> it generates, are seeking alternatives. It will be a long, slow and
> difficult process to extricate ourselves from the toxic products of both
> industrial and surveillance capitalism, but its cause is assisted by the
> weighty analysis provided by books such as this. Combining in-depth
> technical understanding and a broad, humanistic scope, Zuboff has
> written what may prove to be the first definitive account of the
> economic – and thus social and political – condition of our age.
> 
> Zuboff is no stranger to this territory. In her 1988 book In the Age of
> the Smart Machine, she addressed at the moment of their appearance in
> the business world many of the issues that have come to achieve
> dominance in our everyday life. Embedded within a large pharmaceutical
> 

Re: No evidence of digital wrong-doing...

[Felix Stalder]

You are absolutely right, these work in different registers, but I don't
think there is a clear hierarchical relations between them like in a
technological stack where one layer builds upon the other.

It's more like these are different ways to structure our understanding
of, and agency in, social reality and they co-exist at the same time.
Ideally, one would more or less balance out  the deficits of the other,
but at the moment, it's rather less than more.

So the idea would be and with one add yet other registers, or frames,
then different ways of understanding, and acting in, reality might be
opened up.

Felix

On 30.01.19 14:31, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> The three work on different protocol layers, going from top to low level
> (in OSI terms think of them as Application, Transport and Physical layers):
> 
> 1. Voting for someone involves some "thinking", in the sense "Is A
> better for me/my village/guild than B?"
> 
> 2. Mass media operates by displacing 1:1 human input/gossip with 1:many
> input, and is essential for creating group identity beyond the village
> (starting with Bible).
> 
> 3. Social media, the latest entrant, works (the real work, not the
> veneer) below the perception level, by exploiting finite nature of
> wetware, somewhat similar to DoS. If you don't have access to data (you
> don't), there is no way to know how exactly it works.
> 
> There are interactions between the three, mostly one-way, but it's a
> mistake to consider them operating at the same or even remotely similar
> level. None of them displaces the other, but the lower ones change the
> ground for the higher ones.
> 
> On 1/30/19, 04:29, Felix Stalder wrote:
>> Repesentative democracy: institutional capture by special interests and
>> money necessary to run a political campaigns.
>>
>> Mass media: small group of professional writers/speakers with narrow set
>> of opinions and often unacknowledged conflicts of interest.
>>
>> Social Media: polarization of opinion due to the speed and brevity of
>> exchanges and the focus of the platforms on producing segmented
>> "engagement".
> 
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #    is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
> 

-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: No evidence of digital wrong-doing...

[Felix Stalder]

On 28.01.19 13:46, carlo von lynX wrote:
> Even better when expert knowledge is in check by liquid
> democracy rather than size-limited citizen assemblies.
> We actually have a new technology that solves this
> challenge but it is still being used too rarely.


As far as I know from the German Pirate Party, the use of liquid
democracy has been pretty problematic, to say the least. But anyway,
these are different things, as David said, no either or.

Citizens' Assemblies are for a smaller number of citizens coming
together multiple times over longer period of times (say one year),
discussing, in depth and with experts, contentious issues. The
advantages of a small number is that you can be more clear with the
selection process (ensuring a minimum of diversity) and you can
materially suppor the participants (again, important is you want to
include people who canno affort "free labor".).

The advantage of such assemblies really lies in the qualitative
dimension, people from different backgrounds being forced to listen to
each other, respond face-to-face to each other, and seeing where
agreements can be reached and were disagreement might be rephrased to
change the question into something more productive.

This is really hard to replicate electroncially and with large number of
participants.

But to iniate this process now for Brexit, it's really too late. This
takes a long time, and it would mean, in effect, to day inside the EU
until the process is finished, and then we will see again, depending on
the outcome of the process.

What I've always wondered by Labor hasn't come up with their version of
Brexit and then called for a new elections to make sure they have the
majority to bring it through parliament. At least, then people could
vote, even indirectly, for their prefered version of the thing, without
having to re-do the vote, which would be problematic, to say the least.




Felix




-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: The Cryptopticon

[Felix Stalder]

In 2014, a protestor at an anti-fascist rally in Vienna was sentenced to
12 months of jail, for alleged participation in violent action.

Among the evidence that was held against him was using an non-registered
prepaid card. Even though that was entirely legal at the time, it was
held against him as evidence that we was actively engaged in obfuscating
his tracks, which meant, obviously, that he had planned to commit
crimes. To add to the absurdity of this case, this was before the EU
eliminated roaming charges, so lots of people bought disposable sim
cards when traveling aboard (as he did, coming from Germany) for the
simple reasons of saving telco charges.

Felix

[1]
https://derstandard.at/203552905/Da-macht-es-sich-die-Justiz-recht-einfach



On 07.01.19 10:07, Patrice Riemens wrote:

> People have chosen for convenience, even at the cost of all-round
> surveillance. But somewhere in their mind they know it's not 100% okay.
> So no wonder they stigmatize 'you'. Nothing like freedom to engender
> jealousy.
-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Felix Stalder]

On 06.01.19 01:03, Florian Cramer wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 7:57 PM Brian Holmes
> mailto:bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>> What we need, first of all, is a vision so carefully articulated that
>> it can become a strategy and a calculable plan.
>> Exactly that is now emergent. The point is to make it actual. That
>> means, to make it into the really existing state.
> 
> Your wording is interesting, because it connects "emergence" with the
> "state". Since the classical concept of emergence evolved around
> self-organization, it was decentralist. The state is a (more or less)
> centralist concept. The way you put it, it sounds as if you didn't have
> one particular state in mind, but a global concept of statehood that can
> enact global policies.

