Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
On 10/03/14 15:32, Armin Medosch wrote: is clearly old capital against new capital - the enemy is Google. so, old capital is a bad thing and new capital is a bad thing, or what's the moral of this? or speaking against new capital from the platform of old capital is bad? or anything bad about new capital is old bad? or my bad? # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
Writing for the FAZ myself I can assure you, that there is no such thing as the FAZ. It is a multitude of oppinions, plenty of debates and highly moble frontlines. There are some arch-conservative editors and authors who would love to wake up one day and find the internet gone (mostly in the politics and business parts of the paper). And then there are plenty of others (more often in the Feuilleton) who have distinctly different and certainly not conservative views. You should not make the mistake to associate Google with good just because they side with free culture sometimes when it fits their business interests. We are deep inside a multi-front power struggle with shifting alliances and neither the government nor the internet ogliopolies are on our side. btw: I read Enzensberger as satire. Greetings from Berlin, Frank Rieger --- On 10.03.2014, at 15:32, Armin Medosch wrote: The point I want to make is not so much about Enzensbergers text - the poet has clearly let himself down - but the publishing context. FAZ is on a campaign against Gratiskultur - the free culture of the internet. A few days earlier there was a text by Jaron Lanier which was pretty much a repetition of his older rant against Digital Maoism with a little added surveillance sauce. FAZ does not like the net, never did. So they mix cleverly two things, using widespread dissatisfaction with surveillance to fight against free culture. This is clearly old capital against new capital - the enemy is Google. What a pity that Enzensberger allowed himself to be used in that way by an arch-conservative newspaper. Lanier also allowed himself to be used but thats not such a pity because as his Digital Maoism text showed he is beyond the beyond. regards Armin # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
While I'd like to chime in with Andreas' fact check of Enzensberger's ten rules: For those who aren't nerds, hackers or cryptographers and have better things to do than keep up with the pitfalls of digitalization every hour, there are ten simple rules to resist exploitation and surveillance: Unlike Andreas, I think that Enzensberger is right and that critical media activist culture delivered the proof in the pudding when it came up with the format and name of Crypto Parties. The implication is, indeed, that you need to become at least a low-skilled cryptographer who knows what PGP, SSL and TOR mean and how they are used. In Rotterdam, on a CryptoParty last Friday at WORM, we just learned again how difficult it is for contemporary Internet users to even grasp the concept of a local mail client (like Thunderbird) as opposed to Web Mail - and that does not even include complex stuff like PGP encryption and key management. But using Web Mail means, by definition, that others can read and data mine your correspondence. And let's not even go into gory details like keeping up with software vulnerabilities (like the SSL bug in Apple's operating systems or the very similar GNU-TLS bug from last week). It's fair to say that all the computer and Internet communication systems we currently use are fundamentally insecure, and that there are likely only a handful of systems in the world into which a skilled third party could not break into to intercept the data stored on or sent from them. 1 If you own a mobile phone, throw it away. From a hacker perspective, this is sound advice. Apart from a very few fringe, mostly not-yet-existing mobile phone operating systems (such as Phil Zimmerman's Black Phone), all of the existing mobile phones leak your data. Even a most simple stripped-down mobile phone constantly broadcasts your location. The technology to intercept calls and data transfers has become trivially simple (as Danja Vasiliev and Julian Oliver demonstrated on this year's transmediale festival in Berlin). Another issue is that smartphones are multi-sensor devices that broadcast megabytes of data (such as bodily movement via accelerometers) with their users being aware of it. 2 Whoever offers something for free is suspicious. One should categorically refuse anything that passes itself off as a bargain, bonus or freebie. It's always a lie. I agree with Andreas, but a problem remains that this advice can involuntarily backfire against ethical free services offered by non-profits (from free WiFi access at a public library to Open Source software). 3 Online banking is a blessing, but only for secret services and criminals. Here, Enzensberger's advice is naive, because banking in these times is online anyway. If people go to a bank counter instead of homebanking, the transaction will travel over the same networks (and most likely, the bank employee will use the same online banking web interface). It also ignores the data retention and customer tracking built into the international banking system via, for example, the SWIFT accord between the EU and the USA. 4 Governments and industries want to abolish cash. They would like to get rid of a legal tender that anyone can redeem. This is indeed an important point, and has become a reality in countries like Sweden. Contrary to common belief and letting aside all other issues of this payment system, Bitcoin is not a solution for this problem because all Bitcoin transaction records are publicly visible (as discussed here on Nettime previously - no need to open this can of worms again). So far, cash is the only truly anonymous, hard-to-trace payment method. 