Re: nettime The Return of DRM
Whether Wikileaks is an example of successful asymetrical warfare remains to be seen. The state appears confident that the sufficient percentage of relevant population has been converted to zombies. See the intelligence-insulting rhetoric from the highest places, and imagine who it is targeted to. In that light, revelations of any kind become irrelevant. The free speech exists in principalities where media control is sophisticated enough that individual free speech is harmless. Something similar may happen with astonishing revelations. They will become harmless, because the apparatus of population control is sophisticated enough. We see an example of this with executive's impunity - what Nixon got impeached for, modern execs routinely do on a weekly basis, not even hiding it. The fact that secrets that Wikileaks revealed were available to (hundreds of) thousands insiders hints that the state does not care about keeping them secret. Is this just arrogance or confidence in the mechanisms of power is not quite clear, but if I had to bet I'd bet on latter: the relevant percentage of population may continue to support the war, because it's the Right Thing, without further argumentation, and soon everyone will know everything and it will not change anything. Wikileaks will become mainstream and proof of democracy in the first world, and the wars will go on, just because. After all, the war is just business, and the current wars are very successful businesses, which is why they go on. Of course someone had to help Taliban, otherwise the war would become unsustainable. Check out Catch-22 some time. stopped arguing. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is indeed the best thing to look at, if you like to understand more. 'nuff said. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
On Tue, 18 May 2010 17:12:09 -0700 (PDT), Morlock Elloi morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote: ARGUE WITH ME, FUCKERS! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y - Rob. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 hi Morlock, I've waited to reply your mail for almost a week now in the vain hope that someone would join us on the fields of this prose: this is becoming now such an inspiring piece of lyricism, so pleasant to read, you truly are a good writer! but unfortunately it seems noone dares. maybe we are becoming embarassing, as the drawback of lyricism is that of loosing touch with reality, we are fading into a science fiction enactment.. On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 04:39:37PM -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote: I'm skeptical about the ability of us free from ... to use imagination to hack into minds of zombies and provoke the Change. right. all national TV stations are well guarded; but still, some of us are working in those structures of control! most probably because of their skills are becoming crucial to the task, rather than because of some long term social engineering we would be playing... [...] To put it bluntly, no one gives a flying fuck for your imagination. If you don't have an industrial strength media pump you are spitting into the river. now it is quite naive of you to say that: ignoring the power of asymmetrical warfare in contrast to the enthropy pulling out of unidirectional technical advancements. contrary to popular perception these days, we are not in such a bad historical moment for digital cultures: most post-modern critics drop off our ship exasperated by the pressure of new labour issues raising, while the financial pressure is deflected from the mega-corporations to hit the proletariat. But It looks like when the tear-gas hits the rioting crowd: those who are not prepared obviously fall first, look for shelters and the day after will blame the black bloc for actually having a plan - deja vu. Forming armies of mechanical turks is just a desperate preemptive attack driven by the rusty corporate juggernaut before the real battle starts: while they've played all their cards, we have prepared a little but diverse and effective arsenal, which still has to enter play. There is no such thing as digitally autonomous network. You don't know how to make transistors, chips, routers and computers in a sustainable way. do we really need all that? maybe when we talk about digitally autonomous networks we speak about two different notions of digital. a piece of paper with an address and a meeting time can be even more digital than a twit - and less traceable. but then, what are we talking about here, just software being digital? and just technology being human? can't believe that. it's not so bad c'mon :) You are wasting your time in symbolic hobby revolutions. of course! I'm totally into that, living life as an hobby! :) ciao - -- jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iQQcBAEBCAAGBQJL7p4gAAoJEAslGzkIl3JRPVkgAKlf9p6ydTPE8pfOfsV24RxR 0zl8l6z1UJ3Gffb0e29g8l/v0OZ3mERHcJTwsSSDxzPV5mapeul70gkW1C4LDSL3 HFyAwQnAiHW2h9sVwSEhKX4d+gIQjvMUxZLeJ0qW+jN3wtyp5ZmecfIHYCuIfGLC iY1iPt8qX+HUHYypvsq2nbxIIYdSiuny09Y0gpDqlA+alQCjDoHU6D4cJxUXUqxI sVOpLg6WqIdq6SjYSAMcHryLmywdnBeRMKGwv2wlUBYMRYP06TK9MFFxTahYjy2O ITddjhc7g5r3WYY6Zt03BSYa8C75+WQ3V45jqsD0CLOAdsoY/5Vie2UPDwsHav34 ZX2Bsi5P61t07d6mBOgPk4+bQTBQi5zfKCT07E/yE/Y29gJhnwoaWPhOr0yoluXF hpEPbg3eD7w18XUFDaEuyUhomnx9BnmkLmqnkVKBdWb9HCOU77NXlKKMxtk5s5Yb 5zuF1vKamrcumlT0JxxtZALD+RWALzIigNxFXczYMPNoLbjo9WBTI4ykyWBCYOm7 pk56GCrWax9l803q64LboaGklxCp8DakxqxaWmlH1AzIaAvzCijiJOdj6TfHdyWd L9Q54tfV+3oahTh+ljbcP/nCXks70rmdd+3t9wUfGceoVduKQ72dQ8tahwxTU561 74MhFa+Hai6T1K46FLVPmQKEqfuPuZRandjp2S1mhvjVVWc/s/Q7PhByE/lOaA35 py6fZLCJhL7JYY3Kq8NhBVbBj1u+BaajVyoCd6vYYSTlJo9JaTPQBNlMDoAoyey3 ZTKDHluSpEqF67wsgUYF5hqQC6+BKvIqb4TOs0iqNEszUjz8UxTmI8kRROF85/u9 s3gCQkORLNW5WLK4MW/T46fabXHwyZ82GogSQAAKBQm0q1NmmmhBBidxCAD5Z54c 80Wi6yQMoNVwkowVqxq/oBsT1MdUixFAygSy469UZQMFjh+OWtx/8kmvhVmk2PnS oDN9txo9jN5PRkfc7Kdi1FHsSrxzkxpLv0TORqeWP57HKL2BpmuliWO0pYPcHead yVGA5BvJj/4gQzaWGgwc3867BKXQBk2WRMySCODPsECvepPghKfm2/BtTXw+OgsA etUV29avZmlahPVLLwT7nEux4yMVwQkJJXo777n66ZlMemm0u7PlsLQNRULl83qA g37aNRD3yYZgNROH0M7vymn0LwAshnTRFTel/h0QojfOQ+CCZSpwJSg40wtnJhtS FsYbqHKjr8sKw0qWX6BoTWNHJaby7D2MHfOgwwdVoHbtwapTBnqyM1eGdFw/V1bs LPWlUsUCy4aHBBgoRcWnkUx4IrfpZGXmgbD4CxsyLi4qeoveIAko+EGMNK4CxU8= =Tt4Z -END PGP SIGNATURE- # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
I got few private cheers, but you are correct - any real discourse is gone from nettime. Few polite proclamations, news items from newager/treehugger/antiglobalist/neocommunist arenas, and that's it. Everything is so polite and acceptable. ARGUE WITH ME, FUCKERS! Now that I got that off my chest ... right. all national TV stations are well guarded; but still, some of us are working in those structures of control! most probably because of their skills are becoming crucial to the task, rather than because of some long term social engineering we would be playing... working in those structures of control == being those structures of control Do not underestimate the ability of the system to subvert. I think that, analogous to my prposition that technology caught up with behaviour, that systems also caught up with individuals. As units, we are pretty much same as we were thousands of years ago. You only have your lifetime to upgrade yourself. Societal systems evolve slower, but they have limitless mermories, or the state in automata theory. It is only question of time when will the slowly evolving system with continuous memory overtake human in terms of outsmarting each other. Maybe we are not there yet, but we're close. It's not AI that will create dystopia. It's the society itself once it matures enough. now it is quite naive of you to say that: ignoring the power of asymmetrical warfare in contrast to the enthropy pulling out of unidirectional technical advancements. Can you give me *one* example of effective asymmetrical warfare in socio-cultural arena? I don't see anything that even slowed down the invasion of consummerism and liberal capitalism. Don't get me wrong, I am not labelling either as bad or good. Just effective and without competition. contrary to popular perception these days, we are not in such a bad historical moment for digital cultures: most post-modern critics drop I can't begin to understand what would 'digital culture' mean. If you refer to the current prevailing implementations of communication technology, does it make 19th century a 'cellulose culture'? What do have bit carriers to do with culture designations? Why would that attribute be important? Forming armies of mechanical turks is just a desperate preemptive attack driven by the rusty corporate juggernaut before the real battle starts: while they've played all their cards, we have prepared a little but diverse and effective arsenal, which still has to enter play. Have you seen what happens when Indiana Jones meets ninja with knifes? do we really need all that? maybe when we talk about digitally autonomous networks we speak about two different notions of digital. a piece of paper with an address and a meeting time can be even more digital than a twit - and less traceable. OK, so let's imagine a network of highly motivated conspirators; let's imagine that they have opaque communications channels; let's imagine that they have years to prepare. What are they preparing for? What is the output? We are assuming here that they will influence someone outside the group (unlike being on nettime.) Is it purely informational, like they will tell the world something? Or is it something else, physical? Secret communications do not help when you are stashing something more than ideas. You do need technology, otherwise you're stuck with cargo cult rebellions: if we throw bricks here, then torch some cars there, then vote a bit, it will happen! No it won't. of course! I'm totally into that, living life as an hobby! :) Professionals can do it cheaper and in less time. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 hi Morlock, On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 01:50:03PM -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote: They do matter, and this is why: imposed/conditoned behaviours, manufactured desires, data collected, patterns discovered and exploited - all these are controlled by a very few and affect many, and those many affect everyone else. you're right here, still those of us free from manufactured desires are already well able to act far beyond the imagination of those who are imposed and conditioned - that's quite something, considering the situation where we are and the fact that we are talking about a resilient and (digitally) autonomous network. The fact that far beyond in the previous sentence represents a source of inspiration for desires manufactured in future it's nothing we should worry about now, rather than exploit it if we'll ever learn how to do that. said that, we agree none of us wants to let those lovely i-phone rubbers drown (let's say you convinced me to stop provoking myself to care less) but also we cannot devolve our life fighting a symmetrical war with armies of (paid) ergonomists and mind-blasting adverts. I don't see any GNU people collecting patterns and tracking end users in order to deploy those insights into spreading the GNU-deology. No, they do it 1:1, in a grassroots way, preaching to the choir, ensuring own irrelevance. this is true for the past of the GNU project, while its presence and methods are visibly revamped nowadays, also in the directions you are suggesting, IMHO. there are all kind of new initiatives and news we get from GNU and FSF; it all became more professional than it used to be and definitely more intelligible by digital illiterates. You can not be a comfortable atheist in the land of religious zealots on remote control, which is what iphone rubbing 'tards are. Their attention is captured and tamed, and monitored for deviation (the Inquisition was a very expensive and inefficient way of ensuring compliance.) in times when we are starting to insure our relevance, the worst threat is actually deviation from our own perception. the process behind the definition of the GNU Social platform (previously discussed on this list, as daisychain was criticized for its architecture) gives some interesting hints on how this phenomenon can be avoided (or not); right after the nettime thread some of us started interacting with the GNU Social project and this document came out, as a willful contribution so that it doesn't just ends being yet another tool to monitor people's leisure activities http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/User:Hellekin/A_User_Perspective_Of_GNU_Social still an early draft deserving more research, it defines forgotten User Perspectives that can well work as eye openers, in the hope that the next time the shit hits the fan in places like Italy, Iran or China we won't have to rely on Twitter and Facebook as surrogates for free speech tools. ciao - -- jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iQQcBAEBCAAGBQJL4/e/AAoJEAslGzkIl3JRvL4gAJrd2r/4MgVlZZhEKJu0iPD1 uVeDq97aCuEYLE3U/SraGAKESHAIiSRW2VyGfj7RG90WW9ibrvjTFJDEXNQDPw2N rK9PwljfU2rbxmpIdt6DOfLyJ4mf8zTjyvUm1Isg4ww+6S5zngQKkAWJKE31OzKo lNJdL2DHuA4WF6/T4UVHzK7O7NXpX/eOilw2W28PalHcPaNBqhydFi7a+KMNbnyI jG/LH8hzIoaH7t9mNCrAKUeeGDAiIuNfUlxMQEzG9rxu53JR/ZcTPGwIM7rraBhq kCyFT155ZpndN86bNVETtx7pABlpOTk1mgQ8AppgDwYT7v8XMkyL92cZ2tb4PPDM nvQl/jqsz5FNSt/Ze+MJV+OmACWNtTdyaLTepI6F678oa4w1oBB6NGBvbd9XolZr YoeLu9adk+rPvB8XSpqUmVq/trsmX8FebedlAUPEbbw9TZsjxBw1PwZjFbr9lKKR EDYabuqV3RqB8oiaUdx/5k5LB21Xv5XTmsbMVFdqqIi6jslO98R0ADMy7yVaedeY 5TI4zxQn3W9bd8FApwbNeSwhQJzez+snI450izUG29sk2vPHEiXUcgj/oGCRm8aN tvLjBcg1Ye9qx3DuGKvgfbNsjaXhCcjrpyoZJ8T1NTAnYzizEbcSYLGeODXnySaW D6AHW5UXkrAkBWdUbE6DvDtw6CG1Y2cSdNBnRE4jA0LRMEdud+wJQsXPzuUke9Ol T2gFQau3CcsPEbtg5DjRX9VoQckZbvOaE32sCpgV9XXuu/vZKpUm78UO4n3dSItY NJNe1FZbn9g8L8uGFpkqEfHA0IlM87AiBzDdP01iNvxsR2gQBbZTuM2uDLasTvYN ztmoXKLEm0qNrdkSoPTj+NjLatJIY8i69BI1xvjNmq2WFZylgrCiHB6zbdKuyeyB 5MBB4UTIMQl8bz1ai+FrwqAi4EJcTXYSmJirnbiz7GMWtWeFuGcu4FHtu77QZXmR Ff4jkCevwjQLL+ijotALSrZE82I3ai6waiXLwPxU5UhRplYnjgdbHr3Ip1gdK2sl BxnwdA/3oBPyywoHdcco74YT4796gr+xwsKmWT55xKol3vAzQ/yOvl4cGmH7LSWW Nyzuw4NWotBUFrFee/DW6S3KWX+EfoIXQqyH2deRfK9CJ1Hv9r1ZJaalSIe8JEK1 tgy5Selyh15dvIOjNgobr/iEZMFRXaf7Lku/6Pt0DVj1HO9QmCnlZ6tPviTWPSs9 qgK2wZ4nCcal3tj1qAE7ZKQoTBwETX4F7+zg+aKzIx7rNvTunuXQbh/7UqaevRLU kMpMnAo501E8nZQxOrrvQqgRIl90O9hjQnHCwGLMnG/DKbKfMw33E0jAcSn5kq8= =pVlk -END PGP SIGNATURE- # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
The idea that what we have on our hands is a nameless self-emergent system which no one controls, which just happened to spring into the existence as such, almost like a weak nuclear force, is an old one (I'm waiting for a new Unified theory - gravity, strong weak force, electromagnetism, consumerism.) Looking for an agent there makes one a primitive superstitious retard, right? Equating systems of control with natural forces works. Remember God? I mean, you can't fuck with the God. You better obey. The argument that consumers make choices and therefore are responsible for everything is along these lines - you masturbate, a kitten dies. But how can you pose any sense of individual agency if you posit the sort of almight you propose that 'the Inquisition' had? # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
They do matter, and this is why: imposed/conditoned behaviours, manufactured desires, data collected, patterns discovered and exploited - all these are controlled by a very few and affect many, and those many affect everyone else. I don't see any GNU people collecting patterns and tracking end users in order to deploy those insights into spreading the GNU-deology. No, they do it 1:1, in a grassroots way, preaching to the choir, ensuring own irrelevance. You don't need to agree with or believe in social engineering on a massive scale to be affected by it, any more than you need to believe in or agree with firearms in order to be shot. You can not be a comfortable atheist in the land of religious zealots on remote control, which is what iphone rubbing 'tards are. Their attention is captured and tamed, and monitored for deviation (the Inquisition was a very expensive and inefficient way of ensuring compliance.) do we really care about helping the powerless tards rubbing iphones you talk about? they are happy, they have nothing to hide and can # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
Hello Felix, Sorry for chiming in late: Fast-forward three years. Increasingly, our data is up in the clouds. The decentralized architectures for digital production of the 1990s are being phased-out. Google is pushing an operating system (Chrome) were all data is being stored online and virtually nothing remains on the computer. The device which individuals own is being reduced to a relatively dumb terminal. Of course it is true that if people no longer keep their files on their own computers, the issue of open file formats becomes of lesser tangible relevance for the individual computer user. The industry might even, as currently the case with Apple, push more open formats such as HTML5 against Flash because the 'issue' that DRM formerly tried to address, sharing of locally stored files, will simply go away with local storage of media files becoming a thing of the past. But perhaps the implications are even more radical: That, for the mainstream computer user, the differentiation of files, software and network service will evaporate; the whole notion of the file may soon become engineering lingo and be considered an awkward paradigm of an unfriendly tech past. point here is YouTube. It has morphed from a freewheeling platform where users could share whatever they wanted, to a highly controlled system, where all content is scanned and mointored for copyright violation. This is not only true for 'content', but also for software if we look at the new 'app store' paradigm of software development. If this more than just a fad, then it's effective DRMing by embedding content into viewer applications and no longer providing it as files/data, and tying it to tightly controlled platforms (such as iTunes). Even outside the app store paradigm, Free Software/Open Source is now factually dead, or at least irrelevant as a vision for personal computing, because the computer and Internet industry has efficaciously circumvented copyleft by using Free Software as a productivity stack underneath proprietary cloud/web applications and operating systems from Mac OS X to Android. Florian -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
On Tue, 4 May 2010 13:51:01 +0200, Florian Cramer fc-nett...@pleintekst.nl wrote: Even outside the app store paradigm, Free Software/Open Source is now factually dead, or at least irrelevant as a vision for personal computing, because the computer and Internet industry has efficaciously circumvented copyleft by using Free Software as a productivity stack underneath proprietary cloud/web applications and operating systems from Mac OS X to Android. The Affero GPL and the Franklin Street Declaration are directed at protecting user freedom in the cloud. There is already software based on these, notably Status.Net, a Free Twitter replacement. User freedom in OS X and Android can only be compromised so easily because the software they are based on uses a BSD-style permissive licence rather than the copyleft GPL. If people stick with the GPL (or the Affero GPL for cloud software), they'll be much better able to keep the freedom to use their software. There is a GPL fork of Android, and GNU/Linux is a largely GPL-based alternative to OS X. So Free Software is not factually dead. The threats to it have changed, as they always do. Those threats are recognised and people are working to address them. - Rob. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
SIGH my links didn't transmit. you've got yours and I've got mine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTwASnQ3S6Y first-nations resistance http://www.gallerieswest.ca/Features/CoverStories/6-107906.html molotov cocktails or their semiotic equivalent: http://www.fuh2.com/ The original post: Thanks for that JH. In Pakistan, I heard a slogan that has struck me as the best analysis of the networking process: Roads bring schools, but also police. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
The overlooked issue is that understanding is unavoidable ingredient of freedom, so if the technology is involved, then understanding of the technology is essential for maintaining one's freedom. This is why technology is so appealing instrument of the centralized power - very few can get it. Piling engineers works better than piling firearms. This understanding is not easily transferable, it must be acquired. Zillions of 'tards rubbing their iphones or socializing via http are not informed technology users - they are products tethered to their manufacturers via complicated chains of deceptions. Comparing this with early Internet is pointless - those were highly educated, creative and intelligent early adopters, and today those same people have all the privacy and freedom they want. The problem is that the unwashed came and populated the space. No amount of activism will help them, because they cannot (afford to) understand the technology, and you cannot help the illiterates. The truth is that the high tech finally provided true Darwinian mechanism to separate haves and have nots, unlike anything in the recent history; for the first time the lack of technological skills and education (or membership in the ruling class, but that doesn't concern anyone here on nettime) unconditionally makes one a slave. It's a long way from the time when one had to be just literate - today you need to know how not to leave unencrypted footsteps in your daily routine, who facebook sells your data to and how will that affect you and your town, and where to find quality content bits to keep your brain functional. The rest are fucked. I don't see this changing any time soon, especially as most members of this elite like the benefits. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
On Friday April 30 2010, Morlock Elloi wrote: Zillions of 'tards rubbing their iphones or socializing via http are not informed technology users - they are products tethered to their manufacturers via complicated chains of deceptions. Instinctively, I agree with this, but on second thought, this seems to be closing the case a bit too prematurely. Here in Austria, there were presidential elections (a mainly representational post) last week, where the incumbent was challenged only by a far-right candidate. In recent elections, the far-right freedom party managed to portray itself as the party of youth, fighting against the old-guard establishment of the dominant parties. This time, some students managed to mobilize several thousand people, mainly through facebook, to protest in the street against the neo-nazi candidate very early in the campaign. This contributed to her looking really old and stuck in the past. The veneer of the party of the young was damaged and she did badly at election day (there were many other factors contributing to her poor showing, of course.) So, all in all, fb played a positive role here. The point being, the fact that these platforms are centralized, commercial and thus provide a very particular framing of social interactions (who would have thought that 'having friends' could be quantified) does not mean that they cannot enable things that escape this framing. They can, as long as the social logic of the users does not come in conflict with the commercial logic of the providers. But conflict between providers and users need not break out openly. The key question, rather, would be to understand the impact of the framing of social interaction through commercial, advertisement-driven infrastructures vs the autonomy of the social interaction that they enable. I think in the long run, the former is far more powerful than the latter, but I cannot really put my finger on it why and how. Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com --- books out now: *|Deep Search.The Politics of Search Beyond Google.Studienverlag 2009 *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.ScheideggerSpiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
The point is that the corporate operators from Palo Alto had insight into this trend and the following action as it happened, and full ability to influence it, and do some lead nurturing for future events. They didn't, because they are good people. They are such good people that they wouldn't do it even if some other trend with dire consequences for them, their handlers/investors, others in the money chain and within power structures around Palo Alto, California and US. This time, some students managed to mobilize several thousand people, mainly through facebook, to protest in the street against the neo-nazi candidate very early in the campaign. This contributed to her looking really old and stuck in the past. The veneer of the party of the young was damaged and she did badly at election day (there were many other factors contributing to her poor showing, of course.) So, all in all, fb played a positive role here. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Zeljko Blace zbl...@mi2.hr wrote: On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 21:16, Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com wrote: Felix Stalder wrote: The 2010s will see very different forms of revolt than the 90s, as well as very different forms of political invention. The idea that you could help to shape the protocols of a radically open public space - the tremendously productive idea of open flows - is over. That's not to say it wasn't a great project at the time, or that it didn't change many people's worlds But it is to say that another great project awaits. I doubt we would be seeing Great Project, it is more likely that multiplicity of critical methods dealing with existing regulations and power regimes of networked media space will be emerging in parallel and likely beyond threshold of visibility. We don't have an option to make the new and other virtual platform, but rather to focus on reFactoringREAL. I do not understand this pessimism regarding building a platform (or platforms). Why is this now precluded? It seems to me that a new platform is precisely the means through which to counter the Centralization of Everything. A new platform that resembles an old platform (Napster) but with new adaptations (gradated visibility, distributed aggregation, and visible handshakes). I have no idea what reFactoringREAL is to mean (P2P hardware, manufacturing?), but I don?t see much hope for countering the Corporate Cloud without building a P2P cloud in response. Regards, John # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
Excellent points by Zeljko. The easy work of the early Internet now requires greater effort and determination. Fighting corruption that inevitably sets in after a revolution, especially among the leaders of revolt, is harder and less rewarding. The tempation is to recall the glory days and bemoan what has become of the nascent intitiatives. And to castigate those who have capitalized, literally and figuratively, on success at moving beyond innovation to peddling wildly popular rip-offs -- commercial and academic. Plenitude of products to be critically studied plenitudiously. Is there no part of the Internet blob that is not studies to death voluminously, no. Still few studiers write the code or run the systems. Few are insiders of or knowledgeable about the innards of the realm. Few sit at the keyboards of control. For those reasons critical studies are condemned to be tautological. For the very few technical innovators there are tens of thousands metacommenters dependent upon the hard labor of the innovators -- who, may Nietzche harangue them, do not closely read texts. What they do instead is a alphanumeric mystery of zero interest to alphabetical texters. Arrange a visit to an Amazon data hotel, ponder what you can't see going on there. Wait, don't admit defeat, get a job there to get inside the headlessness of the apparatus. May require crushing your skull. For the blind-faithers in NYC, beg a social media friend to get you into one of the six transworld hubs of all Internet traffic, ask to touch the hummer that sucks your best and most private thoughts and vile web sites visited. Then the hummers that suck Goldman Sachs. Ask for a sample of that beer, sign the NDA to make a sysadmin nest egg. Enjoy free sex of the Net again. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
Hi Brian ~ Greetings from Wendover Airbase where I am still in the midst of a battalion-strength war games -- air power overhead (F/A-18s, Blackhawks and MH-6 Little Bird Special Ops choppers), small- and medium-arms fire across the street (hopefully they are shooting blanks) where two platoons have taken up residence and are practicing sweep-and-clear exercises, and a sizeable encampment one klick to the south including fire-finding and ground-to-air targeting radar among other toys. Belly of the Beast. The 2010s will see very different forms of revolt than the 90s, as well as very different forms of political invention. The idea that you could help to shape the protocols of a radically open public space - the tremendously productive idea of open flows - is over. That's not Was it REALLY any different in those good old days? When hasn't the (any!) military-industrial complex NOT been in control of the protocols of connection between its participating humans. Can we say back in the early days of telephone? (nah, Bell was a key figure in the yet-to-be-wet-dreamed rise of the US Empire) And if we go really far back, reading of the standardization of Roman roads. It's the same. All roads lead to Rome... IMHO, any techno-social system which deploys a communications means to facilitate connection between its human participants will have, *as its primary motivation*, the security and means to propagate that very system. It appears to me that the countless layers of protocol-built-on-protocol-built-on-protocol that is the case in our current communications system merely obfuscates, more or less, where the roots of the control and the motivations to control lie... I can't think of any large-scale engineering system that has been deployed anywhere with anything else in mind other than the continuance of hegemonic control over the flows of energy that brought it to be in the first place. (Those flows very much including the life-energy and life-time of the humans who are participating). Sure there are the autonomous zones where play and resistance are spawned, but for these large techno-social systems, those are only fleas on the back of the (straw)dog... Sometimes those fleas carry bubonic plague (read: viral ideas) and can bring down the dog, but a competing (straw)dog will take its place. cheers, jh PS -- I wonder, at this point, how many (what percent) on nettime are actively, in an ongoing way, producing content on platforms that are not in some way connected to Web 2.0? And, how much time are they spending on the more popular Web 2.0 platforms...? * John Hopkins Artist-in-residence, April 2010 Center for Land Use Interpretation http://clui.org Wendover Airbase, Utah, USA http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ http://www.neoscenes.net/travelog/weblog.php chaz...@gmail.com jhopk...@neoscenes.net skype: chazhopkins * # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
Thanks for that JH. In Pakistan, I heard a slogan that has struck me as the best analysis of the networking process: Roads bring schools, but also police. In British Columbia, you can stand on a Canadian Pacific railroad track that runs through the barely-visible remains of a Salish village dating, perhaps, from the neolithic. The houses were still in use until the engineers plowed them under: Analog rights management. There's also a few hundred miles of telegraph line (you've got yours and I've got mine) running northwards towards Moscow, abandoned at the dawn of wireless. Both were communications projects built on imperialist dreams: move goods and troops from coast to coast, encourage tourism and immigration on the untamed frontier, and facilitate financial and political integration with the Old Country. These projects succeeded in overwhelming both guerilla first-nations resistance and attempts to negotiate fairly and equally with the encroaching Europeans (in the cases, for example, of Northwest Coast nations and Hawa'ai). Both systems, like the internet or electricity, also extinguished some of the difference between night and day, and encourage a homogeneity and de-localization that subverts even some of the resistance it facilitates, and vice versa. The forcing of native peoples to learn english and become Christian, for instance, allowed for a pan- aboriginal unity which was previously impossible. Those with excess capital will always have the advantage in building infrastructure, and the avant-garde / underdog can never win set-piece battles. The guerilla tactics of early far-right EM (electronic media) users, with home video studios, desktop-published hate lit, KKK BBS etc. were far outstripped by the indymedia / hacker left by the time of the Battle in Seattle and the various global anti-capitalist siege movements of the early 21st-century. But the rise of the Fox- News-led, net-organized Tea Party proves that capital will eventually move in and pwn the means of production, and in fact you could argue that the left developed the shareware to hang themselves with. The job of the resistance is not to worry that Empire has adapted counter-tactics. It is to constantly dream up new tactics, designed specifically to play to the weaknesses of the Empire's counter- tactics. Usually this means bureaucratic and logistical inertia (fast- changing diversity of tactics on the front line vs centralized Imperial decision-making), isolating and targeting resource-hogging super-weapons (Tiger tanks required truckloads of fuel every day, delivered along longer and riskier supply lines as the army advanced), developing cheapest antidotes to worst threats (i.e. molotov cocktails or their semiotic equivalent: http://www.fuh2.com/). -Flick * FLICK's WEBSITE BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com * FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=860700553 * MYSPACE: http://myspace.com/flickharrison # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Return of DRM
Felix Stalder wrote: Increasingly, our data is up in the clouds. The decentralized architectures for digital production of the 1990s are being phased-out. Google is pushing an operating system (Chrome) were all data is being stored online and virtually nothing remains on the computer. The device which individuals own is being reduced to a relatively dumb terminal. The apple IPad, it seems, is optimized for consumption (and thus hailed as the savior of the old, consumer oriented media industries). That's an excellent summation of the meaning of Web 2.0, thanks Felix. After the highly experimental, expansionary phase of the 90s, the corporations want to get their money out of large research investments. The so-called cloud is their key to regaining direct control. It was interesting at last winter's conference on The Internet as Playground and Factory to see how little this change is publicly admitted, even though it is now solidly established and has been for at least five years. We've moved into a phase where the hazy euphoria of the Internet as playground is doubled by the crude and sinister strategies of the money men, which are obvious and perfectly legible but imposed anyway. The networked entertainment environment of Web 2.0 is a factory, that's right, but as in the case of television, the product that it delivers is you. The new wrapper is more sophisticated, more proactive and self-reflexive, but the core value up for sale is still the working consumer, his or her capacity for self-delusion and the money s/he will earn and spend. This is what happens when new media inventions are absorbed and made to fit the systematic patterns of capitalist exchange. The 2010s will see very different forms of revolt than the 90s, as well as very different forms of political invention. The idea that you could help to shape the protocols of a radically open public space - the tremendously productive idea of open flows - is over. That's not to say it wasn't a great project at the time, or that it didn't change many people's worlds But it is to say that another great project awaits. best, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime The Return of DRM