I think the two relate in interesting ways. What is emergent now is the
vision, and that does have to be decentralized, multiple,
locally-specific and spoken in many different languages. Only when this
vision is broad enough, flexible enough to resonate with different lived
realities, only then it can form the basis of a democratic politics.
Otherwise, it's Chinese style (or Thiel-envisioned) imposition from above.

But, vision is not enough (that's the take-away point from the occupy
movement outside of Spain), it must coalesce into a actual politics, so
it needs the state as centralized, or rather, collective actor. And
there is movement in this direction, around the idea of a green new deal.

So, in the new congress in the US, here is an attempt to "set up House
committee tasked with crafting, over the course of a year, a
comprehensive plan to move the U.S. away from fossil fuels by 2030."

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/green-new-deal-proposal-impacts/

At the moment, this is only a plan to set up a committee do develop a
plan, but it's certainly quite radical in terms of its ambition to
combine de-carbonization with a jobs program.


06.01.19 11:12, AllanInfo wrote:

> What I mean is this: where or in what way does the AS movement intersect
> with all the various/diverse forms of political insurgencies
> currently erupting in different countries? How does this relate to
> Brexit for example? Does the "Anthropocene Socialist” Movement intersect
> with DieM25 another example… Or Volt? Beyond a host of good ideas, what
> exactly is the political framework for the AS movement? Sorry to raise
> these rather practical questions but people here in Budapest are in the
> streets challenging the programme of an oppressive extreme right-wing
> government and I’ve been trying to figure out how this discussion
> relates to this ongoing struggle.

I think the case of the "gilets jaunes" is the clearest here. The
protest erupted over Macron's raising of the tax on gasoline, Diesel in
particular. The motive behind this was not entirely bad, but raising the
prices for pollution, without offering a viable alternative is just
deeply unsocial, because the rich will not feel the difference while the
suburban middle classes will see experience this as just another way in
which they get screwed by a deeply biased system. This is why simply
doing an "ecological tax reform", the classic demand of the Green
Parties of the 1990s, is no longer enough.

What is quite amazing with the "gilets jaunes", as far as I can see, and
this really speaks to the maturity of French politics, is that the deep
disaffection with the current politics it expresses, has not been
captured (yet?) by the far right. This really means there is a lot of
social energy up for grabs, available for an idea of brighter future,
that can offer both a short term answer to pressing needs, but also a
longer term vision of how live will be different, and better!, in 20
years time. At the moment, this is simply not there yet, but the green
new deal, perhaps even the commons, offers the beginning of a framework.

In terms of Diem25, Varoufakis, in a recent talk at the Oxford Union,
has pointed to the various development banks, that exists on the
international, but also the EU and national level, as existing vehicle
through which to organize such a large-scale investment program. He also
stressed that four major issues that need to be solved at the same time
by a comprehensive political action: climate change, unemployment,
public debt and migration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWB6lY2GBjQ

It's quite clear how they relate, but taking on climate change and debt
at the same time (and they need to be addressed at the same time) means
confronting not only not only the fossil-industrial complex, but also
the core segments of the financial industry. Quite a task.




.







-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text 

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Felix Stalder]

On 30.12.18 13:53, Keith Hart wrote:
> But -- there has to be a but -- I believe that there is one crippling
> intellectual impediment above all others that undermines political
> initiatives generated in this network. It is the belief that more
> solidarity can fix excessive individualism.
> 
> When I grew up in Manchester after the war, solidarity was a powerful
> weapon against privacy, the cult of being exclusive.

That was, I hope, not my point, and whatever element of collectivity
informs a humane reaction to climate change, will have to look every
different from the collectivity that was produced by the experience of
industrial work. We live in an "information society" hence each element,
including each human being, can be (and often is) defined more
extensively, and more varied ways than in an industrial context.

Hence, while identity politics, in practice, often create dead ends,
producing multually exclusive niches, very well-served by social media
that specialize in niche-marketing, the answer cannot be, in my view, a
return of simple collective. Rather, is has to lie in finding ways of
create resonance across the different niches, to articulate ways to
create an understanding of a shared fate on some levels while continuing
to articulate multiplicity on others.

I also don't want to revive the old individual-vs-society debate that
haunted 20th century sociology, rather I think we have moved beyond this
and can now start from a relatively well-establised ecological
perspective that highlights how agent(s) and environment(s) are
co-producing each other.

But, for now, this all remains too abstract, not tied into a idea of
collective agency. But it is not unthinkeable to combine a socially
liberal idea of the self with a strong collective idea of public
investment into the transformation of the energy sources of society.

This can be done on all levels, local, regional, national. And it
actully happens in bits and pieces in a lot of places and contexts. What
is lacking in the imaginery that ties together differnet elements, that
produces clear flautlines to isolate and combate those who fight this
transformation.

This, I think, is eminently doable, but opens up a new rift. In the same
way that neo-liberalism opened a conflict between economic globalization
and the global justice movement, this could open the rift between
authoritarian geoingeering and democratic green economy. We are not
their yet, not by far.








-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Felix Stalder]

On 27.12.18 20:11, Brian Holmes wrote:
> So what's to be done is to generate new aspirations, new ideas of the
> good life, and initial models for putting them into practice at local or
> regional scale. Please notice, I am NOT talking about individual models
> - because as much good as that can do is already being done. Instead
> it's about imagining a transformed government, and a new, more intricate
> relation between state and civil society. Inequality will be a big
> driver for this, especially as AI starts kicking in and more and more
> people lose their jobs, or never succeed in getting one. Flood control,
> drought response and the relocation of populations will require major
> collective investments - and here, collective means some level of what
> is called the state. Anthropocene Socialism will emerge pragmatically,
> as an increasingly mixed economy, with the state handling problems on a
> scale that no individual or corporation can address, from medical care
> to clean energy provision to river management, and let's not forget the
> geoengineering, because it will be needed at planetary scale. 


