Re: nettime Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology
On Thursday 14 August 2003 14:07, Felix Stalder wrote: The Open Source Approach to develop informational goods has been spectacularly successful [...] The boundaries to the open production model as it has been established in the last decade are set by six conditions characterizing virtually all of the success stories of what Benkler called commons-based peer production. While I think your analysis is useful, in that it partly explains why it has been so easy for commons-based peer production to flourish in software development, I would be hesitant to define the open source approach solely or even primarily in terms of the characteristics you mention. In terms of power structures, surely there are many different open source approaches, including the 'benevolent dictator' approach used by the Linux kernel developers, and the various kinds of consensus, voting and delegation used by Apache, KDE and Debian. While these projects have different political models, they have some poltiical features in common: Open participation: Anyone can participate if they agree to the groups's principles, and have the necessary skills. Self-management: The people who do the work decide amongst themselves what work is to be done, and how to do it. Transparency: detailed about what the group is doing, including its discussions and decisions, as well as the knowledge gained through its work, are publicly available on web sites (e.g. in the form of source code and documentation) and on mailing lists. Public ownership of knowledge: because knowledge about the group's work is publicly available, and freedom to use this knowledge is protected by open source licences, it becomes part of the commons. (Note that even if a group produced something material, which could not be shared as easily as software, the group could still share its knowledge in the same way.) Open participation also promotes public ownership of knowledge, because less experienced people can learn from more experienced people through participation. Respect for skill: If your expertise is recognized by others, and you contribute something useful, your opinions are granted more weight. There is no way to gain influence without skill. Diversity: Different approaches to carrying out tasks and solving problems can coexist (without hindering one another), and learn from each other (e.g. KDE and GNOME). It seems to me that these principles could indeed be applied to projects that don't fall within the boundaries you specified. The Open Organizations project (http://www.open-organizations.org) is an attempt to synthesize these principles, and some others, into a workable, general-purpose model. Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology
Felix Stalder wrote: I totally agree that, from organizational point of view, the points you list such as open participation are very important. Your list is fully consistent with my elaborations. Yes. The Open Organizations project (http://www.open-organizations.org) is an attempt to synthesize these principles, and some others, into a workable, general-purpose model. I'm skeptical about the possibility of a workable, general-purpose model. My post was about the fact that the type of problem affects the social organization through which the solution is being developed. Agreed. OpenOrg, though relatively general-purpose, isn't meant to be a universal model. It's meant to suggest processes that from which you can pick and choose for the situation you find yourself in, discarding what doesn't fit. Since it's a theory based on practices used in real groups, we don't know what its limitations are (though some may well be determined by the criteria you listed), how far it will scale, etc. But it's at least an attempt at articulating a set of organizational practices at a more general level than software development. So far, we've seen some parts of it used successfully in the Indymedia network (see http://docs.indymedia.org/), and in some small activist groups. One thing we've observed is that, once people have the tools to make openness easy, it quickly becomes second nature to them. We've found that giving mailing lists and Wikis to activists is a much more effective way to promote openness than talking to them about organizational processes. With the right tools, groups of people become open without having to have the theory explained to them, because it's so much easier to work that way. Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime If you can't beat them, monetize them!
Patrice Riemens wrote: SCO invites open source people to 'monetize' Linux A snappy reply from Linus Torvalds, which nicely sums up the crux of the issue: --- http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/09/10/2321224.shtml?tid=11 Dear Darl, Thank you so much for your letter. We are happy that you agree that customers need to know that Open Source is legal and stable, and we heartily agree with that sentence of your letter. The others don't seem to make as much sense, but we find the dialogue refreshing. However, we have to sadly decline taking business model advice from a company that seems to have squandered all its money (that it made off a Linux IPO, I might add, since there's a nice bit of irony there), and now seems to play the U.S. legal system as a lottery. We in the Open Source group continue to believe in technology as a way of driving customer interest and demand. Also, we find your references to a negotiating table somewhat confusing, since there doesn't seem to be anything to negotiate about. SCO has yet to show any infringing IP in the Open Source domain, but we wait with bated breath for when you will actually care to inform us about what you are blathering about. All of our source code is out in the open, and we welcome you to point to any particular piece you might disagree with. Until then, please accept our gratitude for your submission, Yours truly, Linus Torvalds --- And from Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens: http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/09/09/2355214.shtml?tid=11 Mr. McBride, in your Open Letter to the Open Source Community your offer to negotiate with us comes at the end of a farrago of falsehoods, half-truths, evasions, slanders, and misrepresentations. You must do better than this. We will not attempt to erect a compromise with you on a foundation of dishonesty. Your statement that Eric Raymond was contacted by the perpetrator of the DDoS attack on SCO begins the falsehoods. Mr. Raymond made very clear when volunteering his information and calling for the attack to cease that he was contacted by a third-party associate of the perpetrator and does not have the perpetrator's identity to reveal. The DDoS attack ceased, and has not resumed. Mr. Raymond subsequently received e-mailed thanks for his action from Blake Stowell of SCO. Your implication that the attacks are a continuing threat, and that the President of the Open Source Initiative is continuing to shield their perpetrator, is therefore not merely both false and slanderous, but contradictory with SCO's own previous behavior. In all three respects it is what we in the open-source community have come to expect from SCO. If you are serious about negotiating with anyone, rather than simply posturing for the media, such behavior must cease. In fact, leaders of the open-source community have acted responsibly and swiftly to end the DDoS attacks just as we continue to act swiftly to address IP-contamination issues when they are aired in a clear and responsible manner. This history is open to public inspection in the Linux-kernel archives and elsewhere, with numerous instances on record of Linus Torvalds and others refusing code in circumstances where there is reason to believe it might be compromised by third-party IP claims. As software developers, intellectual property is our stock in trade. Whether we elect to trade our effort for money or rewards of a subtler and more enduring nature, we are instinctively respectful of concerns about IP, credit, and provenance. Our licenses (the GPL and others) work with copyright law, not against it. We reject your attempt to portray our community as a howling wilderness of IP thieves as a baseless and destructive smear. We in the open-source community are accountable. Our source code is public, exposed to scrutiny by anyone who wishes to contest its ownership. Can SCO or any other closed-source vendor say the same? Who knows what IP violations, what stripped copyrights, what stolen techniques lurk in the depths of closed-source code? Indeed, not only SCO's past representations that it was merging GPLed Linux technology into SCO Unix but Judge Debevoise's rulings in the last big lawsuit on Unix IP rights suggest strongly that SCO should clean up its own act before daring to accuse others of theft. SCO taxes IBM and others with failing to provide warranties or indemnify users against third-party IP claims, conveniently neglecting to mention that the warranties and indemnities offered by SCO and others such as Microsoft are carefully worded so that the vendor's liability is limited to the software purchase price, They thus offer no actual shield against liability claims or damages. They are, in a word, shams designed to lull users into a false sense of security -- a form of sham which we believe you press on us solely as posturing, rather than out of any genuine concern for users. We in the open-source
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Kermit Snelson wrote: Intellectuals and artists have always relied on patronage, patronage depends on plunder, and plunder depends on deceit and exploitation. Who, after all, paid for Europe's cathedrals? Who paid for Beethoven's sonatas? Who pays for universities today? [...] which side are we, as intellectuals and artists, really on? Who pays for *any* activity? No human occupation is divorced from the economic and political order in which it takes place. Workers in a cooperative, if they're paid in money, go out and spend it in the capitalist economy, thus supporting that economy. Everything is contaminated in this way. How you personally manage to survive in a thoroughly contaminated economy matters less than the actions you take to help change the world order. Theory is necessary, but practice has a much greater ethical value than theory. It is your actions that determine which side you are really on. Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime : Re: New Media Education and Its Discontent
monica ross wrote: Yes, some people are getting paid and others are paying - in some countries, including ones rich enough for it to be free to all. And in some countries, it *is* free for all. Funnily enough, in France for example, the idea of the 'student as consumer', dictating what he or she wants to be taught, seems to be practically nonexistent, and there is a great deal less anti-intellectualism. Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Red Hat Linux end-of-life update and transition planning (fwd)
Alan Sondheim wrote: I find the following strangely disconcerting, as a major linux provider slides out from its customer base. For some this would indicate a growth and maturity of the community - for most of us, it already implies a problematic development of open source community. It's just marketing. If you like Red Hat Linux, you might like Fedora, 'a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project': http://fedora.redhat.com/ If you want a Linux distribution that's maintained by and for its community (complete with a constitution, a social contract, and voting on major issues), you might prefer Debian: http://www.debian.org/ Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime floss enforcement/compliance
Martin Hardie wrote: I understand from the FSF in the US that they deal with enforcement and compliance of the GPL. That sounds a bit misleading. The FSF defends the copyrights that it owns (i.e. for software that is part of the GNU project), and also sometimes helps out other copyright owners of free software when asked to do so. But do they (and I presume with the support of Prof Moglen) only do it within the US. That is within their jurisdiction? The jurisdiction for copyrights is international, thanks to the Berne Convention. The FSF has provided legal assistance to free software authors outside the U.S.; the Swedish company MySQL AB is an example: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi?bw.111202/223162550 Do other groups (ie other than the FSF) deal with compliance and enforcement issues? I think it's mostly up to each copyright owner. Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime floss enforcement/compliance
ed phillips wrote: I'm curious. They seem in their licensing literature( http://www.mysql.com/products/opensource-license.html ) to be trying to scare non-Linux users, companies, and government organizations into purchasing commercial licenses. I thought MySQL's interpretation of the GPL seemed strange at first, but now it seems to me that they're right, since they recently switched the licence of their client libraries from LGPL to GPL: http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing-faq.html This means that if you distribute an application that's linked to their client libraries, your application must be GPL as well. I think the ethical basis for this is sound: using free software in non-free software is a parasitical activity. To make it less parasitical, MySQL AB are charging a fee for it, and using the money to develop more free software. In the long term, if all software becomes free, MySQL AB will of course have to find some other way to survive. But by then, a lot of other things will probably have changed as well. :) As for government organisations, it's in the public interest for them to use free software and open standards, and release as free software any software that they distribute. Indeed many of them are doing just that. Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Civil and human Rights (from indymedia)
