We have ten years to European prisons. That is our timeframe. It is quite short. Few people can actually see that distance. There is no time to explain, but there is time to fire up, accelerate and build the hardware and the infrastructure that is need to sustain the mass adoption of practices - no more 'revolution', but the simple everyday adoption of informal trajectories - metis style - of a broader group of citizens.
I've heard some amazing stories day before yesterday from a friend who is going to Detroit soon. She was there before a while ago and it seems the situation in the inner cities is that whole blocks are deserted and given back to community farming, actually houses stacked with hay in the heart of the auto beast. Take Back the Land liberates another home for another family in Miami: http://takebacktheland.net/ And is going national. States are very much aware that they will go down. They know they are Emperor's clothes. In Europe they have no more money of their own, no more law (85% and rising out of Brussels) and have privatized all their services. Still they collect 40% of our income as tax. What for? Why should you keep paying for what will soon be your very own prison? Asked by the Dutch Ministery of Justice - giving input to the National Terrorism Agenda - who or what the biggest threat was to the Netherlands, I could not help but say: you. You know you have to dismantle yourself, get them buildings flat, spread them out horizontally through the network. For all I care you give us a civil servant every ten people. But you got to go, you have outlived your purpose and the violence you have spread, ah the violence and the stupidity. Dennis Blair, new US head of national intelligence has recently said the biggest threat to US national security is no longer Al Quada, but the credit crisis. The credit crisis means poor people. No wonder that we see a trend ( also in UK and Europe) towards the militarization of the police. Trouble is brewing and the powers that still be and are harnessed in charades of democracy will clamp down hard. The end user disciplining that has been going on in the Western world: regulations of personal health: smoke here, not there, do not make a phone call in your car!, regulation of people flows through a complete visual grid of surveillance cameras with face recognition software, regulation of identity through soon to be mandatory fingerprint id to go online or start up your mobile (end of p2p) and all in the name of ...you. To protect...you. From what I begin to wonder? I can not recall having asked for this reduction of the real, for these much too nice mediations of layers of fear of people afraid of losing their privileges, bonuses, futures. Dennis Blair has been reading no doubt this new report by the U.S. Army War College that talks about "the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks. "Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security," said the War College report. The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S." (Phoenix Business Journal - by Mike Sunnucks December 19, 2008) And we can no longer fix our own cars. That is (paraphrasing David Brin) an act of war. We are in the middle of outsourcing the little agency we have left to proactive homes, sensor networked cities that we have no control over, standards to tags, sensors and spectrum policies that are ruled by logistics and retail. Though the momentum is ours, it is wide open, there is big chance that we will be left with the ability to twitter, watch movies on youtube and use creative commons licences for our mobile 4G blog posts. Big deal. We can twitter, no longer talk. Eastern Europe first, but also the US can go down Argentina 2001-2 style pretty soon. Eastern Europe is pegged to the euro. That was the reason the breakdown was so serious in Argentina (to the dollar). But that breakdown also brought new opportunities, a mass adoption of new practices. Western Europe will be in turmoil the next 5 tot ten years because the middle class pulls the plug and starts to organize their own networks, abandoning the cities to the 180 nationalities that makes up for example Rotterdam (with over 50% of the inhabitants of 'foreign' descent). So what do we do? Hold our breath? None of us is in this for the violence. Something I think, you better shut up Rob, Cassandra you. Interestingly the friends I tell this story all shrink back. They have children. I can relate to them not wanting a future of troubles, challenges, hardship, civil war. After a discussion last week in the Bijlmer (flatstation.nl), Mufti 'urged me to relax'. He told me that I was seeing a kid near a pond very far away. I could not reach it, just see it. I was thinking it would jump, or fall in. But maybe, maybe Mufti said, maybe it can swim. That is so. But maybe, I'm thinking, maybe it can not swim. But still, Mufti is dead right on all the other counts. For the past ten years or so I have been giving input to government studies, the Dutch Board of Culture (mediawisdom policy paper), the Board of all ICT Dutch based companies, politicians and very senior government officials. I have been doing that as I wanted them to realize the seriousness of the situation, their responsibility in having to open up. I stopped short of begging. I could even do that. Democracy as we know it is born out of stolen money and colonial violence, yes, but also on Enlightenment and a genuine concern for as most people possible. I hate to see it go. Yet, we cannot always go back to our shelter from the storm, in our inner Emigration, withdraw in our own scenarios. One day we have to imagine the real and walk right into it. Bang our heads. I'm begging my head now. And I 'm moving it of my shell, gently at first. But I will not be fooled again. The situation in Argentina in 200-2001 unleashed a human potential for creativity in organizing that amazed everyone, including the protagonists. Quoting from Working Paper no.72 SUBVERTING THE SPACES OF INVITATION. LOCAL POLITICS AND PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING IN POST-CRISIS BUENOS AIRES, by Dennis Rodgers (Crisis States Research Centre) in November 2005: ."