Geert (old friend): How could this possibly succeed? Yes, there *is* something rotten in Denmark (and elsewhere) . . . !!
Trying to use technology to "construct" the world as you'd like it to be is always confronted by the reality that technology is, instead, busy "constructing" you. Taking the "social constructivist" path is what got us into this mess. Much better would be to flip this around and take the "technological constructivist" approach. Yes, that is a term first suggested to me by McKensie Wark --- who I met through nettime. Unless, of course, you'd like to keep on failing (for which the funding may have just run out) . . . <g> Mark Jersey City Heights -----Original Message----- From: Geert Lovink <[email protected]> To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Dec 4, 2018 5:02 am Subject: <nettime> Bridging the Gap between Technology and Progressive Politics in Europe Dear Nettimers, we’ve written the discussion text below as a proposal, a strategic contribution and are curious what you make of the ideas and questions we raise. For sure that there more topics and angles that could be added. Do you see any possibility for funding such an effort to come together? Should this be a festival, a translocal network, a support campaign for various movements? Let us know what you think and if you want to get involved. Geert Lovink ([email protected], Amsterdam) and Donatella Della Ratta ([email protected], Rome) There are anumber of topics that overlap and point at a widening of agendas beyondpolitics and the use of internet technologies in society. We feel that we canno longer keep these spaces separated, or leave them surrounded by ambiguitiesand grey areas, or appropriated by alt-right groups, populism or regressivepolitics. We think it‘s time to brigde this gap, create new forms, and restorealliances between tech and progressive politics. We feelthere is a growing tension between the global, immaterial level of social mediaand the concrete sphere of local grass-roots level and related politicalaction. Funny enough, digital technologies are becoming smaller, more invisibleand even further integrated into our messy, always-connected everyday life. Butthis is not bringing neither tech policies, nor the use of tech bypolitical parties and movements, down to earth: with the only exception of thefew who make use of tech as propaganda to prove their group's horizontal,partecipative, open-to-all-credentials. Overall,while the managerial cosmopolitan classes have a similar, exchangeable andshared lifestyle, wherever they operate, the gap between them and thelocal middle-lower classes is dramatically increasing. It istherefore that we feel an unease to organize yet another new media festivalevent, or sign up for this or that NGO campaign. We notice that it is becomingharder and harder for techies and activists to talk to their localcounterparts. They seem to have taken refuge in the way more familiar andcomfortable zone of global, cosmopolitan, like-minded crowds. Think, justas an example, of the Tahrir activists who, once having liberated thecountry, were kicked out of the square and of their own movement, becomingcompletely alienated from local politics and then replaced by a grass-rootsparty, which has been now suffocated in its turn by a more repressive mix oflocal authoritarianism and global interests. The tensionbetween the fascination for the global language of the immaterial sphere with its ‘planetary computation', and theparticularities of the local and its idiosyncratic culture, manifests itself asa growing gap not only in the domain of finance and economics, but also incircles of technology experts and media activists who are increasingly becomingcosmopolitan and detached from local communities and struggles. In the past,there was an alternative to broadcast media: it was to switch themoff. This was easily accomplished by those who wished to silence the noise, anddid not result in social isolation or disconnection. But networked media do notoffer this ancient privilege, as signing off from social networking platformstranslates into social suicide. Todaytelevision, and broadcast media in general, do no longer have the strength togenerate new political formations as they used to do in the past. They ratherjust remediate content from social networking platforms. The social spectacularat the time of Web 2.0 is peer-produced and generated by individuals who are at thesame time victims and perpetrators of their own (networked) frustration andanger. This logic is reproduced in every domain, including that of politics,where people have to be co-producers and no longer can just absorb messages andcontent dictated by the mass spectacular. Political participation in the socialspectacular is understood as a process of continuous remediation of inputs andmessages that is undertaken by each of us, weather willing or not. Because weare our own re-mediators and no longer enjoy being remediated by broadcastmedia participation becomes exhausting. It no longer translates into politicalaction, but stays relegated in the domain of endless remediation. There is acrisis of representation on both the levels of politics and aesthetics. Eventhough it was evident in visual culture a long time ago, this is only nowbecoming apparent in the domain of politics. What does democracy mean in theabsence of representation? Can democracy exist without mediation? The dream ofdirect democracy emerges at a time of even more complex bureaucracy,lengthy negotiations and long procedures in which a multitude of differentinterests are being brought together in a shady procedure, dominated