Aliette Guibert wrote: Around 150 former Italian activists, condemned in Italy for actions linked with the political and social upheaval of the 1970s Translation: nutters who believed that murdering politicians and random civilians would make them popular. Since 1981, they have been legally residing there on the promise made by the former French President Francois Mitterrand. Ahem. François Mitterand was a model of legality? His arbitrary decision to flout the Italian judicial system should be accepted as gospel? Cesare Battisti, the author of several detective novels Writing detective novels makes you above the law? In Cesare's situation, the Italian governement convicted him in his absence with only repentant's testimonies. If he didn't want to be tried in absentia, he shouldn't have fled Italy. And if he thinks his conviction was unjust, he should appeal, like anyone else. That's called justice. Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Negri with Ballestrini to Battisti and on amnesty
Martin Hardie wrote: Benjamin has been big on trusting the law and its processes in this one ... I simply think that the same rules should apply to everyone. If we accept that, say, the policemen who allegedly beat up activists in Genoa at the G8 should be tried (as indeed they are being tried), then the same principle should also apply to Battisti. Or are you in favour of abandoning the whole notion of trials? If so, I would like to hear what you propose to introduce in its place. but Ben are they not alleged crimes or has Battisti been convicted en absentia? I need only repeat what I've already posted here: Only two years ago, [Battisti] declared that he accepted 'the political and military responsibilities of what the 1970s were in Italy', adding, to be entirely clear: 'I declare myself guilty and I am proud of it.' (From _La Repubblica_, reprinted in _Courrier International_, no. 697, 11-17 March 2004.) That sounds like an unequivocal, unrepentant confession of guilt if I've ever heard one. But just hypothetically, even if Battisti proclaimed his innocence, would we be required to take his word for it? Is that how you think the truth should be determined when someone is accused of murder? Perhaps, like me, you think there should be some sort of fair process for distinguishing truth from falsehood in these cases. That is in fact what courtrooms are for. And what have the rights of victims got to do with a prosecution by the State - crimes are committed against the State, the Crown or the People are they not? Victims don't come into it except to give evidence ... Crimes are committed against individuals, and I think it's fair for victims to seek reparation. If you steal from me something that my livelihood depends on, it's fair for you to have to give it back. If you take my life, clearly you can't give it back, but you will have made my family suffer, and it seems to me that you owe them something. If Battisti is indeed guilty as charged, his crimes have wrecked people's lives, and he has profited from those crimes by using them as material for his novels. That, to me, seems outrageously unfair. I don't wish to live in a society where one can kill and plunder to one's heart's content, and make a profit by doing so, without any inconvenient consequences for oneself. Do you? Why all this faith in law and process? Faith has nothing to do with it. It seems to me that some concept of fairness is inherent in all ethical systems practiced by human beings. The pratice of fairness is inconceivable without socially agreed-upon processes that are recognised as fair, and some means of enforcing those processes. On any definition of fairness I can think of, if those processes apply to anyone, they must apply to everyone. The rule of law, as decided on by parliamentary democracy and implemented by the courts, is certainly far from being perfectly fair. But it is the closest thing we have to such processes today. I am all for replacing it with something better. But we currently have nothing to replace it with, so the current alternative is 'anything goes', which strikes me as far more terrifying than any legal system in use today. It doesn't seem to really reflect much except power does it? Power is inherent in human society. There are only different forms of power, some more consensual, others less so. And why not an amnesty - what can a prosecution achieve - what does jail achieve (save some good books by Negri ;-) ) what can a conviction achieve - will the victims feel better for retribution? Surely here we have moved beyond believing in such stuff? What Negri fails to point out is that (to quote again from the same article in _La Repubblica_) [part of the French left] pretends to be unaware that nearly all the former members of the Red Brigades, including those who assassinated [Italian prime minister] Aldo Moro, have been released from prison or are in semi-liberty, at least those who expressed repentance. If I were Battisti, I would apologise publicly to my victims, agree to assist the Italian legal system, and offer reparations to my victims and their families. I think that would be the right thing for him to do, regardless of what the French courts decide. And it wouldn't hurt his chances of being granted amnesty by the Italian government, either. I'm not in favour of retribution, but I think reparations are fair. However, if Battisti remains unrepentant and if, as it appears, he couldn't care less about his victims, then I think a prison sentence for him is, on balance, more ethical than allowing him to enjoy complete impunity. Ben # 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: [EMAIL
Re: nettime confused euro muslims (via b. sterling)
geert wrote: http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040802fa_fact The _New Yorker_ used to have better editorial standards. This article is inexcusable: it blithely equates Arabs with Muslims and Muslims with terrorists. The Internet provides confused young Muslims in Europe with a virtual community. Those who cannot adapt to their new homes discover on the Internet a responsive and compassionate forum. The Internet stands in for the idea of the ummah, the mythologized Muslim community, Marc Sageman, the psychiatrist and former C.I.A. officer, said. The idea here seems to be to infantilise Muslims: the former CIA officer would have us believe that, gullible and hypnotised by myth, all Muslims are easy prey for whatever devious, fanatical views they might find on the Internet. In any case, who wouldn't be confused by the fact that, in France for example, university graduates called Abdelatif or Nedjma are well advised to change their name to something that sounds more French when looking for a job?[1] The Internet makes this ideal community concrete, because one can interact with it. He compares this virtual ummah to romantic conceptions of nationhood, which inspire people not only to love their country but to die for it. The Internet is a medium for all sorts of nationalisms; there is nothing unusual about this. However, to imply that web sites made by Muslims are mainly focused on promoting war, with the aim of translating the concept of ummah into a real political entity, is ridiculous. Muslims use the Internet to communicate ideas as diverse as those of any other group of people, on as wide a range of subjects, both secular and religious. It allows the propagation of a universal norm, with an Internet Sharia and fatwa system. I certainly hope this Professor Kepel is being quoted out of context. The idea that Muslim writers on the Internet, never mind Muslim Internet users, represent a homogeneous group, adhering to a universal norm concerning Islam, is nonsense. Consider Tariq Ramadan[2][3], advocate of a fully European Islam, or the blogs of Raed Jarrar[4], an Iraqi, and his Iranian girlfriend Nikki[5], who consider themselves secular Muslims. Anyone can seek a ruling from his favorite sheikh in Mecca, Kepel said. In the old days, one sought a fatwa from the sheikh who had the best knowledge. Now it is sought from the one with the best Web site. This sounds suspiciously like the American neoconservative idea that the Internet is an immoral and decadent medium that corrupts the minds of youth (in this case those confused young Muslims). To a large extent, Kepel argues, the Internet has replaced the Arabic satellite channels as a conduit of information and communication. Here we elide the distinction between Arab and Muslim. The people who make Arabic-language satellite channels and web sites, and the people who use them, include many Christians as well as Muslims. The editor of Al Hayat[6] (a widely read Arabic-language newspaper and web site published in London, which often contains articles of great perceptiveness and wit) is a Lebanese Christian. One can say that this war against the West started on television, he said And with no transition, we pass from Arabic-language media to a war against the West, as if the two were equivalent. As if Algerian[7], Moroccan[8] and Tunisian[9] journalists and web site operators weren't being imprisoned for criticising their *own* governments. As if the state-controlled Egyptian newspaper and web site Al Ahram[10] didn't publish deferential interviews with George W. Bush[11] and Francis Fukuyama[12]. Or as if the Internet didn't contain a plethora of Arabic-language women's magazines, full of the sort of material you find in all other women's magazines. A jihadi subculture has been created that didn't exist before 9/11. As most nettime readers will probably know, the United States nurtured the jihadi subculture as an instrument of its proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s.[13] Because the Internet is anonymous, Islamist dissidents are less susceptible to government pressure. There is no signature, Kepel said. To some of us who have been trained as classicists, the cyber-world appears very much like the time before Gutenberg. Copyists used to add their own notes into a text, so you never know who was the real author. It's hard to believe that anyone who has actually used the Internet, in any language, would think that most of the texts on the web are not signed. Specific targets, such as the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, or FedWire, the money-clearing system operated by the Federal Reserve Board, are openly discussed. We do see a rising focus on the U.S., Weimann told me. But some of this talk may be fake -- a scare campaign. Indeed. And some articles in the _New Yorker_ may also be part of a scare campaign. Ben [1]
nettime France extradites leftist from Mexico
An echo of the Cesare Battisti case: this time the accused is French. After a failed bank robbery attempt in Paris that left several hostages wounded, Hélène Castel fled to Mexico. Like Battisti, she was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison. She made a new life for herself in Mexico, where she lived peacefully for 24 years. This year, the French police reopened the case; she was arrested in May, four days before the statute of limitations expired. She was extradited to France, where she will face trial. _Libération_ deplores the insincerity of the self-serving French police, who have denied Ms. Castel the right to forget.[1] The leftist newspaper _L'Humanité_ laments: Mexico is no longer the land of asylum that it once was.[2] After the Battisti case, it is ironic to hear that France is actually just like Italy: the sort of country that sentences people to life in prison in absentia, and whose rule of law is so bad that people ought to be able escape it and be granted asylum elsewhere. [1] http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=229190 [2] http://www.humanite.fr/journal/2004-06-15/2004-06-15-395501 Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:05:35 -0500, Jon Ippolito [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This hardware intervention effectively destroys even the possibility of fair use, since artists and educators cannot transform, parody, or criticize what they cannot record. [snip] which is why the MPAA will do its best to disarm the technology by installing Digital Rights Management directly in its routers to stop interesting content from ever getting into the pipeline. Do you really feel that Hollywood and the American recording industry produce much interesting content? Is there really much to be gained by transforming, parodying or criticising it? Perhaps in 1964, when Susan Sontag wrote _Notes on Camp_, she could legitimately see kitsch as an opportunity to create a liberating aesthetic. But for some time now, camp has been the dominant mode of expression of the culture industry as a whole; it has been co-opted as an instrument of hegemony. The desire to remix insipid music, or parody idiotic films that are already the purest self-parody, plays into the hands of the culture industry's own ever more intense navel-gazing. There's nothing liberating in producing ever more clever parodies of Scooby Doo. American consumer culture is already a closed system. The more self-referential it becomes, the harder it is for Americans to imagine that anything exists outside the US. For Americans, the war in Iraq isn't happening in Iraq, because they can't imagine Iraq; for them, it's happening in the imaginary space of the American culture industry, framed by the reassuringly brutal language of advertising, with its growling male voices, punchy editing and snippets of heavy metal songs. As Theodor Adorno pointed out in _Minima Moralia_, All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire. Satire only works when the audience is capable of feeling horrified by real horrors. When the audience's moral sense is totally numb, satire fails to elicit any reaction. It seems to me that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for solving this problem is to use the tactic Richard Stallman came up with in 1984: make free content so people don't need unfree content. Ignore Hollywood. Use Creative Commons licences. Create alternative funding models, as the free software movement has done. Break out of the self-defeating spiral of self-reference. Ben # 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 Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?
