nettime precarity, social movements and political communication (buenos aires)]
hi there - here is the english translation of the introductory text for the meeting on precarity, social movements, and political communication held in buenos aires some weeks ago - hope it is of your interest - cheers marcelo --- PRECARITY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND POLITICAL COMMUNICATION Forms of auto-organization and communication strategies in the era of globalization In our time, human experience finds itself under siege by multiple threats that underline the fragility of contemporary life. Environmental catastrophes, international terrorism practiced by states and elites that have given themselves a license to kill, brutal social inequalities derived from the rule of the market over citizens rights, offer frequent scenes of barbarity to those who have the heart to look on them. As well, other threats, perhaps more subtle but no less real, join in the production of a scenario in which fear, distrust and terror are the norm. Our moment, then, appears to us as a scenario in which the production of the social tie is affected by countless conditions. In recent years, however, with the pace of civilizing change that marks the current momentand within the idea of irreversible crisis previously generated by classical forms of politics that formed the backdrop of the 20th centurywe have seen a group of dissimilar experiences emerge (as much in Argentina as in the world at large) that have lead to the reinvention of forms of experiencing the common good and the collective where were the market and contemporary fears invite only the development of individualistic trajectories. This project proposes to develop a field of interrogation common to these experiences that have shown us these singular trajectories that share a common horizon: that which here we call flights from precarity. The notion of precarity has been revealed to be particularly operative in describing modes of contemporary existence. In a limited sense, this notion is useful for designating the recent changes in a constitutive area of the human: labor. The course of neoliberalism across the globe, together with the crisis in welfare politics that constituted the fundamental framework of nation states after the war, produced a group of radical modifications in the map of productive activities. As used by certain theorists and social activists in Spain and other countries in Europe, precarity serves to map, to de-nature and to politicize the modes in which labor markets in the era of post-Fordist fluidity try to fix new parameters of control for productive praxis. The precariat, the contemporary garb worn by the old proletariat, would permit us, although only potentially, to illuminate the conditions of labor not only of factory workers, but also of all those who live off their labor. Precarity then is as much a descriptive, sociological notion that helps realize todays forms of labor, as it is a political one, capable of creating ways of thinking held in common and of creating methods of cooperation for a set of very diverse situations. If phenomenon of this type began to occur in Europe, in a context of relative abundance a context, however, that is increasingly being eroded labor precarity is demonstrated in a much more forceful manner in Latin America, as has been recently exhibited in Argentina. Speaking here (in Argentina) of precarious work is to speak of, to start with, half of the workers here: those who work in the black. To continue, we must note the multitudes of workers who, despite being not salaried, produce a type of wealth that makes possible the survival of hundreds of thousands of people. It is necessary to add, then, those who work under those so-called trash contracts, contracts of temporary labor, without the recognition of the most basic labor rights: no bonuses, no vacations, no sick leave. Moreover, to this situation we would add the variety of scholarship recipients, workers ad-honorem, volunteers, intermittent artists, etc., a vast group of situations that implicates large swaths of young people and of the middle classes. In sum, precarity is a blemish that extends from excluded sectors to persons living on the edge of penury; it is also the ground from which new forms of aggregation and cooperation among segments of workers (i.e., public transit employees, call center workers, the self-proclaimed young precarious scientists, amongst others) have emerged. But here we dont want to limit ourselves to a narrow use of the notion of precarity. Parallel to its ability to make visible the morphology of contemporary forms of work, this category permits us to focus on other dimensions as well, including precarity derived from the lack of rights in the area of communication subjugated by the mass-media empire; the precarity of citizenship in front of the existence of mechanisms for the coercion of civil liberties that are trying to kill the use of public space (from railings in parks that impede free
nettime Virtually obsessed... with the peer-to-peer world
http://www.asia-commons.net Virtually obsessed... with the peer-to-peer world Michel Bauwens, 48, turned his back on a senior corporate position, and moved from his homeland of Belgium to another contentinent... and a very different way of doing things. Today, researching the P2P movement worldwide is a virtual obsession. Pun intended. We both have one thing in common, he whispered to me conspiratorily as we were finishing our chat, we're information gluttons. So what's the idea behind Michel's p2pfoundation.net and the 2000 pages of wiki-based information it contains? Let's hear him explain: The basic idea I had was that there's a new social movement emerging, which is really about extending the realm of participation to the whole of life. We live in a representative democracy, which says you can vote every four years, and choose which people who exercise power on your behalf... now we're building tools and resources which say everybody needs to be involved, and everybody should have a voice. This movement takes varied forms, and comes in different shapes. It basically has a free-and-open paradigm, which ensures that people can work together and create a pool of resources that they can use. There's the participative processes itself. There's peer production (working together). And there's peer goernance (how you manage that kind of cooperation). The result of all these processes is the commons, he adds. Michel sees that a whole lot of action is taking place on the ground. But there's a catch. There's no place where you can find this information easily. It's all scattered across the globe. To make things worse, one end of this global movement doesn't recognise the other end. People in open politics, open money, participatory culture, participatory spirituality... they don't realise that they are doing something broadly similar and they can all reinforce each other, he argues. So go to p2pfoundation.net and see the way he's trying to link them all together. By information. There's a newsletter, which is a thematic weekly. It's consolidated information, focussing on one topic each week. Everything goes out in electronic form. We also have a blog, which is a day to day commentary. You can find it at blog.p2pfoundation.com , says Michel. [If you want a copy of his newsletter, contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] to subscribe.] So Michel is trying to build an ecology with all this information he puts together. Material goes into the newsletter and the blog. Then, he puts it up in a more structured format on the wiki (which has a functional and a topical area). My goal is to documenting commons-related project worldwide, says he. Anything that's collaboratively produced in common. It could be from the realms of peer production, peer collaboration, peer governance. Take the case of Apache, Mozilla, and the Debian Foundation. How do they manage to have tonnes of people working together (over such ambitious but scattered voluntary projects)? How does that work? he asks with obivious curiosity and admiration. Michel is very modest about the fact that he's collating material from the internet which is all there. Although in a hard-to-find, scattered way. On his site, he has a P2P (peer-to-peer) movements' directory, a webcast directory, P2P encyclopaedia with about 800 terms explained. Right from concepts like the open car project, to open ecology. Open car? What's that? Some people, including expert designers working with major corporations, are volunteering their time to design freely-sharable plans for a environmentally-friendly solar car project. The car isn't physically being made, but it's part of the open design movement, he explains. There are 35 terms around 'open'. And another 25 terms that start with 'participatory' -- right from culture, spirituality. Seven or eight terms are related to commons, from fields relating to books and the science commons, says Michel. Open and free software is like the raw-material, he beliees. This allows groups to communicate and then freely engage to build something in common. He has been keenly keeping track of ideas such as peer mentoring in education too. Time? All this takes upto six hours per day. He does a thorough job, maintaining a full index of everything published in two years. By now the wiki has 2000 pages of information. It explains concepts like the open text book movement, and how these are related with other such movements, says he. Recently, he launched a regional section focussing on French-Italian-Spanish. Keeping this ecology alive it's mostly cutting-and-pasting. I'm a librarian by training. So I choose the relevant citation, and put it in the right topic. You can do that pretty fast, says he. But he's obviously doing a very thorough job. Which was the most exciting idea he came across? To me, the most exciting is open spirituality. It's a process of co-operative enquiry. It assumes nobody has The Truth. Instead, you agree to a certain
RE: cybernetics and the Internet, Was: nettime NNA...
On Sat, 10 Jun 2006, Ronda Hauben wrote: The point there was to encourage cross disciplinary discussion and to break through the communication boundaries of the various disciplines. But the Macy Conferences were actually about feedback systems, not about mathematical philosophy to open social order as far as the reading I have done. Ronda - As I too stated, the Macy conferences were about feedback systems and exposing cybernetics, a 'mathematical philosophy', to a variety of social and hard scientists; encouraging cross-disciplinarity through this way of thinking. And I'm sure you would agree that this 'mathematical philosophy' had a massive impact on many fields, which in turn have contributed to shaping society as a whole. But, I want to take this a step further, recognizing the resonance and hegemony of this feedback-based-autopoetic-OPEN-systems-approach in today's SOCIAL ORDER. To some extent we are agreeing, but for some reason you don't seem to want recognize any of the military/surveillance/intelligence/social-order legacy that is clearly a part of the history of these conferences, 'open feedback systems', the internet and cybernetics as a whole. So be it. That is my reading. The effort to look at feedback or self organizing systems across different disciplines meant that the research was different depending on the different disciplines yes, of course the research was different, but it was all based on the same 'mathematical philosophy': Cybernetics! Such unity of thought was the point! So, thank you for your references. I have read the Wiener and am very aware of 'netizen' thinking. I will take a look at the Macy proceedings you have suggested... But like Mark, I too would recommend that you (re)read some Wiener, particularly the 1st Edition of 'The Human Use of Human Beings': On Sat, 10 Jun 2006, Newmedia wrote: Wiener's refusal to apply cybernetics to the effort to control people and populations is documented in his introduction to Cybernetics. In this he names Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson (secy of the Macy conferences) as well as Kurt Lewin. All three of these *were* military supported and motivated. Weiner wrote The Human Use of Human Beings because of his massive concerns about military use of cybernetics (you have to read the 1950 first edition to understand this) and then around 1953 he gave up this fight -- because he was convinced that he had lost and the military had won. He rewrote Human Use and dropped out of the cybernetics field. best, ~kcw # 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
RE: cybernetics and the Internet, Was: nettime NNA...