There are multiple challenges nestled into one another, and there cannot
be a single answer to them. So there are many, and we see them being
formulated all around us -- from platform coops, to fair trade,
non-corporate information systems, decentralized renewable energy, local
currencies, and the revival of non-western ecological thinking, to name
but a few.

However, what is missing are points of connection, translations,
transformation and bridging where one particular local/cultural response
to the challenges can be made useful for other ones, somewhere else, and
according to a different cultural logic. These kind of bridges from one
closed network to another are more urgent than ever, not the least to
overcome the the cellular character of machine-mediated communication,
as Morlock called it a couple of weeks ago.

But to break out of the mold of neoliberal hyper-individuality and the
cult of "weak ties", to formulate something like a left perspective,
there needs to be a realization of a common fate, of a problem that
cannot be solved individually, but demands a collective response. From
this, a practice of solidarity can be built.

In the industrial society, the common fate (of the working class) was a
experience of exploitation in the work place. For a long time, I thought
"climate change", the destruction of the ground on which civilization is
built, could provide that for the 21st century. But so far, this hasn't
happened, and I think it will not, because even while sweating through
yet another heat wave, or fleeing from yet another 1-in-100-year
hurricane, the issue remains too abstract, too far removed from social
agency. And as long as this is the case, the climate change denialists
will win, because they at least offer the comfort of ignorance, rather
acknowledging a problems but offering no solution (which is politically
the worst approach).

I now think the mistake was to think that a common problem would provide
enough impetus for solidarity, while more likely it is the proposed
collective solution to this problem, that can inspire solidarity. So, in
terms of industrial society, not the experience of exploitation but
practice of unionization was the key (though, lets not forget, also
fascism promised an solution to exploitation (at least of the indigenous
working class)).

From this, we can think of a political map consisting of four groups.

One (I) being the denialists who want to continue their very profitable
lines of business no matter there are rising costs of externalities,
precisely because they treat these as externalities: costs paid by
others. I think in terms of institutional power, this group is the
majority, but in terms of number of people, this is a minority.

The second group (II) knows -- explicitly or intuitively -- that
something needs to be done, that industrial civilization is reaching its
end point, one way or the other. But they don't know what to do so they
do nothing, creating all kinds cognitive stresses to which xenophobes
and racists offer relief. This, in terms of number of people, is the
majority.

The other two groups know that something needs to be done, and are
actively doing something. They share a lot of things, but what separates
them is whether they see climate change as broad social justice issue
(III), even if they have trouble formulating it, and those who see it as
a specialized issue that needs to be addressed without major
modification of the political economy (IV). I personally think this is
impossible and that the later group will drift into authoritarianism as
a way to address issues that our current political institutions are not
capable of addressing (e.g. which city to save and which is abandon,
Miami or New Orleans?).

The first phase of the political fight is about group I against group
III and IV. At the moment, group I is 

Re: apropos "relax dear"

[Felix Stalder]

At the moment, nettime is largely unmoderated, with a very small number
of people set to manual approval by the moderators.

The difficult part is, of course, to decide when to put someone on
"moderation watch". Personally, I've been quite reluctant to do that,
not for some absolutist notion of free speech -- there is no right to
attack and denigrate people, no right to produce confusion and hatred,
and no right to bore everyone to death with belaboring the same points.
Also, nettime still has a collective focus, which involves trying to
think through the contemporary condition from a point of view of
producers of media culture (if such a thing can be still delineated).

The reason I'm reluctant to do is that I think it's better to draw such
boundaries collectively, to use these moments to rethink what the list
is. This is, admittedly, a somewhat "inefficient" approach and it often
creates not very productive loops until everyone gets so annoyed that
they speak up, but I personally don't know a better way.

So, please help us to respond more quickly by speaking up on the list or
sending us private mails.

Felix




On 06.11.18 12:19, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
> friends, i'm an active lurker on this list since 1996; my answer to
> angela's question ("What is Nettime's policy on whether or not it should
> give fascists a platform from which to recruit?") would be that
> "nettime" probably doesn't have a "policy" on anything, other than the
> openness to questions; i'm sure there are people here who can put this
> in a more nuanced theoretical language, but i imagine the list and the
> discourse it supports as "in flux" and as something that takes its shape
> through the things that people write, and through the ways in which they
> respond to each other. - in the given case, the point for me would be
> not to ask what some (general) "policy" might be, but to state clearly
> and concretely that i'm against allowing anything that smacks of fascist
> trolling or recruitment. a statement like this constitutes the quality
> of this list which has, as its "policy", only a certain, vague
> collective spirit which requires critical voices like angela's to
> express their opinion. therefore: i support ted's decision to moderate
> some of the contributions since, given 22 years of trust-building, i
> believe he is acting in the spirit of the list and the discourse it
> serves to constitute.
> (not sure whether this is an answer to julia's question.)
> regards,
> -a
> 
> 
> Am 05.11.18 um 01:57 schrieb Julia Röder:
>> about that
>>
>>  > dear angela,
>>  > relax dear.
>>  > it is ok.
>>  > noone is recruiting anyone here.
>>  > chill.
>>  > best,
>>  > w
>>
>> so, is that it? silence about this from the whole list except from
>> angela?
>> do you all not say anything because you think this is trolling or this
>> is normal??