On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:03:29 -0500, Jon Ippolito [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You're right, American consumer culture is largely self-referential. But that doesn't mean that all non-consumer repurposing of that culture is stuck in the same groove. Remixes like John Oswald's take on Michael Jackson, Pat O'Neill's Humphrey Bogart, and Brian Provinciano's Grand Theft Auto break the expectations--not to mention the law--of mainstream culture's vicious circle. I haven't seen them, so forgive me for hazarding some guesses that might be wide of the mark. Doesn't the very presence of Michael Jackson or Humphrey Bogart serve to anchor the work in what the viewer sees as their world? And doesn't this reinforce the viewer's belief that my world can only be the world that the culture industry has created for me, and that its utterly alienated system of references is something so important that every piece of art has to either emanate from it or be a comment on it, as if it were a holy text and all artists were its theologians? Wouldn't it be much more liberating to treat that system as the minuscule, putrid bit of rubbish that it really is, and therefore ignore it completely, in favour of the much larger and infinitely more human world outside? Want to netcast your video expose on the MGM-Credit Lyonnais scandal or your documentary on Iraqi casualties? Stand in line--you'll need Hollywood's digital watermark (and hence blessing) before you can get it through Internet2's routers. Wouldn't one of Internet2's main selling points for the consumer be the ability to send videos of your new baby to your friends in seconds? How would it be feasible to ban the documentary but not the millions of baby videos? Ben # 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 double-plus-unfree digest [byfield, elloi]
Morlock Elloi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In media content this likeliness of monetizing is much lower. You have to use your imagination. Film viewers don't need support contracts, but they might like to have more of a say in the sorts of films that get produced, and they might be willing to pay for that. I certainly would. 'Value' of the content for the masses *is* created mostly by publishing labels. This is a symptom of the problem I was pointing out. Alienation can't be overcome by media alone, because it's inherent in the way people live. Slaves who watch great free films are still slaves. But slaves who are creating the economic and political conditions for their own emancipation can certainly make free films to help that effort along, and will have no need whatsoever to parody the filmmaking of their former masters. Ben # 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 double-plus-unfree digest [byfield, elloi]
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 22:37:38 -0800 (PST), Morlock Elloi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You have to use your imagination. Film viewers don't need support contracts, but they might like to have more of a say in the sorts of films that get produced, and they might be willing to pay for that. I certainly would. The payment is the crucial problem for un-labelled content. [...] If you think that freedom-fighting avangarde p2p networks will not copy quality content from independents think again. That's fine with me. I think you missed my point. If there was, say, a worker's collective of independent filmmakers that produced films on subjects proposed and chosen democratically by their paying supporters, I would be happy to be one of those paying supporters. And if the resulting films were then copied and distributed free of charge, so much the better. I'm sure I'm not the only person who would contribute to such a project. If all I can do is choose among content that's already been created, I'm reduced to the role of passive spectator. I feel about as involved as when I have to choose between political parties. No wonder I'm not very interested in paying. But if paying gave me a say in the subjects covered and in the way they're covered, so that I and my like-minded friends could get, say, documentaries produced on the subjects we really want to know more about (or want others to know more about), that would be a real reason to pay. Ben # 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 W/O(C) digest [geer, salucofagos]
On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 20:29:28 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And that you will not entertain (as usual) any transitional forms other than those expounded by your high priests of the GPL of the CC. But I will and I do! See the Open Organizations project (http://www.open-organizations.org) where our aim is to identify, catalogue and critique all sorts of transitional forms. I tend not to mention them on nettime because I feel as if they fall outside the scope of this list. well isnt the commons just a hang over form the public/private thinking of modernity. It predates modernity; in English law, the Statute of Merton (1235) recognised rights regarding the use of common lands. You could see the idea of the commons, in that context, as characteristic of a transitional form of society. Formerly, population density was low and most land was open for use by anyone, much as it was in North America before the arrival of Europeans. The manorial system introduced private ownership of more and more land, but the obligation to leave some land for the commoners remained, and was only gradually lost as common lands were enclosed, mainly from the 16th century onwards. Seventeenth-century antiauthoritarian political movements understood this (as described by Christopher Hill in _The World Turned Upside Down_) but were largely powerless to oppose the transformation of land into a commodity. I am not really interested in the idea of building such a commons within capital - one that is free as in speech and not free as in beer. I think we have to build what we can now, in order to make possible a transition to a world without capital. Production can't be cost-free in any economy. Somehow the producers need to eat. But even in a capitalist economy, we can find ways to support knowledge production so that knowledge can be available as cheaply as possible. And in practice, free-as-in-speech tends to mean very inexpensive. You can have all of Wikipedia for the cost of the Internet access needed to download it. In Argentina, workers are occupying factories and running them as cooperatives. In Brazil, landless farmers are occupying land and farming it cooperatively. These are spaces that, while they exist within a capitalist world economy, also implement, to an extent, another kind of power and other kinds of economic relationships. Shouldn't they (and we) also try to create similar spaces for the production of knowledge? Maybe all these spaces, taken together, could be part of the groundwork for transitional forms of society. If we have nothing in common, iif for example someone rejects the ethics by which another seeks to build a just world why would I want them to be able to take what I have in common with others and propertise it to turn it back on me inverted why and for would I want to support the process of expropriation that capital seeks to manage and control by adding to the commons. I agree with you. But this is exactly what the GPL prevents. It prevents someone from turning your knowledge into private property and selling it back to you. p. 188 The legal justification of private ownership is undermined by the common social nature of production. Free Software is produced by a common social process, in which the result is, in effect, not privately owned by anyone. (to quote Moglen: The GPL is a straightforward capitalistic proposition) I think he's mistaken about that. See: http://www.gnupauk.org/DiskusiJa/PrijedloZi/BothDevilAndGnu GNU General Public License protects the freedom to use and to develop, but at the same time creates a strategic collective subject... And to live the passage we don't need a licence (a property form or contract), we need ethics. It's true that in a capitalist society, a licence is a contract for the use of property. But even when we think about constructing a non-capitalist world, we need to think about some of the questions that licences try to answer. What modes of production and consumption are acceptable? Literate societies express their answers to these questions in written documents: constitutions, charters, laws. The GPL encodes a basic ethical principle: you may use what others have produced, but you may not appropriate it for yourself. If you add to it, your production must become part of the collective process of production; you must share your contribution as the original work was shared with you. These are principles that could be part of the basic normative framework of a non-capitalist society. why not experiment with ethics instead of property and the contractual form?? That's the focus of my current work, but it's in its very early stages. If you hunt around on the Open Organizations project web site, you'll find it. If you want to discuss ethics, I invite you to that project's mailing list, since that discussion is probably off-topic for nettime. Ben # distributed via nettime: no
nettime Ethics and Social Transformation (part 2)