On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, kenneth c. werbin wrote: I was not intending to suggest that the attendees of the Macy conferences were military mathematicians (although some like Wiener clearly were), rather that the Macy conferences saw social scientists, like Mead, consider questions of cybernetics and feedback in their fields, as well as in greater society. This is clearly attested to in the title of the inaugral Macy conference, Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems, held on March 8-9, 1946*. The Macy conferences were but one means of spreading the gospel of cybernetics to academics at large. Indeed, I in no way intended to reduce the cybernetic community of the 40's and 50's to some militray plot for the purpose of control, rather I wanted to illuminate the applicability and resonance of this mathematical philosophy to open social order. But the Macy Conferences were actually about feedback systems, not about mathematical philosophy to open social order as far as the reading I have done. I have read a number of the discussions in the Macy Conference volumes. The point there was to encourage cross disciplinary discussion and to break through the communication boundaries of the various disciplines. The effort to look at feedback or self organizing systems across different disciplines meant that the research was different depending on the different disciplines Does this fit with your reading? No what you suggest doesn't fit in with my reading. Which books on the Macy conferences would you recommend? First I recommend you read some of the conferences themselves. There is a relatively new edition containing all five of them Cybernetics | Kybernetik The Macy-Conferences 1946.1953 Volume 1 Transactions/Protokolle Edited by Claus Pias Published by Diaphanes: Zurich, Berlin The 5 Macy Conference volumes are included in this edition and are in English though the publisher is German. Other suggestions: Invention by Wiener Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (Hardcover) by Norbert Wiener, Steve Joshua Heims Book Review of Netizens by Boldur Barbat http://www.ici.ro/ici/revista/sic1998_4/art06.html cybernetics.ref (14%) Article on the Information Processing Techniques Office I am working on: The Information Processing Techniques Office and the Birth of the Internet A Study in Governance http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/lick101.doc It is important to keep in mind that Norbert Wiener at a point in his life didn't do military related work. cheers Ronda * Summaries of all the Macy conference sessions can be found at the American Society for Cybernetics http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm best, ~kcw # 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
Re: nettime report_on_NNA
For the sake of clarity Geert are you putting yourself forward for all the hard work involved in being part of the next stage in the 'rotation'. you are proposing or is this a prompting that others rather than yourself should put themselves forward to take up this burden ? On Jun 9, 2006, at 8:33 AM, Geert Lovink wrote: No, not at all. Did I suggest that?... Not directly but in any community/collective I know if someone 'stands up in a meeting' and makes a suggestion involving work then such an intervention carries with it the implication (and perhaps responsibility) that they are also willing to share in that work. Otherwise the intervention could be mistaken for being somewhat aristocratic. The examples you gave of larger networks of moderation implies that having been part of the early phase need not preclude being part of the new rotation in fact a blend of experience and new blood might enrich any new model under consideration. David # 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
Re: nettime report_on_NNA
Not directly but in any community/collective I know if someone 'stands up in a meeting' and makes a suggestion involving work then such an intervention carries with it the implication (and perhaps responsibility) that they are also willing to share in that work. Otherwise the intervention could be mistaken for being somewhat aristocratic. Weeel, c'mon, he's chiming in with what seems to be a good idea, but good to do some arm-twisting before he gets too deep into academia ;-)) I am of the same opinion, and probably cannot join in on the task as I have other facilitation tasks already. BUT, see below -- it's hard to say yes OR no without a clear description of the job! The examples you gave of larger networks of moderation implies that having been part of the early phase need not preclude being part of the new rotation in fact a blend of experience and new blood might enrich any new model under consideration. excellent suggestion David, and with steady rotation and an experience-base to further stabilize things maybe nettime continues, or maybe not. a decade is a long time in this biz. change can also mean death. In this Light, I would challenge Felix and Ted (and any others feeling qualified) to write a brief task description of the (different) roles/positions necessary to run nettime as it is today. Put it out here. I certainly have some interest, but would need to know the scalability and absolute size of what tasks are necessary, and how they are (technically and socially) accomplished... Cheers John # 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