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Complexity and nostalgia

[Felix Stalder]

I cannot believe we are still debating "class vs. identity". If you look
at the current wave of far-right strong mean, it's seems obvious their
project is the restoration of race AND class privilege AND patriarchy.

Behind this, in my view, is a jump in social complexity (globalization,
Internet, climate crises, multipolar geopolitics etc) over the last 30
years and the inability to find forms of governance adequate to
contemporary social realities.

The neoliberal center has tried to manage this through expansion of
market forces, in the best Hayekian tradition seeing the market as the
ultimate information processor [1]. At the periphery (social as well as
geographic) this never worked particularly well and in 2008, it came
crashing down in the center as well. That created a giant nostalgia for
a less complex word which the right eagerly fills.

In my view, the call to return to a more classic class analysis also has
the whiff of such a nostalgia.

We -- lets say cultural producers of any kind -- should not give in to
this. Our task, in my view, is to develop new languages, and new
esthetics, to account for, and deal with, the sharply increased
complexity. That means, that there is no single privileged point-of-view
or layer of analysis. If there is any strength, it will come out of
multiplicity, out of ways of translating one set of explicit experiences
into another one, showing that how and why resonate with each other.

That's not all that's needed, of course, but might be one of the ways
where culture can generate agency.


















[1] Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society,”
American Economic Review (Sept.), 35 (4): 519–30.




signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

YouTubers Union!

[Felix Stalder]

[It doesn't seem like gaining much traction beyond the occasional media
story. But still, it's interesting in terms of the demands. Two new
basic rights are demanded: the right to be recognized as a market
participant and to right to be heard by a human. Felix]


The Spark

https://youtubersunion.org/

Welcome to the official homepage of the YouTubers Union!

We are a community based movement that fights for the rights of YouTube
Creators and Users. Our core demands are:

- Monetize everyone - Bring back monetization for smaller channels.

- Disable the bots - At least verified partners have the right to speak
to a real person if you plan to remove their channel.

- Transparent content decisions - Open up direct communication between
the censors ("content department") and the Creators.

- Pay for the views - Stop using demonetized channels as "bait" to
advertise monetized videos.

- Stop demonetization as a whole - If a video is in line with your
rules, allow ads on an even scale.

- Equal treatment for all partners - Stop preferring some creators over
others. No more “YouTube Preferred”.

- Pay according to delivered value - Spread out the ad money over all
YouTubers based on audience retention, not on ads next to the content.

- Clarify the rules - Bring out clear rules with clear examples about
what is OK and what is a No-No.


United We Stand!





-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.key-server.io/search/0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

the rising costs of denial

[Felix Stalder]

I think one of the major drivers of the collapse of the political center
and the rise of the far right across the globe, across widely differing
contexts, is the collective inability to deal with the reality of
climate change.

The political center -- with with its post-democratic commitment to
science, technology, numbers and experts -- cannot the deny the reality
of climate change, both in terms of immediate experience (very year,
were are all witnessing numerous, well-reported
"once-in-a-hundred-years" climatic events), and in terms of predictions
that become more dire every year.

But the centrist actors are too corrupt to translate this
acknowledgement of impeding catastrophe into any action. By corrupt, I
don't mean only classic corruption, like the various scandals
de-legitimizing political parties in Brazil, but also structural and
institutional corruption such as the way US politics is dependent on
private money, or the way the German government is subservient to its
major industries.

In some ways, the German example is the most shocking, because Germany
is a relatively well-run country, with comparatively decent media, still
somewhat functioning political parties, lots of money, expertise and a
stated political commitment to energy transition ("Energiewende"). But
even here, politics is unwilling to confront well-documented criminal
activities of its key industry. Which has been caught manipulating
emission caps and, in effect, polluting the entire population with all
the associated health consequences that are well known. The scope of
this scandal and the weakness of the grand coalition to address it is
hard to underestimate.

What the political center is effectively communicating is that they know
the problems but they cannot, or don't want to, act to solve them:
"We're doomed, but we cannot do anything about it, please vote for us."
This is hardly an appealing proposition and it's not surprising people
don't fall for it. And all of this in the name of reason and realism.

The far right never cared about reason and realism, and it's answer to
the problem of climate change is to simply deny its existence all
together. Not the least because the unmitigated exercise of state power
against the "other", the core political recipe of the far right, is
irrelevant here.

But compared to the center -- which acknowledges the problem without
addressing it -- the far-right is consistent, it denies the existence of
the problem so that fact that it cannot address becomes irrelevant.

There is a quote floating around, usually attributed to Nietzsche but
never sourced, that "people choose bad meaning over no meaning" and to
some degree, this far-right offers bad meaning, while the center offers
no meaning, and the left barely exist beyond the grassroots and the city
level.

But the costs of denying the obvious are rising as the right needs to go
to ever more extreme measures to continue its approach. Science is being
de-funded and discredited (at a time, when China is investing
massively), government agencies are handed over to lobbyists
hell-bent on gutting and dismantling them, or they create fake events
such as the never-ending panic over immigration, or Brexit. And what
will be next? War?

This denial even is part of what makes the strange coalition between
ethno-nationalists and globalized financial elites work in the first
place. They both live well with it. While the ethno-nationalists prepare
for unrest through borders and militarizing the police, the financiers
are preparing to ride out the storm on their own private island, guarded
by global mercenaries, or better yet, robots.