(continued from previous post) Proportional Influence -- What does it mean to be considered a legitimate partner in a political process? It means that your voice carries weight. How much weight? Let's consider these examples given by Michael Albert: Imagine a worker in a large group. He or she wants to place a picture of a daughter on his or her workstation. Who should make that decision? Should some owner decide? Should a manager decide? Should all the workers decide? Obviously, none of that makes sense. The one worker whose child it is should decide, alone, with full authority. He or she should be literally a dictator in this particular case. Now suppose instead that the same worker wants to put a radio on his or her desk, and to play it very loud, listening to raucous rock and roll or even heavy metal. Now who should decide? We all intuitively know that the answer is that those who will hear the radio should have a say. And that those who will be more bothered -- or more benefited -- should have more say. And at this point, we have already arrived at a value vis-=E0-vis decision making What we hope to accomplish when we choose a mode of decision making as well as associated processes of discussion, agenda setting, and so on, is that each actor should have an influence on decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by them.[20] Let us call this the doctrine of 'proportional influence'. Albert's examples concern highly localised issues. It is worth considering the implications of this doctrine for large-scale problems as well, such as environmental degradation. There is widespread agreement among scientists that if the present worldwide use of fossil fuels is not drastically reduced, the resulting climate change will ruin the environment in which many people live. This is the view expressed by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Overall, climate change is projected to increase threats to human health, particularly in lower income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries Warming of a few degrees or more is projected to increase food prices globally, and may increase the risk of hunger in vulnerable populations Climate change will exacerbate water shortages in many water-scarce areas of the world... The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor persons within all countries, and thereby exacerbate inequities in health status and access to adequate food, clean water, and other resources.[21] Proportional influence means that those who will be most severely affected -- the poorest, particularly in the regions that stand to be the hardest hit -- should have the greatest influence over the world's use or abandonment of fossil fuels. What sort of decision-making processes are capable of implementing this doctrine? More will be said about this in a future version of this essay, but here I want to point out a few considerations that the construction of any such processes must take into account. I have already mentioned one constraint on decision-making in large groups: the greater the number of participants in a discussion, the longer it takes. Moreover, large meetings where individuals can speak one after the other often resemble a series of unrelated monologues, rather than a discussion progressing towards a collective decision. Decision-making processes for large numbers of people must therefore use heuristics to identify the main points of agreement and disagreement, and craft proposals that are likely to be acceptable to all. Attempts to do this often take the form of some type of delegation. What sorts of delegation are up to the task? Making decisions to promote other people's well-being requires knowing their needs and having the will to champion those needs. This is a risky endeavour at best. Anyone who has tried to make difficult decisions on behalf of a spouse, family member or close friend knows that, even with the best of intentions, it is easy to make mistakes. If making decisions for someone you know well is difficult, making decisions for thousands or millions of complete strangers is an enterprise bordering on madness. But when applied to parliamentary democracy, such a critique is too kind, because it presumes a world in which political candidates are motivated by the best of intentions. In reality, parliaments are an ideal instrument for consolidating the power of a particular class: ...that characteristic bourgeois political system we know as parliamentary democracy [is] the style of regime with which all ambitious, prosperous, and self-confident bourgeoisies feel most comfortable, precisely because it maximizes their power and minimizes that of their competitors Money is
Re: nettime Imaginary Futures -- A presentation by Richard Barbrook
On 4/20/05, Murphy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Saturday April 23 The Thing at Postmasters 459 West 19th Street 6:30pm It's always nice when people post event announcements on international mailing lists without saying what country, never mind what city, the event is taking place in. Even among those who study the Internet, parochialism apparently dies hard. Ben # 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 So what is Otpor doing?
On 06/06/05, Ivo Skoric [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1499871,00.html The article says: Our idea was to use corporate branding in politics, said Mr Marovic of Serbia's Otpor, which has become the model for parallel movements across the region. The movement has to have a marketing department. We took Coca-Cola as our model. I wonder if they need to use Coca-Cola-style marketing just because it's the only thing people respond to in a word dominated by consumer culture, or also because these movements seek to establish capitalist liberal democracy in order to permit consumer culture to develop more fully. (What is our goal? To hold free elections, create a free society.) And are there limits to the analogy? Would they make posters promising people a happy love life if they support the opposition? And would that be any different from the French May 68 slogan Sous les pav=E9s, la plage (i.e. making barricades is fun, like a day at the beach)? Is the use of people's libido for political purposes dishonest, manipulative and degrading, or (perhaps from a Deleuzian perspective) is it on the contrary the essence of political emanciaption? Ben # 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 Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
On 10/01/06, Prem Chandavarkar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So you have 15% of the electorate on one side, and 4% on the other. The 11% differential is enough to swing any election and all the politicians know it. Therefore, democracy is not about majorities and minorities. It is determined by how the debate coalesces around single cause issues. A referendum would deal with that problem nicely. If your analysis is correct, it seems that all you need is a system that makes it easy for people to bring about referendums. The Swiss have such a system, if I'm not mistaken. Ben # 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 on nuclear diplomacy...
On 21/01/06, brian carroll [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the War of Terror is actually the Palestinian/Israeli conflict writ-larg= e at the world-scale. While this might be an interesting analysis from a psychoanalytic point of view, if taken literally it runs the risk of blurring political realities, by, for example, implying that Palestinians are somehow responsible for, or that they benefit from, any acts of terrorism directed against the West. George Bush may say, Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists[1], thus implying that that anyone anywhere who is opposed to some US interest belongs to some imaginary global terrorist side in a single worldwide conflict; that doesn't make it true. Palestinians have enough to deal with as it is; let's not imagine that kidnappings in Iraq or unmanned CIA air strikes against Pakistani villages are somehow their problem, too. Indeed, it is now commonplace for governments to use this very blurring of distinctions in order to garner support for whatever foreign or domestic policy they wish to pursue. Iranian president Ahmadinejad probably knows very well that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle isn't an overriding concern to the average Iranian, and may simply be provoking an international crisis in order to gain the upper hand in a domestic power struggle.[2] Israel may be far less worried about Iran's nuclear weapons than about the possibility of losing its strategic importance to the US.[3] Moreover, if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were really important to the US, it could have brought sufficient pressure and incentives to bear on all parties to resolve that conflict long ago. It does not do so precisely because the Palestinians have very little effect on US interests.[4] [1] George W. Bush, September 20, 2001, http://tinyurl.com/rrkj [2] Karim Sadjadpour and Ray Takeyh, Behind Iran's Hard-Line on Israel, The Boston Globe, 23 December 2005, http://tinyurl.com/dn56s [3] Trita Parsi, A challenge to Israel's strategic primacy, bitterlemons-international.org, 5 January 2006, http://tinyurl.com/acuym [4] Noam Chomsky, The New World Order, 16 March 1991, http://tinyurl.com/= crkxg # 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 The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
On 23/03/06, Rana Dasgupta [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: THE SUDDEN STARDOM OF THE THIRD-WORLD CITY I think you have a point about Westerners' changing perceptions, but perhaps you ought to have mentioned the vast gulf between those commodified images and the ways many who live in third-world megacities perceive their own environment: not as a vibrant, irrepressible source of unlimited creativity, but as a prison to which they resign themselves or from which they long to escape. The lack of clear rules and the labyrinth of informal, parallel economic and political systems, with their merciless logic of nepotism and bribery, ruling over masses of disposable people, tend to breed Kafkaesque despair rather than the thrill of unfettered, improvised ingenuity.=20 Perhaps this helps explain why, in those countries where popular movements have been most successful, as in Bolivia's recent elections, they seem to have relied heavily on the mobilisation of rural populations. Also, Western tourists and consumers are not perhaps the only ones who admire the third world: is Silvio Berlusconi, in gaining personal control of the media and the economy, consciously imitating certain third-world autocrats? As Western elites search for a political formula that maintains the trappings of democracy while staving off the spectre of egalitarianism, might they (such as those who arranged for George W. Bush to follow in his father's footsteps) not find inspiration in the rigged elections, media homogeneity, trompe-l'oeil political parties and dynastic regimes that are a fixture of politics in many countries further South? Ben # 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 The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
On 24/03/06, Keith Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But I truly wonder where Benjamin got the material for his riposte Mostly from listening to Egyptians. Where do you get your information on Bolivian politics?The Guardian? I admit I'm far from knowledgeable about Bolivia, but what brought it to mind was the articles in the current issue of New Left Review. Ben # 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 Democracy without borders?
