nettime What is Codework?
What is Codework? Codework is a practice, not a product. It is praxis, part and parcel of the critique of everyday life. It is not canonic, although it is taken as such. It is not a genre, although it is taken as such. The term is relatively new and should always be renewed. We are suffused with code and its intermingling with surface phenomena. Wave-trains of very low frequency radio pulses for example. Phenomenology of chickadee calls. Codework is not a metaphor, not metaphorical. It exists precisely in the obdurate interstice between the real and the symbolic. It exists in the arrow. It is not a set of procedures or perceptions. It is the noise in the system. It is not the encapsulation or object of the noise or the system. It is continuous; it is parasitic; it is thetic. When it becomes metaphor, masterpiece, artwork, it is still-born; it is of no interest except as cultural residue: it is of great interest to critics, gallerists, editors. When it is not collectible, not a thing, virtual or otherwise, it is not of interest to critics, gallerists, editors. Things have already taken up its name, as if pictures in an exhibition. This is nothing more than the continuous reification, territorialization, conquest, of the real - as if the real were always already cleansed, available for the taking - as if the real were already transformed into capital. Capital is the encapsulation, objectification, of code. Capital drives the code-conference, the code-book, the code-movement, the code-artist, the code-masterpiece; capital drives the technology. In short: Capital drives code into metaphor. In short: Metaphor drives code into capital. In short, but of greater difficulty: Capital drives metaphor into code. In production, simpler: Metaphor drives capital into code. The driving of metaphor, code, or capital is not codework. Codework is the labor of code, subject to thermodynamics. Codework is demonstrative, demonstrative fragment, experiment, partial- inscription, partial-object, the _thing_ prior to its presentation, the linguistic kernel of the pre-linguistic. Code is the thetic, the gestural, of the demonstrative. It the gesture that never quite takes. It is the noise inherent in the gestural. However: Codework will become a _subject_ or a _sub-genre_ or a _venue_ or an _artwork_ or an _artist_ or a _dealer_ or a _collector._ However: This is not codework, or: What I describe above is not codework; after all, names are subsumed beneath the sign (Emblematic) of capital - as if something is being accomplished. (Hackers who are not hackers are unhacked.) To code is not to produce codework; it is to produce code on the level of the code or interface. Bridged code, embedded code, is not codework; the irreversible spew of cellular automata is codework, all the better if the rules are noisy. The cultural production of codework abjures intensifica- tions, strange attractors, descriptions such as this (which is the oldest game in the _book_). The hunt and reception of short-wave number codes is codework. Writers on the edge are circumscribed by codework, malfunctioned psychoanalytics, scatologies. Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Blacks, are endlessly coded and decoded; the codes are dissolute, partial, always already incom- plete: the differend is codework. To speak against the differend is codework; tumors are codework, metas- tases. The useless sequences of DNA, RNA. Be wary of the violence of the legible text. Beware the metaphor which institutionalizes, the text which defines, the text of positivities, not negations, the circumscribing text, inscribing text; beware of the producers and institutions of these texts, whose stake is in hardening of definitions, control, capital, slaughter: Texts slaughter. And texts slaughter texts. # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime definition of snarkyness
(While digging through the blogosphere I came across this German (?) theory prose on Revenge of the Blog. Net Criticism in the Age of Web 2.0? /geert) http://pitsch.wordpress.com/2006/04/04/snarkyness/ Snarkyness It would be wonder if American bloggers wouldn?t develope their ?own? jargon. We can speak of the top of a pyramide of attention of bottom-up citizen blogging which is lead by a relatively closed circle of ?class A? bloggers. Such a classication refers more to quality control in industrial production than the ranking in sports which would be how one would use it Germany (?Oberliga?). In these language games, which are certainly right now heavily researched by academia, a term which appeared often describes the writing style of blogger, more a common attitude than a distinctive form to differentiate one blogger from another. ?Snarky? to my ear it sounds more like witty sarcasm than cold cyncism, it contributes more to the Young Urban Professional than to the authoritarian character described by Adorno, who?s cynicism is a way of distancing himself from his own ethical involvement. The snarky voice of blogger seems to have an east coast origin, or better british origin. It has not reached the center of Californian ?positivism?, as expressed in the ?inspired? writing of Tim O?Reilly and colleagues at O?Reilly Radar, which is maybe a good example for a specialized ?blog? which is not just a self-run-ego-booster but rather tends towards an interesting model of coders of programs as writers of articles and self-promoters of their philosophy of coding. The importance of the ?universal tone? of the snarky voice is expressed by the connotation of