Re: nettime dark days
On 06/13/2013 06:15 AM, Brian Holmes wrote: I prefer to find this recent news a light in dark times. At the moment, i think in the West (core and periphery) we can distinguish between three struggles in advanced stages. One is against authoritarian regimes that force a closed set of values on an increasingly diverse societies. Within these societies, a new mind set is emerging that values, understands and can deal with this diversity. Another one is against the subversion of the democratic processes through the capture of the traditional institutions of liberal democracy by financial markets, which includes the fight against austerity policies and the invention of new democratic institutions redrawing the balance between participation and representation. And, one is against the increasing subversion of civil liberties through the militarization of the state. This process is certainly the most advanced in the US, and so is the resistance against it is also mainly coming from the US. However, not from organized interests, but from brave individuals who cannot tolerate the contradiction between what they are supposed to do (defend liberty) and what they are actually doing (destroy liberty). Of these three, I think the first one we can win and many many people in networks like this and places too numerous to count are working on this. This is what the Internet was made for, particularly those layers that we all can access (aka the front end of the internet) The second one is really hard, but also manageable. Perhaps not winning, but it can redraw the balance of forces. The contradictions evident in society can mobilized by us. A lot of people are working on this too, and there is an increasing mood, from what I understand, that the next step is about creating can realize the promises we all see. The third one is extremely difficult. Because it works on layers that are largely removed from access by any form of democratic process and this, too, is what the Internet was made for. It's about engineering the layers of the Internet that only few very well-financed and well-organized interests have access to (aka the back-end of the Internet). It's not just this is taking place as an expression of the contemporary techno-political paradigm (as Brian and Armin call it) but that there are very few social contradictions (except for the hacker ethic of some of the people working in the machine rooms) that we can mobilize in our favor. It is also because of the structure of the third conflict, that the potential of actually winning the second conflict is sharply limited. But, of course, anything can change, and it's possible not the let the financial and security interest re-engineer our communication infrastructure. But it's really hard, because what is happening largely invisible and there with few actors to mobilize for it. Felix -- -|- http://felix.openflows.com books out now: | *|Cultures Ethics of Sharing/Kulturen Ethiken des Teilens UIP 2012 *|Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa. transcript 2012 *|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studienv. 2009 *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions. ScheideggerSpiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society.Polity P. 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed Futura / Revolver, 2005 | # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime dark days
Felix: One is against authoritarian regimes . . . Another one is against the subversion of the democratic processes . . . And, one is against the increasing subversion of civil liberties . . . Fascinating how you frame all this. Authoritarian! Democratic! Liberty! Subversion! As you recall, the juxtapositioning of democratic with authoritarian comes from the psychological warfare community during WW II. Initially this formulation was aimed at fascism and then it became the basis of the Cold War against communism. Now, when it isn't being aimed at neo-liberalism, it is being focused on China, via the US State Dept and the panoply of related NGOs, NYTimes etc. Among the early leaders in this effort were Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, who are the heroes of Fred Turner's forthcoming The Democratic Surround, which is positioned as the prequel to his 2006 From Counterculture to Cyberculture, where Californian ideologist Stewart Brand was the hero. This psy-war sensibility was also at the core of the 1950 Authoritarian Personality by the Frankfurt School's Adorno and the CIA's Nevitt Sanford. For those who haven't read them, I'd suggest that Gregory Bateson's Conscious Purpose vs. Nature speech at the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation conference in London -- sponsored by the Tavistock Institute and published as To Free a Generation -- might be useful, along with Mary Catherine Bateson's account of her father's conference on the topic of terra-forming humanity in the 1977 Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. As Bateson later revealed, after his years of LSD trips and adventures in self-brainwashing (i.e. NLP etc), the basis of his work was Carl Jung's *gnostic* religious speculations in his 1916 Seven Sermons to the Dead, as subsequently elaborated in Jung's