A short essay on the possibility of democracy on an international level, taking as its starting point an observation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Also available here (in several languages): http://political-explorations.info/democracy_without_borders_en.html Ben -- Democracy Without Borders? Benjamin Geer 6 April 2006 Many observers of the recent Palestinian parliamentary elections have pointed out that the US has been caught in the trap of its own commitment to Palestinian democracy. Having declared its support for free and fair Palestinian elections, it now faces the annoyance of a Hamas victory. The US government's response to the elections has been to try to pressure Hamas into becoming the sort of party that it would find acceptable, by insisting that Hamas disarm and recognise Israel.[1] Meanwhile, in Israel, the party of Ehud Olmert, the current acting prime minister, has won the Israeli parliamentary elections. Olmert has said he will not negotiate with Hamas, and that the priority of the next Israeli government should be to to fix Israel's final borders unilaterally.[2] Something is clearly wrong with democracy as it is being practiced in this conflict. The policies of the Israeli government have an overwhelming effect on Palestinians, yet Israel's democracy doesn't give Palestinians any say in those policies. Those of the Palestinian Authority have a far smaller yet still significant effect on Israelis, and Israelis likewise have no say in Palestinian democracy. This failure is inherent in the very concept of the state: states only allow their own citizens to vote in their elections. To take another example, the vast majority of Iraqis were not consulted on the issue of whether the US should invade and occupy their country. People joke that, since the US president's power extends throughout the world, the whole world should vote in American presidential elections. This joke reflects an intuitive recognition that it would be fairer if people could exercise influence over decisions to the extent that they are affected by those decisions. I have suggested elsewhere that we call this principle fair influence. Non-Americans suffer from an influence deficit with regard to American foreign policy. Of course, existing democracies are far from implementing fair influence even for their own citizens. For example, in the West, parties and electoral campaigns require large sums of money, and political platforms are thus limited to the range of options that wealthy donors wish to support. The wealthy also control the media that shape public opinion. Moreover, the structure of the economic system is excluded from the sphere of issues that the electoral process is authorised to change.[3] Even if democracy faithfully represented the majority's interests, majority rule would still place minorities at a disadvantage. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of these problems. Let us assume for the moment that democracy can be improved so that it truly implements fair influence in domestic politics, and that a state's constitution could specify how such a democracy would work. Could fair influence then be practiced on an international level as well? Max Weber defined the state as a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.[4] A state thus reflects an agreement to resolve local conflicts peacefully within a certain political and legal framework, leaving the state itself as the sole entity authorised to use force in order to ensure that citizens respect that framework. When that agreement breaks down, and the state no longer has a monopoly of force, the result can be civil war or the rule of bandits. Because states need weapons to enforce their constitutions internally, they can also make war against each other, and all states must therefore rely on armies to protect themselves. Therefore the pact that gives the state a monopoly of force on a domestic level cannot be reproduced on an international level. Two or more states could sign a treaty giving each of them some influence in the other's domestic decision-making, but the militarily strongest state would be free to violate the treaty whenever it wished. Therefore, a real solution to the global influence deficit may require a new kind of political entity yet to be imagined, one that departs from Weber's definition of the state. In the meantime, in a world composed of states, the greater a state's relative military strength, the greater the risk that it will dominate other states. Thus, perhaps one way to reduce this risk is to undermine the economic basis of the wealth that the richest countries spend on weapons. That wealth currently depends on the exploitation of labour and raw materials in less wealthy countries, with the cooperation of local elites. The more a state implements the principle of fair influence, the more it will refuse
Re: nettime Democracy without borders?
On 10/04/06, nettime nettime-l@bbs.thing.net wrote: A proxy class implements exactly the interfaces specified at its creation, ... If a proxy class implements a non-public interface, then it will be defined ... In 1945, American president Harry Truman decided to support Jewish immigration into Palestine, against the State Department's recommendations. He reasoned that he needed the Jewish vote, whereas the Arab vote was not significant in American elections.[1] Thus one side in the conflict had effective proxies in the American electoral system, while the other side didn't. Ben [1] Henry Laurens, _Paix et guerre au Moyen-Orient_, 2e =E9dition, Armand Colin, Paris, 2005, pp. 72-73. # 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 re: nuclear diplomatic track
On 13/04/06, brian carroll [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: yet, in 'a state of emergency' it would be imperative to have public .US control over the state, so things do not get out of hand. so, it is like having a circuit-breaker, and what will be called for is that the .US military prepare to take temporary control of all critical .US functionality, outside of political control of the reigning parties, until the state can be reconstituted. I don't think a military coup can be equated with public control of the state. Military coups often lead to military regimes that last for decades, or to unstable states in which regularly occurring coups become the normal mechanism by which power is transferred from one ruling clique to another. States of emergency have an unfortunate tendency to last for a very long time. Ben # 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 Latino political influence in the US?
The American immigrants' rights movement has been getting a fair amount of media attention outside the US. Is there anyone here knowledgeable enough to comment on any broader effects that Latino political movements might be having on American politics, beyond the specific issue of immigration? Have they shown much interest in leftist currents in Latin American politics or been influenced by those currents? Ben -- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article361313.ece Millions mark America's 'day without immigrants' The Independent By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles Published: 02 May 2006 The surging movement for immigrants' rights across the United States reached new heights as millions of foreign-born workers walked off their jobs, withheld all but the most necessary consumer purchases and joined noisy, peaceful May Day protest marches in more than 50 cities. [...] There's no question in my mind that we are in the midst of an historic, new social movement, commented Marc Cooper, a border and immigration specialist with the University of Southern California's Institute for Justice and Journalism. It's taken decades to build and reach critical mass and it is still going to take years to mature and fully pay off. So far, the cool-headed long-term strategists have dominated. # 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 Latino political influence in the US?
On 03/05/06, David Garcia [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So although the recent rise of the left in Latin America is momentous and influencing oppinion and across the world, I wonder whether this current US campaign is (as is often the case with US) more inward looking than Ben's post suggests. I wonder, too... a friend of mine sent me a photo he took at the May Day immigrants' rights march in Los Angeles, showing people carrying a banner saying Chiapas presente in big letters. On 1 May, Delegate Zero (Subcommandante Marcos) of the Zapatistas led a march[1] to the US embassy in Mexico City in support of the immigrants' movement in the US. Ben [1] Thousands in Mexico back 'A Day Without Gringos': Protests support immigrants in U.S., San Francisco Chronicle, 2 May 2006, http://tinyurl.com/gun32 # 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 Mona Cholet/ le Monde Diplolmatique: France's precarious graduate
On 19/05/06, Keith Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At the extreme, those who stay in have opted for self-exploitation. This sounds an awful lot like the classical liberal idea that workers and employers are equal parties to an employment contract that they both choose to sign, so if the workers are exploited, it's their own fault. As if the invisible hand of the job market had anything better to offer. I spent the last two years of my PhD without any overt source of income. [...] It wasn't a bad life. We got by. I felt a lot poorer later when I was a lecturer with a mortgage, car and the rest of it. [...] [S=E9verine] thinks she's frying her brains and gets nothing from it all. And she has a public for this. I don't know what to make of it politically or of this whole precarity movement. I don't know how you survived without any overt source of income (maybe you had some sort of safety cushion, your parents perhaps?), but for some people, not knowing where your next month's rent is coming from, for years on end, produces a gnawing anxiety that you can never shake. (And yes, before you ask, I grew up under those conditions.) Spiralling credit-card debt and drug habits are typical symptoms. Moreover, strange as it may seem, there are people who want something more in life than just getting by: not wealth, but the feeling that they're doing something useful in the world, as opposed to just oiling the machinery of capital. Some people study history, art, literature or sociology because they really think the world needs these things, rather than in the hope of getting a mortgage, car and the rest of it. But then I joined stayed in school for the rest of my life in order to avoid having to get a real job. Those of us who have had real jobs should forgive you for not knowing how lucky you are. Ben # 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
One of the things I like best about nettime is the high signal-to-noise ratio, and I think it's got better over the last few years. It seems to me that a lot of thought generally goes into the postings that appear here, thanks both to the authors and the moderators. So if a day goes by without anything appearing on the list, that seems fine to me. I think nettime is a sort of middle way between an academic journal and a traditional discussion list. It's much more open than an academic journal, but its standards are higher than those of most lists. The high standards make academics want to post ideas here, but the openness means that non-academics can reply, and can post their own ideas. I think that's good, because it goes against the tendency for academic discourse to become self-referential and disconnected from discourses and practices going on elsewhere. I personally don't care where nettimers work or what their titles are; I like that we can have a dialogue here that cuts across professions. I suspect the makeup of this list reflects at least one important social reality, that of solidarity between different kinds of knowledge workers and artists whose lives and work have been profoundly affected by, and who have been participating in, global transformations in communications, media, knowledge production and politics. Tactical media has been just one manifestation of that group's appearance on the world stage. Ben # 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 ECONOMIES OF AFFECTIVITY