the attributed sound of the human voice. to have a ?voice? on the net, is maybe the most central aspect of blogging, especially because this sound is expressed textually and only newly in the direct form of podcasts. Snarky refers ethymologically to the nasal aspect of snoring or snorting. This sonority refers both to a certain private informality of the ?pyjama blogger? but also a certain state of routine and disconnectedness to a feedback which would allow to modulate the expressions. the opposite would be described by another emerging term ?Emo?, which stands for emotional and expressive, and is used both in music and programming. Again, to me the sound of blogging is more like the one of the office chats, the talks around the coffee or copy machine in the morning. the brevity has less to do with the time of the readers but the one of the writers, which very soon have to direct their attention to their days work. in this way blogging is the conversaiton of the world wide white collar force, which is often working from home today. In distinction to the authoritarian character described by Max Weber in the rigidly hirarchized administration of the Prussian State, the new authoritarian character is a liberal one, he is contributing to an economic culture which integrated a protestantic work ethics and loaded it with hedonism and fun. the new authoritarianism is much more machinic and structural to a degree of micro-management. another word which is very fashionable with bloggers is procastination. it describes a hesitation of fulfilling small tasks. it is enemy number of the blogger. between snarkyness and procastination lays the new work ethics which follow the subjectivification of the knowledge worker in the neo-liberal world society. Published: 4.4.06 / 10am # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime FW: [isworld] Call for participation Global Text Project - IS book
-Original Message- From: Richard Watson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: May 16, 2006 2:34 PM To: AISWORLD Information Systems World Network Subject: [isworld] Call for participation Global Text Project - IS book THE GLOBAL TEXT PROJECT - Engaging many for the benefit of many more An interviewer with BBC News Magazine asked Sir Richard Branson how he felt, as a multi-millionaire, when he visited impoverished regions of Africa. He responded: Anyone would feel an enormous sense of guilt going to one of these places-and if you're in a position to do something about it you've got to make an effort.[1] Most IS scholars are relatively wealthy compared to those who live in the developing regions of the world. They are also rich in knowledge, and we believe IS scholars should lead the academic world in making their knowledge more accessible to students and faculty in poor countries by participating in the creation of free, open content textbooks. Textbooks are considered expensive in Europe and the U.S., but they are far beyond the reach of many in developing economies. For example, a $108 Biology textbook sells for $51 in Africa,[2] but the U.S. GNI per capita is $41,400, and the figure for Uganda is $250. [3] Obviously, the developed world's textbook business model does not meet the needs of those in the developing world. We need a publishing model that can meet the needs of Uganda and the many other countries that are not among the World Bank's high-income countries (those with GNI per capita above $10,066). Mass education has created tremendous opportunities and wealth for people in developed countries. It has enabled many to escape poverty. Mass education for the developing world is dependent among other things on finding low cost means of delivering free, quality, content to many. We believe we have a model for developing the necessary content, and we need your support to start an endeavor that can engage many for the benefit of many more. It is called the Globaltext project. The Globaltext project was initiated in early 2006 to develop a series of free, open content, electronic textbooks using modified wiki software. A complete description of Globaltext is available on the project's website at http://globaltext.org. Please take a moment and read about the project's history and positioning before reading this document. Briefly, the project was initiated as a result of two events: (1) the announcement and enthusiastic reception of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project at MIT http://laptop.org, also known as the $100 laptop project, and (2) the experience in the developing a free wiki XML textbook by faculty and students at the University of Georgia since 2004. The XML textbook may be viewed at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XML. The impetus for developing the information systems text as one of the first in the series is based on: * The worldwide community of IS academics is a closely-knit community. Individuals know each other and have a long history of cooperating with each other on a global scale. Creation of an open content textbook will require the cooperation of the worldwide community of faculty and their students, as well as practitioners. * The IS community, of all academic communities, should be the one that is an early adopter of technology that holds the promise of being able to create a state-of-the-art textbook. * The textbook created by the community will be best-in-class, up-to-date, and, perhaps most importantly, made available at no cost to students anywhere in the world, but particularly in the developing world in line with the