-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.key-server.io/search/0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Spain court confirms jail sentence for former IMF chief Rato

[Felix Stalder]

All possibilities of appeal are exhausted, one of the most high-profile
bankers of Spain needs to go to jail now. This makes Spain only the
second country (after Iceland) where any prominent banker were sent to
jail following the 2008 financial crisis. What this article fails to
mention, like all others I found, is that the trial and conviction was
due to an unprecedented citzien's campaign (led by people such as Simona
Levi), which raised funds, hired lawyers and organized leaks to gather
evidence. More on this aspect in an (older) article in The Nation.

https://www.thenation.com/article/in-search-of-the-lost-republic



-


https://www.expatica.com/new/es/spain-court-confirms-jail-term-for-ex-imf-chief-rato/

Spain’s Supreme Court on Wednesday confirmed former IMF chief Rodrigo
Rato’s jail sentence of four years and six months for misusing funds in
a case that sparked outrage when it was uncovered at the height of the
country’s economic crisis.

In February 2017, Rato was found guilty by the Madrid-based National
Court of paying for personal expenses with credit cards put at his
disposal when he was the boss of Caja Madrid and Bankia, at a time when
both banks were in difficulty.

The 69-year-old, who is also a former Spanish economy minister, had
since then been free on bail pending an appeal.

The case shocked Spain, where it was uncovered at the height of the
crisis that left many people struggling financially. Bankia later had to
be nationalised.

Far-left party Podemos welcomed the court ruling, saying Spaniards had
long demanded justice “for those who robbed public money, for those who
ripped off thousands of families, for those who burdened us with debt
for life”.

“We applaud the fact that some of those responsible, like Rodrigo Rato,
get at least part of what they deserve,” it said in a tweet.

– Misuse of 12 million euros –

Rato was tried with 64 other former executives and board members at both
banks accused of misusing a total of 12 million euros ($13.8 million)
between 2003 and 2012 in personal expenses.

Those included petrol for their cars, supermarket shopping, pricey
holidays, luxury bags or parties in nightclubs.

One of the executives, Miguel Blesa — Rato’s predecessor at Caja Madrid
— was sentenced to six years in jail.

In July 2017, Blesa was found dead with a gunshot wound to his chest at
a private hunting estate in southern Spain.

An autopsy ruled it was suicide.

– Second trial –

The Supreme Court will now notify the National Court of its decision,
which will then summon Rato and give him a deadline — usually 10 to 15
days — to allow him to pick a prison and go there voluntarily.

Authorities will issue an arrest warrant against him if he does not.

Rato was economy minister and deputy prime minister in the conservative
government of Jose Maria Aznar from 1996 to 2004, before going on to
head up the International Monetary Fund until 2007.

His subsequent career as a banker in Spain was short-lived — from 2010
to 2012. But apart from the case of the undeclared credit cards, it also
led to another banking scandal considered the country’s biggest.

Thousands of small-scale investors lost their money after they were
persuaded to convert their savings to shares ahead of the flotation of
Bankia in 2011, with Rato at the reins.

Less than a year later, he resigned as it became known that Bankia was
in dire straits.

The state injected billions of euros but faced with the scale of
Bankia’s losses and trouble in other banks, it asked the European Union
for a bailout for the entire banking sector and eventually received 41
billion euros.

Rato is due to stand trial over the case, accused of falsifying
information about Bankia’s finances to encourage investors to buy into
its stock market listing.

He is the third former IMF chief to get into trouble with the law.

His successor Dominique Strauss-Kahn was tried in 2015 on pimping
charges in a lurid sex scandal, and was acquitted.

And Christine Lagarde, who took over from Strauss-Kahn and is the
current IMF chief, was found guilty of negligence over a state payout to
a tycoon when she was French finance minister, though she received no
penalty.

-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.key-server.io/search/0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Quick Review..

[Felix Stalder]

On 2018-09-11 18:15, podinski wrote:
> For me, it was interesting to zoom in and examine this notion that the
> alt.right might be seen as co-opting elements of the transgressive arts
> of the last decades... to fuel their own political power / agendas...

While this might be an adequate description on an esthetic level, what
is lacking, and what has lacked for a long time on the left, is an
analysis of power.

The culturally inclined fraction of the far right saw the control over
discourse, the ability of the (neo)liberal center to  make it
effectively impossible to utter opinions outside a very narrow band
(free market in economy, "post-structuralism" in culture, numbers and
experts in policy making) as a crucial element in their own
marginalization and effectively preventing the building a new alliances.
They wanted to break this control, hence their relentless attacks on
"political correctness" (largely a made-up bogeyman, whose fabrication
was made all the easier by the antics of self-absorbed "radical"
academics), hence their constant trolling of any fora that seemed to be
informed by such ideas, hence their undermining of rational discourse
itself (a fixture of the anti-enlightenment wing of the right).

But this was not an end in itself.

This contributed to opening the space for the formation of a new
power-block consisting of traditional conservatives (small government,
tax cuts), segments of the economy that realized that China was
beginning to dominate "free trade" and disaffected working and
middle-classes who formulated their decline/frustration not in economic
terms but in cultural ones (racist, misogynist, nativist, religious
etc). This has been enabled and financed by those segments of the elite,
who know that their game is ending (petrocapitalism and financialism)
but want to continue the fracking of nature and society a little longer,
privatizing more profits and socializing more costs.

What the right managed to do is the give each of these groups something
that they wanted, in return for accepting some things they don't like.
Steve Kurz spoke of the "faustian bargain" of the religious right and
the types of intention this introduces into the some of these groups.

On the left there has been no analysis of power for a long time. Since
the 1960s, their "transgressions" were done in the pursuit of some vague
notion of "justice" or "personal freedom". Indeed, much of the left, at
least in cultural terms, has been "against power" (a ridiculous notion
in and off itself) with very little notion of what should replace the
system of neoliberalism that is so clearly tottering. This lack of power
analysis made it easier to accept the strange notions of "empowerment"
and other ideas of social change developed within the circles of
philantropy.