byconsultants, marketing and deal making behind closed doors. Social mediaoffers a device for collective fantasy that some call 'direct democracy'. Thispolitical culture has been generated by images that long time ago haveabandoned their representative function. Images that no longer inhabit thedomain of representation. We witness the birth of a new, enhanced reality thatno longer refers to politics as a classic realm. Memes are transitional objectsin this sense. Whereas politics still uses the written form, even in the socialmedia world of Facebook and Twitter, we can expect that in the near future politicswill, inevitably, take a visual shape. How is such an image-politics going tolook like? The artshave all but disappeared behind the hypertrophic realm of the visual. Everyoneis a maker and is destined to output creative works, whether they like it ornot. This is why art as a discipline has disappeared into each and every objectand action, and the form of technique or technology. On parallel, there is agradual withdrawal of the strategic importance of visual arts as a socially orpolitically meaningful (if not explosive) activity. The arts are not longer thegolden gateway to resolve complex issues in society. This is a sad reality wecan only start to deal with and mourn. This is why there are so few artworksthat can convey, facilitate and amplify social and political issues. Inresponse, artists have retrieved themselves into the safe realm of cosmopolitannetworks in which their works circulate as empty signifiers. People arenot following artists. The interpreters of our time are 'influencers', notartists. What’s left for the few of them is the global art market, while amajority of them have been co-opted and retrained as precarious creativeworkers. Our aim isto trigger a discussion on how to bring the two realms of tech and politicsinto dialogue again. We would like to achieve this by bringing togethermultiple forms of knowledge and practices, with people from differentbackgrounds and skills. We are ourselves not immune from the processes that wedescribe here. We are definitely experiencing these contradictory dynamicsourselves. Proposedtopics: >From Web2.0 to Political Power Italy’s FiveStar Movement started off as an individual blog. They like tocall themselves ‘the people of the networks’ in critique of the classicpolitical party model. Politics as a profession has always been their maintarget. The movement presents itself as a pro-active, everchanging entitywhich borrows the dynamics of the Web 2.0 using terms such as participatorydemocracy, horizontality, P2P, equal access. In contrast withthis vocabulary, the actual organization of the movement was built arounda personal blog (Beppe Grillo's). Only an internal group of elite members wasinvolved in the decision-making process (using the platform called Rousseau).At the same time Grillo travelled across the country and invested a lot of timeand energy to build up a grass-roots structure, an activist base to support themovement. The secret of its success can be read as a combination of web-basednetworks and local grass-roots support. In theprevious decade, the left has lost a connection to both vital elements. Itneither understood the organizational dimension of the internet, nor did itfind ways to reinvent the relation to the local. What lessons are to be learnedfrom the ‘unconventional’ way the right-wing populism in Europe has gainedvisibility and influence? Can the web element, the global and virtual one, andthe very concrete grassroots level be combined for progressive politics?or is the ‘glocal’ mix only serving conservative agendas? How can socialmovements re-invent their relation to local interests? Has the left oftoday become an elitist group that only relies on its global, immaterial ties?If one would have to start all over again, would a Facebook group be the newblog à la Grillo, the tool to build a movement from scratch? Are social mediaplatforms the best place to shape an organizational structure for a politicalmovement? To build a new grass-roots movement one would need time. Do we havetime in the real-time age? What are the arguments against taking a decade tobuild such a movement? Would another option be to renew connectionsbetween the political left and progressive grass-roots movements, such asrefugees welcome, eco activism, commons-based initiatives and self-organizedspaces? Beyondthe Self: Towards Collective Action Recentanalyses of the online-self have produced two divergent readings. The first oneconcluded that the celebration of the self in social media resulted in aculture of isolated individualism, disorganized precarity, ultimately leadingto mental stress, burn-out and depression: organized sadness. The otherinterpretation holds on to the older promise of the liberation of the self as aprogressive value. Empowerment and self-determination should lead to morecreativity, more diversity and new forms of socio-economic innovation. In bothanalyses, the focus is still on the individual. Is thisreally the core question or, rather, ideology? Is there any space inside theonline self for collective experiences? Can there be a plural self, or is itquintessentially a libertarian self-obsessed category? Is there any desire toovercome the self-referential ego land? Where can we find ‘they’, the onceagonizing, desperate lonely souls that are ready to morph into another state?How can the scattered fragments ever come together? The 'festival' shows us away out but how do we deal with such one-off events that have such a temporaland local quality? How do we build a continuity in this process? How do were-invent a