goals of the OLPC project. Members of the Globaltext core team are Wayne Huang (Ohio University), Don McCubbrey (University of Denver), Chris Wagner (City University of Hong Kong) and Rick Watson (University of Georgia). Additional information on the core team is available on the project's website. THE EDITORIAL STRUCTURE The editorial board created for each book will ensure the necessary degree of consistency and quality. Rick Watson and Don McCubbrey will serve as Co-Editors-in Chief of the Information Systems text. The initial outline for the book (described below) was developed by the founding members of the editorial board: Gordon Davis, Don McCubbrey, and Rick Watson. In developing the initial outline, reference was made to the most recent Model Curriculum and Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems as approved by The Association for Computing Machinery, The Association for Information Systems, and The Association of Information Technology Professionals [5] as well as the participants' familiarity with more recent trends. In the spirit of open content development, suggestions for changes to the initial outline are welcomed. Volunteers are needed to serve as chapter editors. As explained in greater detail on
nettime May Day report
[This mail, orginally dated May 3, got stuck in a mail queue here @ nettime. Sorry for the delay. Felix] May Day, 2006 Chicago, USA Dear nettime, Today I went to the big immigrants' rights march/rally. I had enough to say about the day even before I received word, just after having returned home from the event, of an untimely loss for the Chicago art/activist world. Michael Piazza passed suddenly over the weekend. Michael was an artist and a local presence for many years, with a memory of radical Chicago that went back to the Seventies. I cannot speak about May Day in Chicago in 2006 without mentioning the concurrent passing of this colleague beloved by so many because Michael himself played an important role in keeping the observance of May Day vital in the city of its politicized birth, including having coordinated a number of projects that took place on the site of the Haymarket incident. I could say a lot more about Michael and the way he lived his life, but I'll keep it short here and simply offer the observation that much of what happens in this city in the area of cultural activism--the way our networks operate, the way people so generously support and collaborate with each other, the way productive exchanges between allies are made possible--bears the imprint of Michael's innovations and values. I think with time we will realize that Michael's work, in its own way, left as long a shadow in this city as did that of the late Carlos Cortez. Check out this interview with Michael on the colorful struggle over Haymarket memory, authored by Nicolas Lampert. http://www.areachicago.com/issue2/haymarket.htm To the immigrants' rights rally, then. It was huge. The New York Times quoted the Chicago police count at 400k while organizers claimed more than 600k. I tramped around the perimeter of the concluding rally site, stopping in different places to get a feel for the local view, observe neighboring clusters of demonstrators, catch fragments of sound and speech floating by. The composite impression I took from the experience was one of hope, but in regard to a very particular problem--what Badiou in _Ethics_ calls 'the problem of the same.' As opposed to the problem of difference. Because here difference was not only on display but joyfully announced, with creative signs, t-shirts, and yes flags doing the work of declaring origins. And yet the aggregate message was one of unity, of the common, of the shared--of 'the same.' When difference is not only tolerated but celebrated--ie the presence of more and greater difference literally applauded by the cheering throng (Organizer: And today the Ghanian community stands with us! Mexican throng: Yay!!!)--how can it be anything else but making visible the depth of the common interest, the common cause, the common struggle. A significant feature of this event (along with the first big one that took place here back in March) was the notable presence of Polish, Croatian, Irish, and Ukrainian immigrants, who together probably made up about 15 percent of the crowd. Unlike the actions in LA, this visible minority of white Euro-immigrants turns the local debate constructively away from racist undertones. The small but tightly organized block of young Irish immigrants, especially, echoes the immigrant history associated with the current city father (Daley junior). You don't want to be too crass about it, but in Chicago it never pays to err on the side of subtlety, either, so it must be said: this undeniably multi-racial character of the local movement has arguably dulled the easiest of the reactionary counterattacks. Seeing peoples normally (around these parts) thought of as 'white' not only joining a Mexican-led movement, but happy to do so, and furthermore, pleased and comfortable to be playing the role of minority...that, I'm guessing, is a complication of the default white supremacist narrative which immediately gums up the psychology of xenophobia. Chicago being the North American center for Polish, Croatian, and Ukrainian immigration, and one of the centers for the Irish arrivals, perhaps stands to render the local movement worthy of continued consideration nationally as the xenophobic reaction inevitably counters in the coming days. That all said, there were two groups underrepresented in bodies and yet still represented. The Black American and the Chinese shared this peculiar status. Neither were very visible as countable bodies, although the black folks seemed to be out in numbers greater than the media reports would have you believe. Nevertheless, considering this city is more than 30 percent black, the numbers seemed pretty small. I have no figures on the numbers of undocumented Chinese in Chicago, but I do know that a friend who was looking for a caregiver for an elderly Chinese woman got more than thirty calls in response to an ad that ran for one week in the lowest circulation local Chinese paper, and all of the applicants were middle-aged women