See, for example, this interview with Anand Giridharadas: Calling Out
Phony Philanthropists

https://www.philanthropy.com/article/calling-out-phony/244373

Q: You write that the phoniness of social-change efforts led by elites
contributed to Donald Trump’s election. Explain.

A: You cannot understand the rise of Trump without understanding the
elite conquest and privatization of social change-making. I think a lot
of rich Democrats laid the groundwork for Donald Trump in a couple of
ways. By promulgating pseudo-change, they created space for him. All the
nonsolutions to real problems meant that those problems festered over 30
or 40 years.

From what I know, there have been attempts to connect some segments of
the religious block with environmentalism (responsibility to look after
god's creation) but beyond the European movement against GMO (which
connects people who are against meddling with NATURE, to people are
concerned about the validity of the science, to people who are against
private ownership of life-forms and the threat this poses to small
farmers) it doesn't seem to have progressed a lot.

Felix










-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.key-server.io/search/0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Malaga: Casa Invisible is here to stay! (Text by Gerald Raunig)

[Felix Stalder]

transversal.at
Casa Invisible is here to stay!
http://transversal.at/blog/Invisible-is-here-to-stay

Gerald Raunig, Translation: Kelly Mulvaney

After two-and-a-half hours marching through the city, the protest took a
turn onto Calle Larios, the central avenue of pomp in Málaga’s center,
at 10 pm. A wave goodbye to the vehicle carrying the band that had been
leading the protest for so long, and the march moves on into the
pedestrian zone. Suddenly and with no announcement, the first seven rows
of superheroínas invisibles begin to run, not quite such “invisible”
superheroines, they overtake the six-man line of police and run the
whole way to the Plaza Constitución, where the final rally is supposed
to take place. Incompliant flight, breaking through the consumption and
movement patterns of the expensive shopping mile, stares of disbelief
from passersby and even most of the protest participants are astounded
by what is possible on this day.


img

How is this possible in a city that has become more and more beholden to
tourism? That caves in to the assignment and handing-over of the city
center to speculation, gentrification and touristification? Culture
instrumentalized as attraction in the competition amongst cities and as
brand in the service of tourism – from the claim to Picasso’s birthplace
to the countless museum institutions erected of mediocre quality? How is
this possible, above all, in a city that is now also shedding its
liberal cloak and attempting to evict the sole remaining sociocultural
oasis in the thoroughly-touristified desert of its center?

For over eleven years Casa Invisible has been a guarantor of alternative
cultures and ecologies of care, and it has also been a social machine
for everything that is incompliant in spite of, and in the middle of,
the compliant city: feminist cafes and workshops, antiracist and
refugees-welcome groups, concerts, local meetings of the PAH (platform
against evictions), meetings of the movement Málaga no se vende and of
the Sindicato Inquilinas, discursive events held by the Universidad
Libre Experimental (ULEX), dance and theatre workshops, technopolitical
initiatives, and much more. The building, occupied in 2007, was built in
the 19th century; it has a wonderfully shaded patio and is an island in
the middle of the multiply sold-out, instrumentalized and valorized
city. Embedded in a somewhat inhospitable environment, the Casa
Invisible is instituent practice, a new form of sociocultural
institution, multi-generational, transversal and diverse in all directions.


img

As part of a federal strategy, the right-wing neoliberal party
Ciudadanos began to attack social centers across Spain at the beginning
of this year, precisely because social centers, thanks to their practice
of occupation, break through the extreme economy of appropriation and
extraction of the compliant city. It is particularly annoying for the
right-wingers that this kind of island against property and speculation
exists in many Spanish cities. In Málaga’s case, the Ciudadanos members
of the city parliament have been pressuring the longstanding mayor of
the Partido Popular to give up his legal “tolerance” of the occupied
Invisible and, after eleven years, to call for the building to be
evicted due to flimsy administrative reasons.

But the Invisible can’t be evicted just like that. On March 10, 2018,
there was an initial colorful protest against the threat of eviction,
and even a steady and steadily heavier rainfall was no reason to stop
the action or give up the joy of occupying public space. Singing and
dancing in the rain, with a fondness for doing so in front of the city hall.


img

On July 19 a new and apparently more urgent announcement of eviction
came from the municipality, and an even larger protest march in support
of the Casa Invisible made its way through the city. With slogans such
as “La Invisible se queda” (Invisible is here to stay), “somos
indesalojables” (we are unevictable), “La Invi no se toca” (No one
touches Invi), thousands of people met in front of the social center and
took off on a common march through the city. The mayor, Francisco
(“Paco” or “Paquito”) de la Torre received special attention on this
day, as choruses like these rang out through the streets: “Dónde está
Paquito, Paquito dónde está, Paquito está vendiendo lo que queda de la
ciudad” (Where is Paquito? Paquito where are you? Paquito is selling off
the rest of the city) or “Paco escucha, La Invi está en la lucha”
(Listen Paco, Invi is fighting). This struggle is not just a struggle
for an occupied building and its users, but also a struggle against the
complete appropriation of the city, against a Mall-aga of the muelle
uno, which turned the port into a mall, against the compliant
superficialities of the consumption of culture and sociality that are
extending into all parts of the city center.