5 The madness of networking every object of daily use - from toothbrush to TV, from car to refrigerator - via the Internet, can only be met with total boycott. The recent news about smart TVs spying on its viewers ( https://securityledger.com/2013/11/fix-from-lg-ends-involuntary-smartt v-snooping-but-privacy-questions-remain/) indeed confirm this - and the news that smart refrigerators are now running spam botnets ( http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/is-your-refrigerator-really-pa rt-of-a-massive-spam-sending-botnet/ ). This is one example of the term post-digital making sense - that in many cases, it's better that devices are offline than online. 6 The same applies to politicians. They ignore any objection to their actions and omissions. They are submissive to the financial markets and don't dare to go against the activities of secret services. No point in arguing with that. Most likely, most of them are in the pockets of the secret services that have collected compromising information on them. 7 E-Mail is nice, fast and free. So watch out! If you have a confidential message or don't want to be surveilled, take a postcard and pencil. This advice is technologically naive. It's known that the NSA and other secret services have systematically scanned and collected postal mail
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
Andreas: can be effective in any way if performed in such privatistic ways as suggested in HME's rules.) Thats what I thought too -- and I think it is completely impossible and not even a topic worth to be discussed. The article was not even good as a shameless plug for this terrible pathetic social democratic former bookseller who wants to rule the EU. What a nonsense and what a megastrange souvereingty language for a social democrat? Such language was until now used only in the German far right (where it is the only important motivation except to have fun by provocations). Best, H. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
Hi MP, it is not so difficult. There's capital, and its not homogenous. There are capitals of a different era and of a different kind - such as industrial, agro-business, and financial capital. There are different modes of production and social relations that go with it. It is not about 'for' or 'against' or naive versions of 'good' and 'bad' but if we want to understand the world we live in - and to preempt any questions, I think to some degree this is possible - then we need to engage with such concepts that great social scientists have developed regards Armin On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 5:54 PM, mp m...@aktivix.org wrote: On 10/03/14 15:32, Armin Medosch wrote: is clearly old capital against new capital - the enemy is Google. so, old capital is a bad thing and new capital is a bad thing, or what's the moral of this? ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
Am 10.03.14 02:58, schrieb Nick: Quoth Felix Stalder: Enzensberger's text was just a joke, and the FAZ printed it because it would stir controversy, not because it had much to offer intellectually. Was it really just a joke? I'm not so sure dismissing it as that is appropriate. Sure it necessarily isn't a deep critique of the power dynamics at play with some of the newer technologies people are using now, but it wasn't designed as that, and I for one find the provocations basically reasonable. OK, then let's look at the rules one-by-one. (for reasons of time right now, i'll only do the first ones, you will get the drift..., and maybe somebody else will continue, add, contest.) -a my main critique is against the general thrust of HME's proposal, i.e. the suggestion that it is possible to resist as an individual. he admits the limited range of his proposals when he writes at the end: These simple measures can't solve the political problem that society is faced with. i think that he should have started his text with this admission, and then also make suggestions for strategies towards such solutions - which, of course, cannot be individualistic, but need to be collective, and political. (the title, Defend Yourselves! is of course borrowed from stephane hessel's manifesto, Indignez-vous!; it is a strange distortion to suggest that such defense, or indignation, can be effective in any way if performed in such privatistic ways as suggested in HME's rules.) Published yesterday by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, http://www.faz.net/frankfurter-allgemeine-zeitung/enzensbergers-regeln-fuer-die-digitale-welt-wehrt-euch-12826195.html This is an unauthorized, quick translation. Defend Yourselves! For those who aren't nerds, hackers or cryptographers and have better things to do than keep up with the pitfalls of digitalization every hour, there are ten simple rules to resist exploitation and surveillance: i disagree: not only specialists like nerds, hackers or cryptographers should have a basic and differentiated understanding of the cultural techniques that digital technologies offer; by analogy, of course, you can always tell somebody that a vocabulary of 300-500 words is enough to read a tabloid newspaper and that should be sufficient for getting by; but would you really tell anybody to stop after those 300 words and then go do better things? 