nettime Supporting Iraqi Radio Journalists (interview with Anja Wollenberg)
Supporting Iraqi Radio Journalists Interview with Anja Wollenberg, Media in Cooperation Transition (Berlin/Amman) By Geert Lovink Media in Cooperation Transition (MICT) is a Berlin-based organization that was founded in late 2004 out of a radio program that was conducted as Iraqi German cooperation (TELEPHONE FM, by streamminister) and that was broadcasted in Baghdad. With an emphasis on cooperation, mixing Internet streaming technology with old school radio techniques MICT is running media projects ever since with Iraqi partners in Iraq, addressing an Iraqi audience. MICT-projects have a focus on the political process in Iraq, respectively the elections and the constitutional process in the last year. MICT is run by Klaas Glenewinkel an Anja Wollenberg and could be considered a sister organization of Streamtime, the support campaign for Iraqi bloggers, in which I am involved, with, in fact, equally strong roots in radio and streaming. This interview could be read as a follow-up of the one I did with Streamtime member Cecile Landman, earlier this year (http://www.networkcultures.org/weblog/archives/2006/01/ support_iraqi_b.html#more). GL: Your website looks slick and corporate. Yet, there can't be a more unglamorous place to work than Iraq. It seems such a big contrast. How do you deal with this? Free and independent radios and newspapers in Iraq seem to be involved in such a heroic and titanic struggle. AW: In Iraq today you will find a high degree on plurality in the media landscape, professionalism in reporting has increased dramatically, governmental censorship has vanished and the right to free speech is generally given, although seriously damaged by the growing lack of protection for journalists. But independency is definitely missing. It has not developed yet in the field of media. There is no market, no market research, no legal framework. Instead media in Iraq are with almost no exception partisan and biased. In lack of a market they depend on donors and donors are rarely free of interest when it comes to the Iraqi situation. From my point of view the current struggle in Iraq is in the first place not about freedom, democracy or independence. It is primarily about power and its redistribution. The political conflicts revolve around this, the constitutional process did revolve around this, the elections do and the media are hopelessly and actively involved in this process of redistribution. Independency is lip service in Iraq today. It will only become reality in the framework of an according law, on the ground of an emerging market and a less fragile power situation. But from what I understood the Iraqi user, reader, viewer is quite capable to differentiate. As media users Iraqis derive from a tradition of political propaganda. Not trust but distrust in media is the common attitude. In general they tend to make use of different media sources including foreign Broadcasters such as Al-Jazeera, Radio Monte Carlo and BBC World. How do we deal with contrast? The 50 team-members we worked with in the last year came from 5 different countries and were located in 3 different places (Amman, Iraq and Germany). Contradicting views and environments were an essential part of our daily work. Therefore the structure of cooperation, the culture of communication and the design of the editorial workflows gradually adapted to the need for creating common perspectives with those involved on a daily basis. That is a challenge, indeed. GL: Over the past year or so you have been giving media trainings in Amman, Jordan to Iraqi radio journalists. What have your experiences been so far? AW: The participants for the trainings we do are mostly the correspondents for the media-projects we run. Trainings are embedded in an ongoing cooperation and they are usually combined with a workshop where we discuss concept and content for the upcoming program with the correspondents. This has always been an extraordinary experience with the Iraqi colleagues. They are absolutely committed to their work and they like very much to engage in this kind of discussion. Most of them understand journalism as a moral mission. They act in the name of truth as a symbol for a new decade. To me this belief in truth and the effort to erase subjectivity from journalistic work may bring along problems though. Journalists, who are not reflecting on and dealing with their subjectivity but just reject it, become vulnerable for abuse in the power struggle that Iraq is going through. As I said: media in Iraq are biased and partisan. You cannot ignore that, but many Iraqi journalists tend to do so. Another observation is quite interesting: a multitude of international media institutions (dpa, reuters, BBC, Deutsche Welle, MICT, IWPR, CNN, RFI, UN?) is offering media training to Iraqi journalists who attend workshops,