recently published Red Book private notebook. Yes, there is a religion behind what you are describing and subversion is its cardinal sin. To the extent that the struggles are as you describe them, they are at the heart of the Rockefeller effort to social engineer the world through control by choice for more than 60 years. And, the civil liberties you describe are the result of rigging the maze to provide the illusion of free-will. In this world, the only liberty involved is the liberty to consume. without questioning the architecture of the maze itself. You are correct that these efforts have not been successful so far and, based on where digital technology is taking us, aren't likely to be successful in the future! If your goal is to free a generation, then these are indeed very dark days . . . Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # 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
nettime dark days
There are dark days, these days. We have the privilege of observing different levels of repression working at the same time, ranging from blanket surveillance of every electronic communication, to sending out riot police to expel civil society and its mainly symbolic forms of resistance from public spaces, in London and Istanbul, to the Greek Government turning off public television from one day to another, under the EU/IMF dictate, which even the IMF has admitted to not working. The list could go on and on, including drone strikes, austerity politics creating a lost generation across Europe, daemonization of hacking ... Now, each of these events has a complicated, independent prehistory, but their concurrence is not coincidence but an indicator of the depth of the global crises, the failure and blow-back of neo-liberal globalization, the extra-ordinary anti-democratic steps that the elites are willing to take to stabilize this system, and the weakness of any form of organized alternative. It seems like the window for meaningful chance that the crisis opened is closing. And it might be closed for a while. # 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 dark days
The darker the day gets, the closer the dust is.. the window for meaningful change is not closing in my opinion. The opposite, it is widening. Many networks getting in touch with each other directly, more than ever. Where ever an uprising we get this gets extended: Greeks with Turks, Kurds and Arabs, Italians and Spaniards are linked to Americans, British, Canadians, and Mexicans.. hackers, artists, whistle blowers, researchers, and activists fighting on the streets are being linked and communicating and working together. Sort of 'mass mutual recognition' and 'free and open rEvolutionary' subjectivity is being built step by step.. True that it goes together with the rising sort of global fascism, racism, sexism and oppression. However contradiction is in the nature of things, as well as synthesis and harmony. I think it is a real net-time, with a great cause. On 12 June 2013 10:13, Felix Stalder fe...@openflows.com wrote: There are dark days, these days. We have the privilege of observing different levels of repression working at the same time, ranging from ... # 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 dark days
... It seems like the window for meaningful chance that the crisis opened is closing. And it might be closed for a while. Not sure, Felix. It might very well be the swan song (a very agitated one, I admit) of the old order also. GeziPark, PRISM, ERT shutdown come all as a shock. Shock doctrine can work for the powerful, but the gamble can turn against them as as easily. Let's bring that about! Cheers from LondonSW27 p+5D! # 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 dark days
Hi, Felix, why so negative? Of coure everything that you say in the first paragraph is true, but that can also be interpreted differently. Yes, it seems our governments are showing more and more their real faces, yes, there is a bourgeois authoritarianism, a term you yourself have used, and it is still growing. But resistance is also growing, Turkish civil society is not taking it anymore and here also people start to understand that they are getting cheated, that they are told lies, that nothing can be relied on anymore, you can even shut down public television over night. BUt the alternatives are also getting developed. I would like to point to a piece I have written on the occasion of the launch of Seeds Undergfround by Shu Lea Cheang tonight in Linz. The piece is about her work but raises also a theoretical question regarding an emancipatory media practice ... Greening the Network Commons In 2001, Shu Lea Cheang created Steam the green, Stream the field (Cheang, 2001-02), a work which anticipated a major shift in the discourse and practice of post-media art by 10 years. Shu Lea Cheang insists on calling herself a 'self-styled' artist, emphasising her autonomy to define her activities as art. Her projects highlight the potential of the coming together of social self-organisation with a social and trans-media art practice that combines landscapes and datascapes, the natural and the digital commons. more http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1462 All best 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 dark days