1 If you own a mobile phone, throw it away. You had a life before this device, and the human race will continue to exist after its disappearance. One should avoid the superstitious worship that it enjoys. Neither those devices nor their users are any smart, but only those who plug them to us in order to accumulate boundless riches and control ordinary people. accumulate boundless riches, control ordinary people - all this is pure polemics. is the longevity of the human race really the measure by which to assess the uselessness of the mobile (or smart?) phone? what about communication with your family or business partners? the examples of how mobile phones have improved business opportunities, learning, and communication in underdeveloped parts of the world. many services are affordable even for people with little money. - these examples should not legitimise over-pricing and data-veillance, but they put the simple throw it away in question. rather, the question is: can you afford not to have a mobile phone? 2 Whoever offers something for free is suspicious. One should categorically refuse anything that passes itself off as a bargain, bonus or freebie. It's always a lie. The dupes pay with their privacy, their data and often enough with their money. true, and well said, even though i don't agree with the categorical refusal, because we may want to, or have to, choose to make use of some of those services. i think that one should be aware of the price that one is paying, in whatever currency. - (besides, there was a campaign by the dutch ISP xs4all already in the 1990s, called Free is not free.) 3 Online banking is a blessing, but only for secret services and criminals. i disagree: it can also also a blessing for those who don't have a bank counter within walking distance; a reality of the current banking system is also that it is often cheaper, in terms of banking fees, to make your transactions by online banking. which means that not to use online banking is something that you have to be able to afford. (the political answer, if such an answer was sought, could be to force banks to offer transactions at the counter at the same price as online transactions.) - and then the other question is whether other forms of banking are less of a blessing for secret services and criminals... 4 Governments and industries want to abolish cash. They would like to get rid of a legal tender that anyone can redeem. Coins and bills are annoying for banks, traders, security and fiscal authorities. Plastic cards
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world (Florian Cramer)
This is interesting, I've translated it into Spanish. http://www.mediateletipos.net/archives/26153 (Ø) _ _blank www.null66913.net www.mediateletipos.net El 02/03/2014, a las 12:00, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org escribió: ... Today's Topics: 1. Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world (Florian Cramer) 2. Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium, Part One, section 7, (Patrice Riemens) ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
On 03/Mar/14 04:24, Geert Lovink wrote:
Thanks Cornelia, and Florian for making the translation. I don't mind
the piece but what misses here is a bit of self-reflection of a writer
who has
snip...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html (U.S.
Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement). Geert
Good points, Geert -- I noted this in the last months, when sending out small
packages ('normal airmail') to friends outside the US: both addresses, mine and
theirs were entered into a database, where, with subsequent mailings, the postal
clerk could immediately pull up all my data from that database. Another older
example, though, as a long-time participant in the mail-art network, when I
lived in Iceland, practically anything in-coming to me there was thoroughly
inspected by folks in the postal office.
That said, human manual surveillance isn't cost-effective -- the Stasi state is
a good example, in the end its structure (dis)functioned as a sclerosis in the
vitals of the social system -- and was a major factor in the system not
remaining flexible and innovative (as all systems must do in order to adapt and
survive) -- and thus led to the demise (transformation) of that particular
social system.
Back in the 1970s, towards the end of his career, my father was with the Office
of Technology Assessment at the White House and one of the last big projects he
worked on (as a 'systems analyst') was the automation of the US Postal Service.
That was when the 'machinery' of comprehensive letter surveillance began to form
-- in the interests of increasing speed, decreasing costs, and so on. Five digit
Zip Codes that are now nine-digit, identify individual postal addresses. You
want to post me? Just write 86303-7213 on an envelope (and perhaps USA) and I
will receive it. This abstraction of the analog makes surveillance of the data
space very possible. (Although it does not immediately suggest surveillance of
the analog 'real' space -- that takes a huge amount of energy -- to sift through
the data space and then to deploy meat-space observation.)
(This all echoes similar arguments from the Internet of Things community -- it's
all for cost savings and convenience, and speed, and pleasing the consumer!).