But Málaga no se vende – Málaga is not for sale!, as movements against
the sale of the city centers 

Manipulating individuals, your wife or Jeremy Corbin, by micro-targeting Facebook ads

[Felix Stalder]

[Throughout the day, I was wondering whether a new service offered by a
company called "The Spinner" was real or satire. Their pitch is the
following:

> The Spinner* is a service that enables you to control articles
> presented to your wife on the websites she usually visits, in order
> to influence her on a subconscious level to initiate sex.

https://www.thespinner.net

This hits so many button about how toxic online ad-tech, and start-up
tech culture more generally, has become, that I was leaning towards
seeing this as satire, but then it was revealed that Labour Party
campaign also ran a campaign targeting an individual, the party leader
Jeremy Corbin (and his closest associates) trying to warp his perception
of what the party itself was doing. The whole story is below, and most
likely not satire. Felix]


Facebook ad micro-targeting can manipulate individual politicians
Anonymous Labour Party official to Tom Baldwin

https://theoutline.com/post/5411/facebook-ad-micro-targeting-can-manipulate-individual-politicians

Caroline Haskins
Jul—16—2018 11:42AM EST


At least one political party is avoiding negotiating by using
micro-targeted Facebook ads focused on just the politician and their
inner circle, and the same tool could be used to manipulate people with
major influence on public opinion. During the 2017 U.K. general
elections, Jeremy Corbyn, the incumbent 69-year-old leader of the Labour
Party, wanted to invest heavily in digital ads encouraging voter
registration. Labour Party campaign chiefs thought it was a waste of
money and so decided to trick the incumbent leader of their own party.

They spent £5,000 on voter registration Facebook ads that met Corbyn’s
demands, but here’s the catch: only Corbyn and his associates could see
them. According to a forthcoming book from Tom Baldwin, a former Labour
communications director, they were individually-targeted, hyper-specific
ads made possible through Facebook’s advertising tools, reports The
Times and The Independent. “If it was there for them [Corbyn and his
associates], they thought it must be there for everyone,” an unnamed
Labour Party official said to Baldwin. “It wasn’t. That’s how targeted
ads can work.”

Using Facebook’s Custom Audience advertising tool, businesses and
campaigns can “sniper target” people by individually submitting
information that matches Facebook profiles — like names, email
addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, and gender. The tool cannot
target down to a literal individual and requires at least a couple dozen
people for a campaign to run.

Since a number of political situations have unfolded in the last couple
of years that, in retrospect, were heavily influenced by Facebook, the
company started a political ad archive and significantly raised the bar
on what it will approve as a political ad. But it put these measures in
place only a few weeks ago, and it’s limited to ads targeting areas in
the U.S., meaning that we don’t currently have a side-by-side comparison
of what ads Corbyn and his inner circle were served as opposed to the
general public. The book, Ctrl Alt Delete: How Politics and the Media
Crashed Our Democracy, purports to provide specific examples of what
Corbyn would have seen.


On one hand, this is a strange story about how a baby boomer politician
and his closest political buddies did not know what ads were being
served on behalf of their own campaign. (Granted, the structure of the
U.K. government means that party elections have astronomically low
financial stakes. £4.3 million was spent across all U.K. political
parties for the 2017 election; compare that to the $10 billion
advertising price tag for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.) But more
importantly, it illustrates how Facebook’s “sniper targeting”
advertising tools can be used to infiltrate the thoughts of major public
figures and their closest allies, and in a successful scenario,
manipulate their thinking. As of May, Facebook has new thresholds for
political ads, which broadly includes anything related to a candidate,
election, vote, legislative issue. But anything that doesn’t fit into
that definition of “political” will remain relatively unregulated.
Clearly, this has huge implications for businesses and companies
struggling with internal division.

Or, say one has the email addresses and phone numbers of Donald Trump
Jr. and a few of his buddies (t...@theoutline.com). Don Junior is
extremely active on social media and frequently likes and interacts with
targeted ads. If one wanted to get a message to Don, a Custom Audience
and some carefully-chosen text over a picture of a luxury yacht or
smoked piece of meat would do the trick. (These are, to the best of our
knowledge, real Instagram ad interests of Donald Trump Junior, as
unveiled by a Slate investigation.)

This is a facetious example, but the tool could be used to generate real
harm if put into the hands of people with the power to spread conspiracy
theories, such as Alex Jones or 

Barcelona Energia flicks the switch

[Felix Stalder]

[This strikes me as a winning formula. Connect the issue of sovereignty
with a program for clean energy. There is a deep, and quite justified,
fear among large segments of the population (at least in Europe) of
having lost control over out individual and collective destiny.
Neoliberal globalization gutted democracy and made people's lifes
dependent on global flows that they cannot control and often don't make
sense. The costs of denying climate change is mounting, you need someone
as extreme and stupid as Trump to do it. But the repressed is never
gone, but channeled into something else.

So, neoliberal globalization as an ideology (not so much as a practice)
is dead. The traditional centrist parties (right and left) bought so
deeply into it, that they have nothing to offer as an alternative

At the moment, this is all fused into isolationist nationalism and
xenophobic hatred against immigrants. But the two projects -- renewal of
democracy for regaining some measure of sovereignty -- and transition
towards cleaner energy can mobilized differently. And this is an example
of how!]



Barcelona Energia flicks the switch | Info Barcelona
30/06/2018 20:00 h

https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/barcelona-energia-flicks-the-switch_683855.html

Besides saving money, the public distributor aims to head the transition
towards  energy sovereignty in the city by backing renewable local power
generation and encouraging more responsible and rational energy consumption.

Barcelona Energia will be distributing the power generated at the plants
it currently manages. These are: 41 solar panels installed on municipal
buildings, the energy recovery plant in Sant Adrià de Besòs, and the
biogas plant at the Garraf landfill site.