Hi all, I definitely stays for the complex dialectic between oppression and liberation forces and also demanding another temporality of change - looks like that we could be in a very beginning of total class recomposition with unpredictable results but what really bother me and put my mindset into more pessimistic point of view is a general lack of new forms of militant organisation' structure which could formalize a power for the change - sorry to say but I can hardly believe that euphoria on the side of popular movements with non-representational principle of organisation could work in a the situation of a real war which we face today - we need to invest a lot of efforts into the building of the structures which again could dialecticaly embrace the power of delegation and direct participation - and we know from the histrory the name of this organs - the Soviets or councils their new politics should be reconsidered a new adjusted to all changes which we experience in a field of technology, populism and nature of struggle for commons dmitry 2013/6/12 Armin Medosch ar...@easynet.co.uk Hi, Felix, why so negative? Of coure everything that you say in the first paragraph is true, but that can also be interpreted differently. Yes, it seems our governments are showing more and more their real faces, yes, there is a # 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 dark days
A US federal judge advised in conference we disputants: Truth does not emerge by genial discussion but by hammer blows. Perhaps judges are compelled to tweet like that. But the same could be said about change in power relations, that does not happen through acceptable behavior. Joyous and earnest protests coutured with tear gas, head bashing and neckerchiefs, online viral calls for engagement, ponderous lectures and arguments, do no more than expend energy like entertainment, sports, political campaigns and celebrity TEDs, which they emulate with vicarious ineffectural adrenalin inebriation. Power is maintained with violence no matter the political platform cosmetizing its murderous threat to disobedience. No wonder revolutionaries emulate the powerful once they have capitvated the fodder. Darker days are necessary to avoid being blinded by the kleig lights of media and propaganda. # 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 dark days
Felix: There are dark days, these days. We, the humans, are in serious trouble. What we are up against isn't HUMAN at all; it's a system and that means MACHINES. The Google slogan is Don't BE Evil. That is a statement made by the machines about themselves. As anyone with a smattering of Western cultural education knows, it is *impossible* for humans to not be evil, since it is in our essential nature. We can try to avoid doing evil but no human could live up to the Google slogan. What Snowden, having given up on Obama et al, has just done by sacrificing himself is to try to stop the machines. But, since the humans *refuse* to understand the machines -- which is our only hope -- we cannot possibly fight back. What is decried as neo-liberal is just a label for those who are most assiduously working for the machines. They are the BORG -- for whom Resistance is Futile. For the humans, in the WEST (but not the whole world, particularly in China, where the cultural dynamics are fundamentally different), these are indeed dark days . . . Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # 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 dark days
I don't know why what Daniel Ellsberg described as the most significant leak ever should lead you to despair. European governments are challenging the Obama administration, the response within the US will be heavier. The campaign to loosen the grip of the Silicon Valley internet monpolists is bound to be strenghtened. Is it better not to know that to know the extent of the surveillance state? Orsan Senalp wrote in while I was writing this. posted this on: Numbers are growing.. yesterday there were more than a million people in Taksim Sqaure. Now more fighting back on the streets in almost all the cities. () Please spread the word, show your solidarity, join in the streets, squares, assemblies in your country, use online channels, twitter, facebook, whatever... contribute in anyway you can to build and links our revolt globally. It might be the turning point to start an offensive to build the new worlds we have been dreaming about... This might be be a turning point not only for Turkey, but also for Europe, for US, for Asia, for Syria, the Middle East, the greater Middle East, (even for Antarctica).. Whatever else happens, this is mass insurrection. And international support makes a different. The uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East and elsewhere took heart from OWS in the belly of th ebeast, even if neither have yet succeeded. OK, he's excited, but he sure doesn't think it's all a foregone conclusion. Defeatism begins when people predict the worst and give up. But it's not about predicting who will win, rather about choosing sides and doing your best for your side. It is significant that after Eastern Europe imploded, the action has now moved to W. Europe's Southern and Southeastern neighbours. Of course there is every reason for Western Europeans to feel despondent. The game is up for them. But don't rule out the rest of the world, even the Americans. It's just bad historical sociology to suppose that repression is an infallible tool of political dominance. Tocqueville asked himself why the French revolution happened and found four answers. The spread of Enlightenment ideas of freedom through printing; a rigid system of social stratification; economic improvement for many; and repression (rather than taking the lid off the pressure cooker). I think this has been quite a good week for a Tocquevillean. Best Keith # 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 dark days