social glue that lasts? TheSocial Media Question: Where are the Alternatives? Facebook isperceived as the number one enemy, yet everyone keeps using it. The question isnot whether to find a way out of Facebook as there’s also Instagram, WhatsAppand the likes (not to mention Google). It is not an option for many of us todelete Facebook, as this leads to social isolation and cuts off short-termpossibilities for events and campaigns to mobilize and inform potentialpublics. We need a post-colonial alternative as large parts of the worldpopulation heavily rely on Facebook because of a lack of physical spaces asalternatives where to meet up and discuss/conspire. To leave dominant socialmedia platforms is therefore a white-men elitist choice. How can we developalternatives for organizational purposes in the shadow of the platforms andthen bring the outcomes there, using them exclusively for ‘broadcast’ purposes-as the critical mass of people is there? Can we undermine the social mediabusiness model by ‘hacking’ the platforms and exploiting or squatting them byproducing the least amount of data? In themeanwhile, can we develop a Five Year Plan to organize the mass exodus? Canopen source still help us in this effort to develop alternatives, or has itproven to be too nerdy, too far away from people, several decades after theseprinciples were first launched? Similar to the left, it has retrieved toco-working spaces, far away from the streets, and withdrawn in safe spaces wherecoding for code's sake has become a self-referential elitist activity. Apartfrom the usual re-appropriation of capital, such as Microsoft’s latestacquisition of GitHub, what can we still expect from the geek class? Why aresocial media alternatives never on the agenda of the big hackers' meeting? Whyare they solely focused on surveillance and privacy issues that are thequintessential expression of the neo-liberal self? Is there a way for theprogressive tech community who is part of the creative industry-start-up logicto serve a collective political goal? Is the leak à la Wikileaks and Snowdenthe only possible political gesture? TheGhosts of 2011 Protest Movements: Resurrection or Burial? There was atime when political movements seem to be on the rise. From the Arab world tothe USA, from Greece to Spain, there was a celebration of grass-rootsmovements. Seven years have passed and the vital social energy seems to havecompletely vanished, either disappeared in complete silence or crushed into blood.Is there a residual potential of left-overs of the street festivals in Cairoand New York, or should we bury any hope? When we visit these places all wefind is depression, expulsions, exile and fear. We witness a restauration ofold regimes in an even harsher form, the rise of neo-liberal ideology: whetherin the form of its authoritarian face or in its market features such as brands,shopping malls and online services that are the same across the globe, causinga numbing flatness and culture of indifference wherever we go, pushing peopleinside their houses. The appearance of the body in public space is carefullyorchestrated and managed, both by authoritarian and market regimes, pushingpeople indoors, thereby preventing the potentially dangerous physical presenceof bodies coming together. This results in the global state of depression andapathy, no matter where you are. Can wepreserve the 2011 images and make them alive again? Where are the activists?How can we catalyze the human potential that’s left—if any? Instead offorgetting, how can we stage a serious discussion about what has happened, andstep out of our isolation, out of the private spaces (on social media),reconvening again with our bodies? Is the occupation of spaces still working isa method and, if not, what could replace it? Can we use our imagination to findnew strategies and tactics beyond those that have been tried out? Is the globalconnection of local struggles still possible—and desirable -- or shouldwe reconcile with small, fragmented clashes that, for the time being, do notresonate with events elsewhere? Is there anything happening in the first place,or are we blinded by our informational overload? Is it possible to findcommunalities in struggles? Futureof Europe and the Polis Networks Right-wingmovements portray Europe as a bureaucratic monster that only claims more powerand financial resources for itself. Progressive left regards it as a club ofthe few representing global industrial interests of banks and financial giants.How do we find a way to redefine Europe in other terms rather than within thislimiting opposition? How do we reconcile the local element that we celebratehere, with transnational forms of solidarity? How do we bridge the macro withthe micro, preventing that the macro becomes the distant, immaterial dimension,whereas the micro degenerates into boring and selfish provincialism? Can wefind an inspiration in networks of rebel cities that stand up against bothpopulist nationalism and global capital? It seems more doable to arrangeconcrete exchanges between cities, its citizens and officials, rather than theempty gestures of bilateral meetings. But those exchanges presume strong formsof local organization and cannot be advocated in all cases. Without movements,without winning elections, not much will happen. How can the boredom, projectedonto the national level, be overcome? What does it mean that we donate theorgans of the nation state to right wing populists, for a long time to come? # 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: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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