Juan Martin Prada's essay reminded me of this talk that Shierry Weber Nicholsen gave a few years ago and that, to my knowledge, hasn't been published anywhere. She takes as her starting point Stjepan Mestrovic's notion of postemotional society: While emotions would seem to be the inviolable heart of individual subjective experience, in postemotional society they are prefabricated, simulated, manipulated externally by, say, the mass media, triggered by images. They lose their genuineness and become quasi-emotions. She then compares this with Theodor Adorno's grim assessment of emotional life in _Minima Moralia_ to the work of psychoanalytic theorists including Wilfred Bion, Christopher Bollas and Joyce McDougall. Ben Adorno's Minima Moralia: On Passion, Psychoanalysis and the Postemotional Dilemma Shierry Weber Nicholsen September, 2002 The Postemotional Let me start with the third of the terms in my subtitle, the postemotional. The term postemotional was coined by a sociologist, Stjepan Mestrovic. When you hear what he means by it you will probably agree with me that it is somewhat misleading. But it is catchy, and it points to a problematic around emotion in contemporary subjectivity and thus links to the question of passion. Mestrovic elaborates his idea of the postemotional in his 1997 book Postemotional Society. He conceives his work as an extension of sociologist David Riesman's analysis of American culture in The Lonely Crowd (1950), thus in the tradition of studies in culture and personality. Riesman analyzed American culture in terms of inner directed and outer directed personalities. For Mestrovic, contemporary American society is the further evolution of Riesman's outer-directed society. He argues that now it is not only ideas and behavior but also emotions that are socially determined. For reasons that will not concern me today, Mestrovic calls this state of affairs postemotional. While emotions would seem to be the inviolable heart of individual subjective experience, in postemotional society they are prefabricated, simulated, manipulated externally by, say, the mass media, triggered by images. They lose their genuineness and become quasi-emotions. The emotional spectrum becomes limited and individual emotions blurred. In Mestrovic's words, Postemotionalism holds that contemporary emotions are 'dead' in the analogous sense that one speaks of a dead current versus a 'lie wire,' or a 'dead nerve' in a limb or tooth. The current is still on, the nerve is still present anatomically, but neither is functioning as it was supposed to. The result is that all of the primal passions discussed from Aristotle to Hume to the present become shadows of their former selves. Anger becomes indignation. Envy ... becomes an objectless craving for something better. Heartfelt joy is now the bland happiness represented by the 'happy meal.' Sorrow, as the manifestation of affliction, anguish, grief, pain, remorse, trials, tribulations, and sadness, is magically transformed by the TV journalist's question 'How do you feel?' (after a death of a loved one to a sniper, or a tornado, or other calamity) into the typical but vague answer 'I'm very upset.' Mestrovic, Postemotional Society, 62-3 Complement to the prefabricated, quasi-nature of emotions is a cult of sincerity, genuineness, and quasi-therapeutic self-examination. The reality of phoniness is masked by the propaganda of the genuine. Because emotions are not only triggered but generated through the mass-media, they can not only be manipulated but serve as means of manipulation. They serve this purpose all the better in that individuals find themselves pressed to consider their preformed emotions their very own, genuine and sincere expressions of self. Mestrovic's idea has a very disturbing implication. For the individual in such a society is in the grips of what I will call the postemotional dilemma. What do I make of what seems to be my subjective experience? How do I know what is real? How and where can truly genuine emotional experience survive? And on what basis can I make these assertions of external manipulation? Mestrovic does not speak directly to this dilemma, but Adorno does. My focus today will be on how Adorno formulates and addresses this postemotional dilemma. For Mestrovic, America exemplifies postemotional society in its most advanced form. His work thus also figures in the tradition of cultural criticism through a description of American society. This tradition includes Riesman's work as well de Toqueville's and Veblen's and Adorno's. Minima Moralia and Postemotional Society Adorno wrote Minima Moralia, the work I will focus on today, while in exile in the United States in the 1940s. (Minima Moralia, note, predates Mestrovic's book by some 50 years, though it is roughly contemporaneous with Riesman's.) He had left Nazi Germany is 1934 and arrived in America in
[no subject]
On 23/06/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Second, apparently blogs are not considered good enough sources for Wikipedia. (Apologies for partial cross-posting.) In my own experience, many of the people who contribute to Wikipedia articles in English, on politically controversial subjects, seem to be motivated by the desire to promote an ideology at all costs, typically an ideology of the American far right. These are the people who repeatedly, insistently, copy and paste material from conspiracy theory web sites or neoconservative propaganda web sites into Wikipedia articles, or just make things up and insert them without citing any sources. If you want to maintain any kind of scholarly standards in a Wikipedia article, it can be very difficult to avoid an edit war with them, and of course every time you revert their edits, you'll be accused of promoting your own bias and censoring other points of view. Wikipedia policy encourages compromise and, last time I checked at least, doesn't take a clear stand on what kinds of sources are acceptable. Anyone can anonymously put up a web site (and why not a blog?) to publish fabricated information, and cite that web site as a source in a Wikipedia article. The result is often something like this cartoon: http://www.idrewthis.org/2004/bothsides.gif Or to put it differently, it's a bit like the reports in the New York Times, based on fables told by Ahmad Chalabi, that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.[1] Wasn't Wikipedia supposed to do better than this? For this reason, a number of controversial Wikipedia articles (particularly those dealing with Islam and related subjects) are locked by Wikipedia administrators. Others have simply been abandoned to unscrupulous propagandists. Ben [1] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040607/scheer0525 # 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 Re: rejoinder: is a radical project identity achievable?
On 01/08/06, Brian Holmes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What kind of culture, what kind of shared horizon can help us get there? [...] A political culture that can resolve serious differences between dissenting groups, and can draw plans for using and governing the productive forces that make and shake the earthscape [...] The exact science of our unbound dreams is what governments should be afraid of. Brian, I sympathise immensely with your motivation for asking these questions, but I think this quest for a universal progressive political culture is Quixotic and perhaps dangerous, despite the best of intentions. In 2002 I fell under the spell of a hypothesis: that some of the principles of what I saw as the political culture of free software -- open participation, public ownership of knowledge, strong reliance on consensus -- could be applied to other kinds of production -- to industry, to agriculture -- and could be used to build political systems capable of organising human life on a large scale. I was encouraged to find similar principles at work in some European activist groups and workers' collectives. I was disappointed to find that many activist groups, however, were organised along the opaque, authoritarian lines of traditional political parties, and speculated that if European social movements could be persuaded instead to put these principles (described at http://www.open-organizations.org) into practice, they would not only do their work as activists better, they would also embody a real alternative to the failed models of parliamentary democracy and of the political party, an alternative that might thus appeal to the broader disillusioned European public. Indeed, I wondered, could these principles become part of a political culture capable of working on a global level, a new universalist dream to replace the failed dream of communism, in short the Holy Grail evoked by your questions above? I knew enough about ethnocentrism to have strong reservations about anything resembling yet another Enlightenment project intended to bring a universal political culture to the world's benighted masses. I wondered: What are the necessary links between one's political culture and the rest of the culture that one lives in? How can one choose between the competing claims of any proposed new political culture and those of any existing culture? Who can legitimately make such choices? The Left has tended to settle such questions impatiently, without much reflection, by reference to supposedly universal principles of Marxism (once thought by many, and still by some, to be an exact science) or of the French Enlightenment, or more often, by instinct (I personally can't accept...), which amounts to the same thing. Any political culture that doesn't correspond to those principles therefore appears backward and, it is thought, should be consigned to the dustbin of history. I decided not to look any further for any sort of shared horizon until I had carefully studied a non-Western culture, in its political and other aspects, in some depth. I studied Arabic, and a year ago I began an extended period of study in the Middle East. I have learnt a great deal here and hope to learn a great deal more. I don't have answers to the questions I asked above, but I'm more convinced than ever that these are hard and important questions, not to be brushed aside in any premature rush towards an imagined universalism. I don't think politics can be separated from culture. The British House of Commons, European anarchist working groups, and the deliberations among the heads of clans in Upper Egypt all have their distinctive cultures. Perhaps you are right, Brian, that tomorrow's social movements need a new shared horizon as the basis for international cooperation. But even if that's true, let it not be a totalitarian horizon, one that attempts to cast all political life in the same mould. Let it be one that allows individuals and groups to move freely among political cultures and to mediate between them. Ben # 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 Peace-for-War
On 22/08/06, Alex Foti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But only if we construct a sufficiently shared narrative on the parable of capitalism and communism in the 20th century, and especially on the exhaustion of neoliberalism at end of the century, can we create the bases for that new radical, secular, cosmopolitan, ecological, transethnic, multigendered culture that can give new thrust to movements, fight war and rebuild the world. Napoleon attempted unsuccessfully to export his version of the Enlightenment to the Middle East via his invasion of Egypt in 1798: The revolutionary modernity expressed by [Napoleon's] Egyptian expedition was completely rejected by the Muslim world, which saw it above all as a militant atheism, hostile to all religions.[1] During the 19th century, Muslim intellectuals nevertheless appropriated Enlightenment thought and integrated it with Islamic thought, both in order to understand how their societies could catch up with Europe in terms of industry, military achievements and standard of living, and to understand how they could resist being dominated by Europe.[2] Correspondences between European and Islamic thought became commonplace. The Islamic concept of shura (consultation) was identified with democracy.[3] Ottoman constitutionalist reforms, though based on European ideas, were justified in terms of Islamic law. A belief in the progressive character of ethnic nationalism was a key aspect of European political ideology, and European states went to great lengths to introduce and promote this concept in the Ottoman empire and to help emergent nationalisms gain political independence. This was also of course a means of increasing European influence in the region.[4] In the first half of the 20th century, Europe was widely seen as applying a double standard: proclaiming the universality of Enlightenment ideas such as self-rule, but not allowing its colonies to enjoy the benefits of those ideas. Independence movements were aimed mainly at eliminating this double standard in order to establish independent European-style liberal democracies. After formal independence was attained, however, it became clear that economic independence was much more difficult to achieve. Socialist ideas, another product of European humanism, gained some influence in the Middle East (particularly Lenin's account of imperialism), and some states developed ties with the Soviet Union, or took advantage of rivalries between the US and the USSR in order to increase their political autonomy, while nationalising their industries and adopting a policy of import substitution. However, import substitution turned out to be unsustainable,[5] and dependence on Soviet protection turned out to be another form of foreign domination.[6] Meanwhile, the masses welcomed the benefits of modern technology, but remained attached to their traditional Islamic culture, which seemed to be sidelined, deprived of its central role in regulating society, its place taken by a Western liberalism that brought painful economic upheavals and continued Western domination. Islamist movements gained popularity by arguing that both capitalism and socialism had failed in the Middle East, and that the only way to gain true independence was to revive the original, true values of Islam, in order to create a new form of modernity.[7] That dream is alive and well, as the popularity of Hizballah demonstrates. At the moment, it seems unlikely to me that any secular movement can gain widespread popular support in the Middle East. The ideologies that currently seem most likely to rebuild this part of the world are Islamist ones. If you want to create a new global political culture, I suggest thinking seriously about the role Islam could play in that culture. Ben [1] Henry Laurens, _L'Orient Arabe: Arabisme et islamisme de 1798 a 1945_ (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004), pp. 40-45. [2] Albert Hourani, _Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939_ (Cambridge University Press, 1983). [3] Maxime Rodinson, Rapports entre Islam et communisme, in _Marxisme et monde musulman_ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 130-180. [4] Henry Laurens, op. cit. [5] Henry Laurens, _Paix et guerre au Moyen-Orient: L'orient arabe et le monde de 1945 a nos jours, second =E9dition (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005) pp. 206-207. [6] Maxime Rodinson's article Les probl=E8mes des partis communistes en Syrie et en Egypte, in _Marxisme et monde musulman_ (pp. 412-449) contains many interesting observations on the relationships that developed between the Kremlin and its clients in the Middle East, and between Marxist and Islamic ideologies. [7] Fran=E7ois Burgat, _L'Islamisme en face_. Paris, La D=E9couverte 2002. # 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