..people bypassed politics as usual,because they were characterised by a highly personalised politics of informality that undermined the working of the state as a set of formalised institutional procedures for representing political voice. Ana Dinerstein claims that in the wake of this crisis of representation, Argentina became a political laboratory, as an unprecedented groundswell of bottom-up mobilisation led to a range of alternative forms of political participation aiming to transform the nature of Argentinean political culture and society. These included asambleas populares (spontaneous neighbourhood assemblies), clubes de trueque (barter clubs), empresas recuperadas (worker- occupied enterprises), and piqueteros (organised groups of unemployed). In the three years since December 2001, however, the first three have either disappeared or steadily declined, while most instances of the latter have become institutionalised as a new form of political clientelism. This suggests that none constituted a sustainable mode of alternative political participation." The reason? Here: "As one member of the PB Central Technical Coordination team remarked in an interview on 19 August 2003: Personally, I think that one of the greatest problems weve had has been with the minimal diffusion of information about the whole process This is something that can be seen in every neighbourhood, you find that the level of knowledge about PB that the average inhabitant has is really quite minimal. Were constantly trying to get more information out there, but there hasnt been a proper campaign or anything One of the things I really feel, and this is my personal opinion of course, is that for one reason or another we havent properly exploited certain channels that because theyre in the governments hands would be very easy to make use of in order to effectively communicate on a very large scale, for example by including something on PB (Participatory Budget, RvK) in the information bulletins that all the kids in state schools receive at the beginning of the year to give to their parents or also by advertising on the GCBAs radio station, or the new television station that it now has as well The radio in particular is particularly galling, as weve had almost no airtime at all on it, and what little that weve had has been because I know a lot of people there and Ive pass on certain things to them informally Logically youd want this kind of informing of the population to be formalised. In his study in Physical Review Letters, Sven van Segbroek of AI Lab, VUB shows how solidarity is fostered and engendered by diversity. Diversity brings on social networking. A balance will show up between people who are extremely good at networking and those who give it up with the first negative experience. Because the possibilities for social networking are exploding exponentionally it is a safe prediction that solidarity will also grow. The Argentine example shows that the logical limit to this diversity in content and formats is infrastructure, the hardware itself. This is - for me - one of the key reasons that bricolabs (www.bricolabs.net) is about the loop of open content, software and hardware. To make sure that we can facilitate community radio and communications, projects like the bricophone are key. http://www.nlnet.nl/project/bricophone/ Yet apart from setting up parallel systems, building a solid body of knowledge from scientific, traditional and artistic embodied knowing on everyday living, dignities and applications ( open source toilet, washing machine, scooter...) it is vital that we engage in high level consultancy with governments, EU and large corporations. There is money ( slower money) to be made in a fully open infrastructure of smart and connected things, homes and cities. All over the world current governments, maffia's and gangs will start resembling each others even more soon, if they do not give up their laws, violence and patents. History has shown that failure to recognize this has always resulted in higher disciplining and violence. Then the people break that. It is not too late that negociate us out of that scenario. Renegociating connectivity means asking ourselves from the ground up to the GPS, what kind of connectivities do we want and how green, scavenging and open do we want them? We may even have to renegociate tcp/ip for a while and work with fully local protocols that do not connect to a global network, in order to gain full granularity of the experience of dialogue and communication. The expertise should go to the middleware and the unique keys that every citizen on the planet can receive in order to talk to other localities. Salut! Rob note: the term 'mass adoption of practices' was coined by Derek Freeman in a workshop at Access Space, Sheffield. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