Independence from major power companies

The distribution of 100% green local energy breaks the dependency on the
current electrical oligopoly and combats climate change by cutting
greenhouse gas emissions produced by transporting the energy we consume,
as well as reducing energy loss which occurs during the same transport
process.

By making its services available to the public from January 2019 the
company will be taking another step forward in promoting a new energy
culture in the city, offering advice for users to increase consumption
efficiency and also promoting the self-generation of solar energy. The
prevision is that the energy could be supplied to 20,000 families in the
metropolitan area.

Barcelona Energia is the largest 100% public power distributor in the
Spanish state and is already inspiring other initiatives by local
administrations, such as those by the city councils in Cádiz and Pamplona.


-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.key-server.io/search/0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

RIP: Koko

[Felix Stalder]

PRESS RELEASE for Immediate Release

The Gorilla Foundation is sad to announce the passing of our beloved Koko

June 20, 2018 | http://www.koko.org/node/2257

Woodside, CA  Koko — the gorilla known for her extraordinary mastery
of sign language, and as the primary ambassador for her endangered
species — passed away yesterday morning in her sleep at the age of 46.

Koko touched the lives of millions as an ambassador for all gorillas and
an icon for interspecies communication and empathy. She was beloved and
will be deeply missed.

Koko, a western lowland gorilla, was born Hanabi-ko (Japanese for
“Fireworks Child”) on July 4, 1971 at the San Francisco Zoo. Dr.
Francine “Penny” Patterson began working with Koko the next year,
famously teaching her sign language. Dr. Patterson and Dr. Ronald Cohn
moved Koko and the project to Stanford in 1974 and went on to establish
The Gorilla Foundation. While at Stanford the project expanded to
include a second western lowland gorilla, Michael. In 1979 Koko and The
Gorilla Foundation moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains where Ndume joined
them as a fellow ambassador for their species.

Koko’s capacity for language and empathy has opened the minds and hearts
of millions. She has been featured in multiple documentaries and
appeared on the cover of National Geographic twice. The first cover, in
October of 1978, featured a photograph Koko had taken of herself in a
mirror. The second issue, in January of 1985, included the story of Koko
and her kitten, All Ball. Following the article, the book Koko’s Kitten
was published and continues to be used in elementary schools worldwide.
Her impact has been profound and what she has taught us about the
emotional capacity of gorillas and their cognitive abilities will
continue to shape the world.

The foundation will continue to honor Koko’s legacy and advance our
mission with ongoing projects including conservation efforts in Africa,
the great ape sanctuary on Maui, and a sign language application
featuring Koko for the benefit of both gorillas and children.

For press inquiries or to make a tax-deductible donation to the Koko
Fund, please contact Joy Chesbrough, The Gorilla Foundation’s Chief
Development Officer, at: 1-800-ME-GO-APE ext 14.

For general inquiries and condolences, please email kokol...@koko.org



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Athens: Plato’s Academy and its neighborhood are at risk!

[Felix Stalder]

Hi Alexandre,

> I appreciate the reply. And will attempt to debunk your answer that
> collective self-defense is wrong in many levels. 

Thanks for responding to my ill-tempered post in a way that turns it
into something interesting. This is nettime :)


> First with equating resistance with the extreme violence that this
> system, everyday, employes to keep everything and everyone in their
> place. It is a privileged position, one that claims to derive from a
> reading of historical record, when actually history tells us that only a
> people that is untammed and ungovernable will shake the foundations of
> the oppressive systems that hold their spirit hostage. 

I don't doubt that my views reflect my privileged position. There's no
way around that.

But the point I wanted to make is NOT that street-level resistance is
equal to state violence. Not at all. The point I was trying to make --
against the background of what's happening in Europe -- was that a new
crop of authoritarian politicians are only waiting for a pretext to
crack down on everything and everyone offering open resistance. And, of
course, street-level violence is the easiest pretext possible. These are
no longer liberal politicians who are, in some ways, constrained by
their pretense to live in a lawful society with actual civil rights and
the goal of reaching some democratic consensus. Now, this was always on
ideal and never a actuality, but it imposed some limited. Now that we
are moving into a political field where there are no such limits anymore
and the state apparatuses are more militarized that ever in last 50
years. This is probably not new to communities who have always been
heavily policed, but the way to extends across much wider sectors now is
new.

In this sense, I'm much more with Brian's line of thinking about finding
new ways to express entanglement, building up different ways of being
together as socio-ecological being as a way to build a base for
significant transformation of the current conditions.


> Otherwise, much love, and good luck with the petition.

:)

all the best. Felix


-- 

  http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.key-server.io/search/0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Athens: Plato’s Academy and its neighborhood are at risk!

[Felix Stalder]

Hi Alexandre,

my reply is late, because I was busy and hoped that someone else would
reply, but nobody has and nettime is the home of the slow it's still
time  say something.

I think your mail was exceptionally wrong. On numerous levels.

First, it was a classic example of some guy feeling entitled to
take a piss at a women who is vastly more competent than he is. And this
within a space where the gender balance is already extremely, well,
unbalanced. So, that's radical.

Second, you don't seem to understand politics as we move into a more
authoritarian realities. The state, and the elites, like street-level
violence, because it makes it easy to brand their opponents as '
anti-social' or 'terrorists' and bring out the full force of the
militarized state to crush them under the applause of a fearful majority.

Third, leaving random calls for violence in public fora is potentially
really harmful, not just for you but to the wider range of people
involved in the specific forum.


Felix



On 2018-06-10 11:56, Alexandre Carvalho wrote:
> 
> 
> Online petitions do shitz. 
<...>

-- 

 | http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: