Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
A bit late on the thread -- I concur with Jaromil -- a fair, well-written, and inclusive (as far as that goes) account of the list, kudos for taking the time to compose it. Age does (productively or not) bring on reflection on the past, and at two decades, well, it's now a collective history. Thanks, Felix (@305 posts under no pseudonym) & Ted (@351 posts under no pseudonym) (1600 under the 'nettime ...' rubric) I'm wondering if there are any deeper stats available -- in retrospect -- such as subscriber numbers over time; posts over time, etc... My email archive shows 22600 entries ... but I had a few gaps of some months over the course of the almost 20 years... cheers, jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Sherpas and Sahibs in the Sharing Economy
Here is another in a growing number of critiques of the corporate
"sharing" economy:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Share-like-a-Sherpa-Class-by-Anthony-Kalamar-Class_Inequality_Language_Sharing-Economy-151026-178.html
Share like a Sherpa: Class Inequality in the "Sharing" Economy
By Anthony Kalamar
The "sharing economy" evokes an image of free, socially-minded
exchange among friends and equals. Yet, it is increasingly clear
that much of what goes by this name today is dependent on, and
exacerbates, social inequality. In truth, the sharing economy is
divided into two classes: Sherpas and Sahibs.
Last year, controversy erupted over the alleged gentrification
of Burning Man by Silicon Valley tech money; among the wealthy
elite's crimes against the Burner ethos was the use of hired help
for many of the less agreeable aspects of the Black Rock lifestyle:
setting up and taking down camps; preparing and serving food and
drinks. Often experienced burners themselves, these workers were
paid not just to make life easier for the noob-leet; but to help
them pick properly unique and self-expressing outfits, to show them
around Black Rock City, to get them safely back to camp after
over-indulging, and, overall, to create and share an experience for
their wealthy employers to enjoy.
Sort of like a hired friend or mentor. They came to be called
"sherpas."
The sherpa phenomenon led to controversy because it is so clearly in
contrast to Burning Man's shared ethic of self-reliance, radical
inclusion, and decommodification. Yet Black Rock City is not the
only place where the values of "friendship" and "sharing" are
invoked to obscure underlying relations of inequality.
The real Sherpas (with a capital S), are, of course, an ethnic group
in Nepal, not a job category. But uses of the word similar to the
meaning used at Burning Man can be found in tech culture ("network
sherpas" and "web sherpas") and gaming ("game sherpas") and beyond.
In the "sharing economy," it is represented by SherpaShare, a
platform that provides statistical support for drivers for Uber,
Lyft, and similar services.
Part of the significance of the growing use of the word "sherpa" in
the sharing economy is that it communicates that these workers, like
the real Sherpas, do more than physical work; importantly, they are
affective laborers who create and share in experiences for the
on-demand enjoyment of others. As George Orwell said, language is
"an instrument which we shape for our own purposes." "Sherpa" is a
word that names a category, a kind of worker, who can then find an
identity and a common interest with each other. Where the word
"sharing" has been used to cover-up the underpaid, precarious
situation of these workers, "sherpa," in response, can be used to
clarify and make visible.
The next step is to determine: what to call those who the
sharing-sherpas work for? That should be easy; just turn to the
history of the original Sherpas, and extend the metaphor an
additional step: sherpas work for sahibs.
The real Sherpas live in the vicinity of Mount Everest. Many of them
make their income by working for extreme tourists--wealthy "job
creators" who make seasonal treks from the richer nations of the
world to climb the famous peaks of the Himalayas, probably for the
purpose of self-discovery or some similar El Dorado. The Sherpas'
job is the sharing of knowledge and experience; it requires the
development of trust, and an intimately shared experience in the
face of the thrill and the danger of the ascent. Helping their
wealthy clientele reach the summit, Sherpas risk injury, extreme
cold, and often death; it must be like working in a coal mine where
the product is adventure.
For decades, the Sherpas addressed their mountaineering employers as
"sahibs," which means "master," a word dating from the British
Empire. They stopped using this word in the 1970s, as part of a
movement to attain greater respect from their employers; but
anthropologist Sherry Ortner, who studied the Sherpas, decided to
keep using the term "sahib" to mark the enduring ethnic and class
distinction between Sherpas and their employers. As she writes,
the word "sahib"
"places the sahibs in the same frame as the Sherpas, a single
category of people being subjected to ethnographic scrutiny. And...
though I do not accept the implication of superiority embodied in
the term (which is of course why the Sherpas stopped using it), I do
not think it is possible to avoid the (ongoing) fact of sahibs'
power over the Sherpas on expeditions; my continuing, somewhat
ironic, use of the term signals this continuing
Re: Fwd: Hacked Team [getting off-topic...]
On 05/11/15 08:04, Jaromil wrote: > the military industrial complex. Software embargos can't help at all here, > since software is probably the easiest thing to smuggle, ever. Not yet. Might become, but LSD is still easier. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
CfP: Winter Symposium: "Appropriating Technology For Societal Change"
CfP: Winter Symposium: "Appropriating Technology For Societal Change" 4-6th of March, 2016 Study Circle 6 of the Nordic Summer University (NSU) holds its winter symposium on: Do-It-Yourself in Anthropocene: New Political Imaginaries A planetary, ecological collapse threatens to end the world as we know it. International negotiations are being held without results. Both in the engineering community and in the ecology movement , attempts are made to develop alternatives from below. The training of technophile engineers and technophobic environmentalists places them in opposite camps on most issues. What these two communities have in common, however, is a shared problematic (i.e. technology) and a Do-it-yourself attitude towards societal problems. Under the pressure of a perpetual, ecological crisis, a hybrid imaginary is emerging. A case in point is the establishment of `open source ecology villages' in the countryside in the US, in Ireland and in Spain. Another example is initiatives to secure food sovereignty through open sourced, automated greenhouses, tailored for the needs of urban dwellers. In either case, the universalistic aspiration of the engineering culture meets the particularism and the small-is-beautiful philosophy of the environmentalists. This nascent movement articulates a new cultural imaginary, utopic and apocalyptic at the same time. The winter session of study circle no. 6 will explore this new imaginary, its promises and pitfalls. In order to participate at the winter symposium, submit your proposal to one of the coordinators of the circle before November 15, 2015. We accept applications for presentations of papers and workshops as well as just participation. Please submit a short description (a few hundred words) of the paper or workshop you intend to present at the seminar together with a short bio. We welcome a range of topics and presentations, from engineering and the social sciences to more experience-based and practically oriented interventions. We strive for a mixture of participants, including academics, students, practitioners and activists, as well as in disciplinary background. The symposium will be held in the extended Göteborg area in Sweden, from Friday 4th till Sunday 6th of March. Participation fee is 500 SEK (50 euro). It covers food and accommodation. It might also be possible to apply for travel subventions, conditioned on available funds. For more information about the circle, please contact the coordinators. Johan Söderberg: johan [dot] soderberg [at] sts [dot] gu [dot] se Gustav Eek: gustav [dot] eek [at] fripost [dot] org Website: http://nordic.university/study-circles/appropriating-science-and-techno logy-for-societal-change/ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Fwd: Hacked Team [getting off-topic...]
back on the HT case 4 months later On Mon, 27 Jul 2015, Radovan Misovic wrote: > I found an interesting article related to this topic. > Hacking Team: a zero-day market case study [...] A new article finally tells more of the story behind the scenes and shows better the connection between "market" dynamics and the ethics of those involved http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-hacking-team-defectors I simply second the definition of a fascist (with plenty of italian effing acquaintances) ruling the company. When looking at the rest of the booming tech security industry, I believe what really went wrong in HT is going wrong in any other company with dreams of grandeur and obsession of scaling up operations in the military industrial complex. Software embargos can't help at all here, since software is probably the easiest thing to smuggle, ever. Now, good luck with startups and zilicon falleys The Hacking Team Defectors Written by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai November 2, 2015 // 09:00 AM EST Copy This URL I am sitting in a nondescript all-white office room in Sliema, a touristy, commercial town that faces Malta's capital of Valletta. I'm staring at my computer, typing commands into the terminal, and I have no idea what I'm doing. Sitting across the room there's a hacker who looks nothing like the image of a hacker that popular culture has ingrained in our minds. He has a buzz-cut, he's clean-shaven, has an earnest smile, and is wearing a dark blue polo shirt and cargo shorts. He looks more like a tourist than someone who used to develop spyware for the infamous Italian surveillance tech company Hacking Team. He is sending me a bunch of commands written in the Python programming language, trying to exploit a flaw in my MacBook's operating system, so that I can get administrative privileges on my work computer. "Let me write another backdoor," he says. After a few failed attempts, and a couple more Python scripts, it finally works. "Fuck yeah, you're root," he says, using the technical term for a user who has full privileges on a computer. "We just exploited your computer!" he adds, laughing. I laugh too, and then I realize that, technically, a guy that used to work at Hacking Team, the surveillance technology vendor that sold its products to almost 40 law enforcement and intelligence agencies from across the world, according to data dumped online this summer, just hacked my computer. *** His name is Alberto Pelliccione. Until last year, he was the man responsible for developing Hacking Team's Android spyware, and one of the employees who had worked on the company's marquee product, the surveillance suite known as Remote Control System or RCS, since its early days. In February of last year, Pelliccione resigned. Since then, the company's top brass, particularly the CEO David Vincenzetti, has gone after him for leaving, and later sued him for allegedly using Hacking Team's code to create an antidote to the company's spyware, a defensive system called ReaQta. Now, after a mysterious hacker only known as PhineasFisher breached the company in July, exposing its most guarded secrets, such as internal emails, list of clients, and even the spyware's source code, Pelliccione was fingered by Vincenzetti as a potential suspect. But he's not the only one who's faced the wrath of his old company. A small group of high-level former employees, who all left after Pelliccione, are also suspected of being behind the hack, and have been called "infidels" and "traitors" by the Italian press. Their departure, as well as what happened to them after they left, shows that even internally, some were not happy about the direction the company took in the last few years; there have been multiple reports that Hacking Team's products were being abused by some of its customers, such as Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, or Saudi Arabia. "Hacking Team shouldn't be a fucking religion that if you wanna leave you're an infidel or a traitor." The group of former employees was accused of having played part in the hack after months of separate lawsuits against five of them. Two of them even received visits from the Italian intelligence -- all ploys that seem to be a way to intimidate and punish them for having left the company. A Hacking Team former employee asked not to be named because Vincenzetti, "with his ongoing lawsuits, is at least a little bit effective in his terrorist tactics aimed at forcing people not to talk." Guido Landi, who worked as a developer at Hacking Team focusing on Windows, is one of the former employees that the company is going after. For him, Hacking Team is a "madhouse," led by a "fascist" who won't forgive anyone who dares to leave.