Re: nettime Immaterial Civil War
On 12/11/06, Matteo Pasquinelli [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The brand of Barcelona is a consensual hallucination produced by many but exploited by few. [...] The rise of Barcelona to prominence within the European system of cities has in part been based on its steady amassing of symbolic capital and its accumulating marks of distinction. [...] It is a matter of determining which segments of the population are to benefit most from the collective symbolic capital to which everyone has, in their own distinctive ways, contributed both now and in the past. [...] The crucial question is: how to develop a symbolic capital of resistance that can not be exploited as another mark of distinction? Can collective symbolic capital function as an insurance policy against invasion? The question might seem bizarre, but I mean it seriously. Does the collective symbolic capital accumulated by Latin America in the past few decades help explain why US hasn't overthrown any of the leftist governments that have come to power there in recent years? Is it more difficult for the US government to get away with, say, organising a coup in Venezuela or Bolivia now that a generation of young Americans have grown up with positive associations with Latin America (Che Guevara, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Paulo Coelho, Frida Kahlo, Chico Mendes, Paulo Freire, The Official Story, Nine Queens, Man Facing Southeast, Carlos Santana, Buena Vista Social Club, bossa nova, samba, Diego Maradona, Ronaldo, and so on, not to mention Subcommandante Marcos and the World Social Forum)? Jacqueline Salloum's mock movie trailer, Planet of the Arabs[1], a montage spectacle of Hollywood's relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims, gives an indication of how far the Middle East is from having any positive associations for most Americans. I think solidarity isn't something that just happens; it's at least partly constructed out of collective symbolic capital. For example, for the average person in the Middle East, Lebanon has many positive associations, not least because Lebanon's formidable culture industry is the source of much of the music listened to in the region. It seems to me that, for a long time, the strongest and best-loved symbol of Lebanon has been the singer Fairouz, who long ago attained the status of Arab cultural treasure while remaining strongly associated with her home country. During the outpouring of solidarity with Lebanon that swept across the region during the recent war, there was a deluge of Fairouz songs on satellite television, in concerts and in theatre. Fairouz was presented as the soul of Lebanon: poetic, vulnerable and imbued with dignity. I'll never forget the surprised, disoriented and amused expression on the faces of some educated young people in London a few years ago when I tried to explain Fairouz to them (a bit like Celine Dion...). I suppose their surprise was the result of cognitive dissonance between their image of Arabs (the Hollywood image exemplified by Jacqueline Salloum's film) and the concept of the adored and respected female singer. A lot of work surely went into giving the West positive associations with Latin America. Perhaps literature professors helped by getting their students to read Latin American writers. Surely a lot of capital went into projects like Buena Vista Social Club. Perhaps someone here knows more about the history of that process. Is it worth trying something something similar for the Middle East, a region crushed under the weight of authoritarian states and American intervention, a bit like Latin America in the 1970s? Ben # 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 Iraq: The Way Forward
On 10/01/07, Felix Stalder [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now, we are in a situation where nobody has any good idea what to do. [...] There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again. I've just read a very thoughtful book, _Carfree Cities_, that begins with an analysis of how cars destroy communities. The author goes on to provide a detailed design proposal for car-free cities, borrowing heavily from Christopher Alexander's architectural design patterns. In essence, the proposal attempts to combine the best aspects of old European neighbourhoods with an urban topology that allows for very efficient public transport based on a metro or tram system. A comparison of car-centric Los Angeles with car-free Venice runs throughout the book. The author's web site provides a brief summary of the book: http://www.carfree.com/ I don't know whether the time is ripe for this idea in the US, but maybe September 11 and the Iraq war could be used to concentrate Americans' minds on an idea that would enable them to rebuild their communities while reducing their dependence on oil (and thus reducing their military presence in the Middle East). Ben # 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 Iraq: The Way Forward
On 11/01/07, Michael H Goldhaber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: b) Venice is in fact becoming de-populated, with its natives moving to the car-unfree mainland; That's because tourism has driven up real estate prices to the point where locals can no longer afford to live there. There are ways to prevent this from occurring in car-free cities, and some of these are discussed in the book _Carfree Cities_. The author emphasises that Venice is not an ideal car-free city, and that it should be possible to build better ones; hence his detailed design proposal. c) it is a complete mistake to think that Americans' access to oil depends on having troops in Iraq =97or anywhere in the middle east for that matter. How do you explain the proliferation of US military bases in the Middle East[1] if those bases aren't intended to protect American access to oil?[2] On this last point, when Iran threw out the Shah and held the American embassy staff hostage, it continued to sell oil on the world market, like any other OPEC country. Iran's oil production plummeted in 1979, and oil prices shot up as a result.[3][4] As it is, the invasion of Iraq has certainly not increased US oil supplies or lowered prices, but in fact done the opposite. The war is conceivably a war for oil-company profits (which have gone way up since it started) but not a war for oil itself. The invasion of Iraq looks to me like a colossal miscalculation, but I find it difficult to explain except as an attempt to turn Iraq into an extension of the Arabian peninsula, i.e. of an oil-rich region with US-friendly rulers and plenty of American military bases. Ben [1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/centcom.htm [2] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050425/klare [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis [4] http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm # 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 ACT4MASCHINENDIGEST [Foti, Marcelo]
On 16 Jan 2007 13:21:11 Alex Foti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We are not occidentalists [...] We are rather for secularism wherever we can find it. What do you mean by secularism? Do you mean separation of church and state, anticlericalism, militant atheism, or what an old European leftist once told me: I don't like religious people? Whichever of those meanings you choose, you can be sure that, in much of the world, secularism is indeed identified with occidentalism, so your assertion above will tend to be seen as a contradiction at best. I have spent a lot of time talking to European atheists and to Middle Eastern Muslims about the different perceptions of religion in Europe and the Middle East. The European atheists tend to see all religion as an instrument of domination, at best as a necessary evil, to be confined to private life and tolerated as little as possible, in the hope that someday it will disappear completely thanks to universal education based on Enlightenment principles. The Middle Eastern Muslims tend to see religion as the source of all ethical inspiration in human life (both public and private), as the source of ideals of altruism, generosity, responsibility, justice and social harmony, as an essential tool for self-criticism and self-improvement, and they imagine that life without it would be horrible, indeed almost inconceivable. (Therefore they are astonished to learn that many Europeans are atheists.) I can hardly imagine a greater depth of misunderstanding between two groups of people. In both groups, most of the people I talk to are highly educated, yet their education has completely failed to teach them anything about the other group in this regard. In the _Networked Politics_ reader, Moema Miranda says, answering a question of yours: We cannot face the challenges of today if we reduce our understanding of anti-capitalist struggles and of politics to just the rationalistic dimensions of our movements. For example, here in Brazil, Liberation Theology and the Ecclesial Grassroots Communities were essential in the struggle against dictatorship and in creating the basis for the PT. [...] These dimension of spirituality [...] were badly interpreted in the formulations of classical left. So there is a great challenge to open up the scope of who we talk to.[1] That observation applies at least as well to the Middle East. Ben [1] http://www.networked-politics.info/index.php/Reader_Networked_Politics # 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 Iraq: The Way Forward
On 12/01/07, A. G-C [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How do you explain the proliferation of US military bases in the Middle East[1] if those bases aren't intended to protect American access to oil?[2] [...] to keep a military strategic position of US Defence at the south of Russia and China [...] Because civil nuclear becoming now a predictable market of America [...] Imagine what Iran yet now represents in this geo challenge Those seem to me like plausible factors as well, but they can coexist with the importance of protecting access to oil. I think we mustn't forget that the CIA helped overthrow Iranian prime minister Mossadegh in 1953 because the British, hurt by the nationalisation of Iran's oil industry, persuaded the US that Mossadegh was turning towards communism. Thus oil and the Cold War, for example, were closely linked. Ben # 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 Iraq: The Way Forward