But in the end, the collection of information is the collection of information
-- it becomes an available pool of abstracted 'power' as a source of feedback
from a wider social system. The energy that is necessary to accomplish such
feedback is *not* zero (I was astonished the first time I encountered this at
the post office -- the clerk had to manually type in both names and addresses,
that definitely took time/energy!), and it is precisely that energy expenditure
that becomes a concentration of power to those who control the info/data-base.
However, the cost, again, is an energy drain -- from simply dealing with the
acquisition and storage of information, and then the subsequent projection of
brute power that is necessary to control the system.
Feedback systems sap energy from the wider system that is seeking this
information source to optimize/control who/what is being monitored. In the case
of social systems seeking to impose increasingly granular control over
constituent processes for whatever 'socially-mandated' reasons there is a heavy
price to be paid -- this energy is drained from other systems processes (like
maintenance of infrastructure, maintenance of health/food delivery systems, etc,
etc)
The US (and the West to be sure!) has been seized by an ever more paranoiac
mentality whose mantra is 'more feedback = more control = more security' at the
same time as an increasing blindness to the real energy costs of such feedback
systems. This in stark contrast to the necessity of un-controlled and
un-monitored energy flows that are crucial in maintaining a vital social system.
Command-and-control reification is the condition of a social system in demise (a
footnote from my dissertation follows):
**
As an example, Václav Havel's well-known essay The Power of the Powerless
contains a profound exploration of the nature of power in an extremely
hierarchically-controlled social system near the end of its existence. It is a
system that for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the
unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all
expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified
politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be
implemented within its official structures. (1985) It is the application of
power via protocol which exerts the control and eliminates (as that exertion
becomes more and more intense) any spaces for autonomy to exist. But these
systems reach a saturation point where the control (and feedback) system, a
necessary structural part of it, begins to absorb all the energy available to
the system overall --
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
Thanks Cornelia, and Florian for making the translation. I don't mind the piece but what misses here is a bit of self-reflection of a writer who has been inside the media realm his entire life, and who is unable to put his own 'offline romanticism' in the larger picture of the (German) history of ideas. Apart from this, it is also sad that he is simply badly informed about the current state of the postal system in the age of global surveillance. One link will do: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html (U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement). Geert On 2 Mar 2014, at 2:30 PM, Cornelia Sollfrank corne...@artwarez.org wrote: Thanks for sending via email. Imagine you would have had to hand-write the information and send it to all subscribers of nettime via postcard;-) ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
I don't think that Enzensberger's text is to be taken seriously - the tone is so light-hearted that it might well be that it isn't even intended to be. His suggestions are so far off the social reality of technical systems and media usage, that it is hard to take them as anything but the flippant and ironic Biergarten-remarks from an old man in the elite-quarter of München-Schwabing. What is worrysome about this is that in a country where the government leader thinks that the Internet is uncharted land for all of us (Merkel, 2013), people who read a supposedly informed intellectual (Enzensberger) writing in a respected conservative newspaper (FAZ), might actually be mislead to think that the proposed privatistic head-in-the-sand strategy is a meaningful response to systems that affect human lives, economic and political processes on a far broader scale. Throwing away, as Enzensberger suggests, your mobile phone, not using online banking, or writing letters only by snale mail, would probably be as revolutionary as not reading the FAZ any more. Welcome to Neuland. -ab Am 03.03.14 12:24, schrieb Geert Lovink: Thanks Cornelia, and Florian for making the translation. I don't mind the piece but what misses here is a bit of self-reflection of a writer who has been inside the media realm his entire life, and who is unable to put his own 'offline romanticism' in the larger picture of the (German) history of ideas. Apart from this, it is also sad that he is simply badly informed about the current state of the postal system in the age of global surveillance. One link will do: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html (U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement). Geert # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