more inclined to think that the surveillance state has just obsoleted the economy as a policing mechanism. not a bad thing. (it allows the imf for example to declare its own irrelevance.) and unlike the economy, the state really doesnt care what you think. or say. the state only cares about the network you say whatever to. so we're back in the network wars. again, not a bad thing. this looks more like what they used to call a level playing field. On 12 June 2013 04:13, Felix Stalder fe...@openflows.com wrote: There are dark days, these days. We have the privilege of observing different levels of repression working at the same time, ranging from blanket surveillance of every electronic communication, to sending out riot police to expel civil society and its mainly symbolic forms of resistance from public spaces, in London and Istanbul, to the Greek Government turning off public television from one day to another, under the EU/IMF dictate, which even the IMF has admitted to not working. The list could go on and on, including drone strikes, austerity politics creating a lost generation across Europe, daemonization of hacking ... ... # 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 dark days
I agree with Dimitry below. It should be noticed that existing communication circuits and forms of social cooperation have all been built over the last twenty years. On the one hand, social media was at least partially prefigured by Indymedia and similar iniatives fifteen years ago, the huge circuits for the relay of news from movement to movement have been built up more or less deliberately, and the form of swarming, or the sustained temporal pulsation of concentration/dispersion of forces, is not just a spontaneous phenomenon but a learned and widely shared strategy. Plus all this has been relayed by more bourgeois publics-sphere structures, giving rise to the phenomena of strategic press leaks and also some judicial harassement of authrotarian regimes. On the other hand, we don't have formal organizations beyond the General Assembly, so the power dialectic of delegation and direct action has not been developed very much at all. Everyone is now saying this is the next step. I agree. best, Brian On 06/12/2013 05:03 AM, Dmitry Vilensky wrote: what really bother me and put my mindset into more pessimistic point of view is a general lack of new forms of militant organisation' structure which could formalize a power for the change - sorry to say but I can hardly believe that euphoria on the side of popular movements with non-representational principle of organisation could work in a the situation of a real war which we face today - we need to invest a lot of efforts into the building of the structures which again could dialecticaly embrace the power of delegation and direct participation # 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 dark days
You mean vigorous typing on the keyboard and determined tweeting aint't it? It seems that interactions with corporate disks (which is what 99% of social computer usage today is) are modern variants of praying. Surveillance networks are just priests in the confessionals. Does a prayer work? unpredictable results but what really bother me and put my mindset into more pessimistic point of view is a general lack of new forms of militant organisation' structure which could formalize a power for the change - sorry to say but I can hardly believe that euphoria on the side of popular movements with non-representational principle of organisation could work in a the situation of a real war which we face today - we need to invest a lot # 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 dark days
On Wednesday, June 12, 2013, Keith Hart wrote: European governments are challenging the Obama administration, If this is your bulwark against the dark days, I'd consider embracing despair. The European states might talk a good game--like they did before the second Iraq war--but both the demands of conjunctural geopolitics and the dynamics of statecraft would seem to dictate that they are much more likely to go along to get along, after registering their pro forma dissents. This paragraph from a Der Spiegel article on US data retrieval and storage indicates why: The NSA is a useful partner for German authorities. The director of the NSA, four-star General Keith Alexander, regularly receives delegations from Germany at his headquarters at Fort Meade. These meetings are generally constructive, in part because the pecking order is clear: The NSA nearly always knows much more, while the Germans act as assistants. the