On 19/01/07, Michael H Goldhaber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Contras were in Nicaragua. Reagan hardly hid his political support for them, but was eventually forced by Congress to be secretive about direct aid to them. Yes, Nicaragua, sorry. That's just one of many examples of covert US military action... isn't it? All those books by former CIA agents like John Stockwell... or do you disagree? Do you maintain that the US has never engaged in any secret wars? How do secret wars fit into your view of the US military? I'm sorry to be a pest, but I feel as if you haven't answered this question. As for Saudi Arabia, I understand that shortly after the Iraq invasion, the US closed all its bases there. [...] (I don't dispute that are bases in places such as Qatar.) Doesn't that amount to the same thing? It's a small concession to the Saudis but basically maintains the status quo. Those bases did not go up in 1973, as your timeline would suggest, but in 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait. I don't have access here to the books Brian recommended, but... it seems that the 1973 oil embargo caused a major readjustment of U. S. policy priorities in the Gulf the U. S. began periodic naval deployments in the Indian Ocean and expanded Diego Garcia into a naval station capable of supporting major air and naval deployments.[1] The US considered using force to seize oilfields in the Middle East if the 1973 embargo went on for too long[2], and the British government was afraid they might really do it[3]. After the embargo ended, high levels of oil production actually caused economic problems for the Gulf countries, and would have liked to reduce production. This option was firmly refused by the US, who let it be known that any reduction in production would practically represent a cause for war American officials implied, in public and in private, that they were prepared to intervene militarily in zones of oil production if their vital interests required it.[4] It seems that Carter and Reagan would very much have liked to establish more bases in the Gulf, particularly in order to make sure the Soviet Union would not be able to interrupt the flow of oil to the US, but couldn't persuade their Gulf allies to let them do so until 1991. Anyway, my main argument is not that particular interests at times seek to benefit from American military might, but that as a domestically extremely powerful and culturally important institution, the military and ist supporters keep finding rationales for strengthening it. On the whole they probably believe whatever the momentary rationale is, but they and certainly, their main Congressional supporters, do not really quesiotn that there must be one. The rationale of protecting access to oil is not momentary; it has been a feature of US policy in the Gulf since Nixon justified his twin pillar policy in 1973 by saying that assurance of the continued flow of Middle East energy resources is increasingly important to the United States[1]. However, it almost seems as if you agree with me here. If US presidents have really believed in that rationale all this time, and if this is why they've carried out the military policies we're talking about, wouldn't removing the possibility of such a rationale (by eliminating US dependence on oil) make it more difficult to justify certain military interventions? I realise that you're probably going to say, No, because they'll just find some other excuse. But, well, look at what people who study conflict prevention say. A lot of it seems to be about reducing material causes for conflict, which typically involve competition for scarce resources, such as water, oil, grazing land, and so on. When you have an army, and another country has something you need, it's tempting to take it by force. I agree with you that reducing the size of your army to the minimum necessary for self-defence is sure to help as well. But it's hard not to notice that the US has the highest resource consumption per capita of any country in the world, and also has the largest military capacity. As George Kennan put it in 1948: we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.[5] So what I'm suggesting is this: if you have a teachable moment, take advantage of it not only to teach Americans about their bloated, self-serving military, but also about the economic disparity that that military is being used to protect. Point out that US oil consumption is an environmental disaster as well as a cause of war. Try to end the occupation of Iraq, yes, but also try to get people thinking about how to change the US economy (e.g. by eliminating the use of fossil fuels)
Re: nettime history lesson
On 22/01/07, Quirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Once socialist sharing communities can out-accumulate private Capital, only then will our economic power will extend into real political power. Wouldn't that mean out-producing and out-consuming as well? But that would be environmental suicide. Current levels of production and consumption are already leading to environmental suicide.[1] For the past few years I've been seeing occasional texts in French about something called decroissance, or de-growth[2]. The idea is that since limitless economic growth is not possible on a planet with finite resources (of which two-thirds are apparently already used up[3]), human beings will have to produce and consume less. Brian, I read Giovanni Arrighi's article Hegemony Unravelling[4], which you recommended, and was surprised that although he discusses at length the reliance of capital accumulation on the existence of a particular built environment of facilities, he gives no attention at all to its dependence on the natural environment, or its effects on that environment. He discusses the idea that China may soon be in a position to become the world's main centre of capital accumulation and thus replace the US as global hegemon, without considering whether environmental constraints might make this impossible. Just as Arrighi's article was being published, China's deputy environment minister said in an interview that China's economic miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace.[5] Meanwhile, the Pentagon expects catastrophic climate change to lead to nuclear war in the next 15 years.[6] Ben [1] U.K. fears disaster in climate change, Heather Timmons, International Herald Tribune, 30 October 2006, http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=3334967 [2] Would the West actually be happier with less? The world downscaled, Serge Latouche, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2003, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/081.html [3] Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up', Tim Radford, The Guardian, 30 March 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1447863,00.html [4] Hegemony Unravelling, Giovanni Arrighi, New Left Review 32, March-April 2005, http://newleftreview.org/?page=articleview=2552 [5] China's environmental suicide: a government minister speaks, Andreas Lorenz, Der Spiegel, 7 March 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,345694,00.html [6] Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us, Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, The Observer, 22 February 2004, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html # 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 Energy Consumption of an Avator in Second Life
On 07/02/07, Alex Foti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In fact, these calculations push me to pose larger questions: how many kwh per year are consumed to operate the Net There are some scientific papers here about the energy consumption of computer networks and computer manufacturing: http://www.it-environment.org/publications.html Ben # 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 appropriation and type
i'd love to know your take on this manuscript, regarding the field of typography Perhaps your argument would be strengthened by a consideration of some of the issues involved in typography of non-Western scripts. In the case of Arabic, for example, calligraphic tradition long ago standardised a certain number of styles, which users naturally expect to find on their computers. The results are judged by comparison with classical models that are seen as aesthetic and functional design ideals. Unfortunately, technology such as Unicode, which attempts to make Arabic script work like the Latin alphabet, has become standardised. Operating systems simply do not provide the infrastructure that would be needed in order to render Arabic well. Therefore word processors produce ugly results in Arabic, and even Arabic books are often poorly typeset. A good introduction the failure of current font technology to produce beautiful, highly readable Arabic script is the article Authentic Arabic: A Case Study by Thomas Milo, presented to the International Unicode Conference in 2002: http://www.tradigital.de/specials/casestudies.htm Ben # 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 Free Media vs Free Beer (By Andrew L)]
Free Media vs Free Beer by Andrew =97 last modified 2007-04-15 13:23 [...] * EngageMedia.org - an Australian based free software project and video sharing site for social and environmental justice film from Southeast Asia, Australia and the Pacific. * Transmission.cc - a new global network of social change online video projects co-founded by EngageMedia. While I'm happy to see things like this happening, it seems strange to me that those two web sites are entirely in English, and barely touch on the issue of language and translation, and then only in the context of making subtitles for videos. EngageMedia.org has videos about many countries in Southeast Asia, but doesn't even seem to have a way of indicating which language a video is in, apparently because they're all assumed to be in English. EngageMedia's project brief says: We are focussing on Australia, the Pacific and South East Asia, as we want to build cross-border cultural relations within the region and facilitate this sharing of cultures through grassroots communication networks. The project aims to provide a global distribution tool for local community media makers who would otherwise be unable to distribute their film widely. How can you make a regional media distribution tool, never mind a global one, that doesn't at least attempt to treat all languages equally? Also, translation is more than subtitling. Not all videos are self-explanatory to all audiences. If you're Australian and you don't know anything about, say, Indonesia, maybe you can understand a video about Indonesia made by Australians for an Australian audience. But I suspect you won't necessarily understand a video about Indonesia made by Indonesians for an Indonesian audience, even if it's subtitled in English. You might need an introductory text, potentially a long and detailed one, to give you the necessary background knowledge and put the video in context. (I could give specific examples of Egyptian films and videos that would be very hard to understand for someone who hasn't lived in Egypt.) Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime War profiteers in art (Biennale di Venezia, 2007)
On 11/06/07, Ana Peraica [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am thinking again on the role of the war reporter that has emancipated indicating a cultural need for the distant trauma in public Sometimes it's not so distant. People in Iraq do watch TV news reports about the war going on around them. It indeed reminded me of plenty of conferences on war topics in which speakers were caught in war for a day, having all kinds of bullet-protection jackets and who had only made troubles to local police that had to cover them up instead of taking care for children, old people and women in danger that would not be able to escape, as these reporters A lot of reporters have been killed in Iraq, and quite a few of them have been Iraqis: http://www.rsf.org/special_iraq_en.php3 To get a sense of why some journalists risk their lives to cover wars, you could have a look at the BBC documentary Control Room, about Al-Jazeera's coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, perhaps especially the part about Al-Jazeera journalist Tariq Ayyoub, who was killed by an American air strike on the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad, and the statement by his widow, in which she implores a gathering of journalists to persist in telling the truth about the war. Ben # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Political opposition and communication technology in Egypt
This is an English translation of the transcript of a meeting entitled Bloggers in Prison, Too, which took place on 18 March 2007 at the Centre for Socialist Studies in Cairo, Egypt: http://www.political-explorations.info/en/wiki/Bloggers_in_Prison%2C_Too The background for the meeting was the case of Abd Al-Karim Nabil Sulaiman, an Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison for 'contempt of religion'[1]. The discussion touched on many subjects, including the worldwide battle against freedom of expression, the state of Egypt's opposition groups, young people's participation in protests, the political role of blogs, the loss of privacy and the spread of wireless Internet technology. Some excerpts from Alaa Seif's talk: Most of those tools [for protecting privacy on the Internet] have been designed on the basis of the assumption that kidnapping and torture have a very high financial and social cost So if they got a copy of that encrypted email and wanted to decrypt it, the cost of breaking the code would be ten thousand times more than the cost of kidnapping you and torturing you and saying: 'Tell us what you said in that email.' [laughter] But that's based on the cost of kidnapping and torturing you where? In Switzerland. [laughter] Great! OK, what's the cost of kidnapping and torturing you in Egypt? About 5 Egyptian pounds [i.e. next to nothing]. [laughter] See what I mean? I'm totally serious. Today if you go to my home town... you'll find wireless Internet antennas on the towers in which pigeons are raised. That's a local area network. They can block web sites so that when I'm sitting in Egypt I can't see what's out there, but as soon as something gets into our local area network, it will spread. This wireless technology is very cheap, very easy to use, and it's the sort of thing Egyptians are good at. You know, just like we've got car mechanics who know how do things that nobody else knows how to do, just wait until you see what will happen with wireless technology in Egypt. One important thing is that we have to get in early as creators and inventors. What's happened now is that we reuse technology that was designed for us elsewhere, and we're very good at putting things to new uses. But for some things... that might not be good enough in some cases, so we need to come up with solutions ourselves. Ben [1] http://www.freekareem.org/ # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