If you have a confidential message use poetry for encryption. Moazzam Begg, who spent three years in Guant?namo Bay before being released without charge in January 2005, began writing poetry as a way of explaining what he was going through. He knew that everything he wrote would be censored, so used poetry to try to describe his situation to his family. (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/26/poetry.guantanamo) I think today's kids are instinctively aware of those issues. It's a matter of being On/Off for them, as they put it into words. Like walking down a street in public, being On. On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Nick nett...@njw.me.uk wrote: Quoth Cornelia Sollfrank: Thanks for sending via email. Imagine you would have had to hand-write the information and send it to all subscribers of nettime via postcard;-) Well in fairness the postcard suggestion was If you have a confidential message, which I'm pretty sure doesn't count for posting a translation of a message to a publically archived list. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world
Since several people asked me off-list about my own opinion on Enzensberger's piece and my reasons for posting it here, the best answer I can give is an essay I completed just a few weeks ago for _A Peer-Review Journal_ (APRJA, http://www.aprja.net), an Open Access journal on digital culture edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox at Aarhus University in Denmark. While it now reads like a reply to Enzensberger, it was actually written early as part of a larger post-digital research workshop organized by Aarhus University at Kunsthal Aarhus in collaboration with transmediale festival; all other essays in the current number of APRJA were products of this workshop, too. The original essay, including images that are missing here, has been published at http://www.aprja.net/?p=1318 Florian # What is 'Post-digital'? ## Typewriters vs. imageboard memes In January 2013, a picture of a young man typing on a mechanical typewriter while sitting on a park bench went 'viral' on the popular website [Reddit]( http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/16vlkc/youre_not_a_real_hipster_until/). The image was presented in the typical style of an 'image macro' or 'imageboard meme' (Klok 16-19), with a sarcastic caption in bold white Impact typeface that read: You're not a real hipster ??? until you take your typewriter to the park. The meme, which was still making news at the time of writing this paper in late 2013 (Hermlin), nicely illustrates the rift between 'digital' and 'post-digital' cultures. Imageboard memes are arguably the best example of a contemporary popular mass culture which emerged and developed entirely on the Internet. Unlike earlier popular forms of visual culture such as comic strips, they are anonymous creations ??? and as such, even gave birth to the now-famous Anonymous movement, as described by (Klok 16-19). The 'digital' imageboard meme portrays the 'analog' typewriter hipster as its own polar opposite ??? in a strictly technical sense however, even a mechanical typewriter is a digital writing system, as I will explain later in this text. Also, the typewriter's keyboard makes it a direct precursor of today's personal computer systems, which were used for typing the text of the imageboard meme in question. Yet in a colloquial sense, the typewriter is definitely an 'analog' machine, as it does not contain any computational electronics. In 2013, using a mechanical typewriter rather than a mobile computing device is, as the imageboard meme suggests, no longer a sign of being old-fashioned. It is instead a deliberate choice of renouncing electronic technology, thereby calling into question the common assumption that computers, as meta-machines, represent obvious technological progress and therefore constitute a logical upgrade from any older media technology ??? much in the same way as using a bike today calls into question the common assumption, in many Western countries since World War II, that the automobile is by definition a rationally superior means of transportation, regardless of the purpose or context. Typewriters are not the only media which have recently been resurrected as literally post-digital devices: other examples include vinyl records, and more recently also audio cassettes, as well as analog photography and artists' printmaking. And if one examines the work of contemporary young artists and designers, including art school students, it is obvious that these 'old' media are vastly more popular than, say, making imageboard memes.[^1] ## Post-digital: a term that sucks but is useful ### 1. Disenchantment with 'digital' I was first introduced to the term 'post-digital' in 2007 by my then-student Marc Chia ??? now Tara Transitory, also performing under the moniker _One Man Nation_. My first reflex was to dismiss the whole concept as irrelevant in an age of cultural, social and economic upheavals driven to a large extent by computational digital technology. Today, in the age of ubiquitous mobile devices, drone wars and the gargantuan data operations of the NSA, Google and other global players, the term may seem even more questionable than it did in 2007: as either a sign of ignorance of our contemporary reality, or else of some deliberate Thoreauvian-Luddite withdrawal from this reality. More pragmatically, the term 'post-digital' can be used to describe either a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, or a period in which our fascination with these systems and gadgets has become historical ??? just like the dot-com age ultimately became historical in the 2013 novels of Thomas Pynchon and Dave Eggers. After Edward Snowden's disclosures of the NSA's all-pervasive digital surveillance systems, this disenchantment has quickly grown from a niche 'hipster' phenomenon to a mainstream position ??? one which is likely to have a serious impact on all cultural and business practices based on networked electronic devices and Internet services.