In early 2007, Steve Jobs (of all people!) concluded in his 'Thoughts on Music' that DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work [1]. Soon after, one label after the other started selling music in unstricted [2] formats, and there was much celebration about the death of DRM. And, there were lots of reasons see things this way: Digital Rights Management Systems were very unpopular with the public. People hated them. Plain and simple. And they were technically unstable, because the encryption, once released to the public, was regularly broken within a few days. And attempts to re- engineer the entire computer operating system to make DRM possible -- Windows Vista -- turned out be be equally unpopular and fraught with internal problems. Fast-forward three years. Increasingly, our data is up in the clouds. The decentralized architectures for digital production of the 1990s are being phased-out. Google is pushing an operating system (Chrome) were all data is being stored online and virtually nothing remains on the computer. The device which individuals own is being reduced to a relatively dumb terminal. The apple IPad, it seems, is optimized for consumption (and thus hailed as the savior of the old, consumer oriented media industries). Much of online social interaction and production takes place on vast, centralized platforms. The older DIY approaches -- from mailing lists to independently run networks such as Indymedia and even p2p networks -- are fading away and are supplanted by super-professional service approaches. There are lots of reasons, and some of them very good ones, for this development. That's not my concern at the moment. More remarkable is that part of this development is the return of DRM. This time, not out in the open, accessible to the user, but completely hidden, built into the deep structure of the platforms themselves. The case in point here is YouTube. It has morphed from a freewheeling platform where users could share whatever they wanted, to a highly controlled system, where all content is scanned and mointored for copyright violation. According to YouTube itself, this works the following way [3]: Rights holders deliver YouTube reference files (audio-only or video) of content they own, metadata describing that content, and policies on what they want YouTube to do when we find a match. We compare videos uploaded to YouTube against those reference files. Our technology automatically identifies your content and applies your preferred policy: monetize, track, or block. As they conclude it: It's up to you. Which sounds great, it's up to you, until one realizes, that are not speaking to us, but to the big content owners. Much of the work done by YouTube and other platforms has been to put the content industry back in control, even though it's a control controlled by the platform providers. So there is considerable tension among the old and new players in the media industries, but as they work out their differences, users are becoming becoming more precarious, more dependent, and more controlled. And the tool to do this is ubiquitous DRM. Each and every file on YouTube is processed through their DRM and, of possible, made entirely dependent on arbitrary decisions of content owners, who can now, at any moment, make disappear files that include portions of their content. A few days ago, Constantin Film decided to use their option and had all films which contained portions of their Hitler melodrama Downfall (Untergang) deleted from YouTube. There were hundreds of clips, since changing the subtitles of the scene where Hitler realizes that the war was lost had become a subgenre in itself. [4] This DRM systems know no fair use exemption. Control is total. There is no problem of the files being re- uploaded, the system is effective, real-time and scales effortlessly. And the better YouTube and others become at this, the more pressure will be applied on those platforms which have not yet implemented something similar. Which, it seems easy to predict, will lead to a further concentration in this already highly concentrated field. Of course, individually each of us can be smart enough to avoid these things, and many of us are members in closed file-sharing communities that function without such restrictions. But, socially, we can see how control is creeping back, how DRM is becoming part of the infrastructure, and how it is affecting our speech and culture in ways that are neither predictable nor accountable. With a flip of a button, one which you have no access to, all your nice little remixes can disappear, even if they were online for a long time. It's all up to them! Felix PS: Of course, there is a Hitler parody of this removal up online. Just not on Youtube. http://www.vimeo.com/11086952 How long will it take vimeo to implement their own DRM? [1] http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ [2] mp3, is,