response within the US will be heavier. So far, not really. The polls released indicate that USers are mostly okay with what the NSA has done, or what's been revealed of it so far. More relevantly, the impulse among those who were potentially part of the heavy response has been to protect the Democratic president and slander Snowden/Greenwald. That in itself is bad enough, but that it's been carried out in ways that hew closely to ideas about criminal subjectivity (if you have nothing to hide, you don't need to worry) and the sanctity of the nation (Snowden is a traitor!) suggests that the circle drawn around the sovereign is pretty tight and fierce. Is it better not to know that to know the extent of the surveillance state? Of course, with the provisos that the leaks don't reveal the extent and that knowledge is not the same as escape. It's also possible that such knowledge has a chilling effect. The Panopticon set up the technology for complete surveillance, but part of its rationale was that prisoners never really knew when they were being watched, creating a sort of self-management and -regulation among them. Once in awhile, it's effective for the spied-upon to be reminded they are being spied upon. None of this is meant to predict the future (though I feel sure the first two points I made here will continue to be true), but to question landing on the side of either optimism or despair. It gives them too much credit to declare ahead of time that change is dependent on crisis *or* plenitude. # 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 dark days
On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 09:28:52AM -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote: You mean vigorous typing on the keyboard and determined tweeting aint't it? It seems that interactions with corporate disks (which is what 99% of social computer usage today is) are modern variants of praying. Surveillance networks are just priests in the confessionals. Does a prayer work? If you can compile it, sure. Cypherpunks write code. # 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 dark days
On 12/06/13 09:38, Patrice Riemens wrote: GeziPark, PRISM, ERT shutdown come all as a shock. Some of the saddest specialist responses to PRISM that I've read argue that it isn't a shock and that clever people knew this sort of thing was going on anyway. # 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 dark days
We are in the age of the Anthropocene now, everything has changed, the future is not what it used to be. yours JJ On 12 Jun 2013, at 17:40, Brian Holmes wrote: I agree with Dimitry below. It should be noticed that existing communication circuits and forms of social cooperation have all been built over the last twenty years. On the one hand, social media was at least partially prefigured by Indymedia and similar iniatives fifteen years ago, the huge circuits for the relay of news from movement to movement have been built up more or less deliberately, and the form of swarming, or the sustained temporal pulsation of concentration/dispersion of forces, is not just a spontaneous phenomenon but a learned and widely shared strategy. Plus all this has been relayed by more bourgeois ... ... Notre livre-film Les Sentiers de L'utopie (Editions Zones/La D?couverte 2011) twitter: @nowtopia. pour la liste mail - vous pouvez souscrire ici - https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/labofii www.labofii.net # 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 dark days
Why is that so sad, not about cleverness, surely it is just that some people have been realistic from early on. Since the 90s I've certainly assumed Microsoft was in the collaboration and spying business and so did various European governments, I seem to remember a lot of discussion about only using open source software in government rather than Windows etc. On 13/06/13 07:01, Rob Myers wrote: On 12/06/13 09:38, Patrice Riemens wrote: GeziPark, PRISM, ERT shutdown come all as a shock. Some of the saddest specialist responses to PRISM that I've read argue that it isn't a shock and that clever people knew this sort of thing was going on anyway. ... # 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 dark days
I agree that' the specialist responses are the saddest. Not just clever people, but anyone who paid attention since TIA in 2002 knew this was going on. All the people who are trying to be more cynical than thou are lame. There is a huge difference between intellectuals knowing what the state is doing (that's their job, after all) and official, incontrovertible proof for everyone. The difference is made by acts of exceptional courage. It's ihugely positive. Cynicism is a fear to commit. It's the banality of defeat. I prefer to find this recent news a light in dark times. BH PS: The Anthropocene is now our fate. Any blow to the capitalist state that has brought it on is a good thing. For the rest, knowing how to face it is what wre all need to learn. Let's help each other. On 06/12/2013 04:01 PM, Rob Myers wrote: Some of the saddest specialist responses to PRISM that I've read argue that it isn't a shock and that clever people knew this sort of thing was going on anyway. # 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
