Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch
On 13/Feb/16 12:42, Felix Stalder wrote: The material circumstances that are dragging Europe (and the US) down have more to do with geopolitical and demographic shifts, the kind of stuff that Keith Hart is talking about. These are, at least in part, related to technological changes, but are primarily embodied in logistics, distribution of productive capacities and changing patterns of the world economy (such as increasing "south-south trade") and not in techniques of crowd control. "Material circumstances" is a key term -- and one that emphasizes some of the following points: Don't forget a more basal causal pressure: global population which affects all the above. Whenever localized resources are depleted, human populations begin to move, and if they can't move, they get angry: "A hungry man is an angry man." It is suggested that we are consuming 1.6 earth's worth of resources at the current population level. Surely pressures arising from this broad condition are propagating throughout the system in ways that we hardly are aware of or understand. Perhaps the fever of the 1% to accumulate what they do is related somehow -- another expression of the persistent drive of Life to continue itself in the form of 'optimized' (used with at least some irony!) evolutionary selection. The geo- in geopolitical change is definitely resource-depletion related to one degree or another. And certainly at some remove, but deeply related the 'political' as well. Technological 'change' also is one driver of resource depletion and shuffling around. I would not use a materialist approach, but trace the energy (re)sources and sinks as distributed across the entire techno-social system and globe. There is relationship between those flows and the flows of human conflict. 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch
Sorry to intrude in this Euro-centric (myopic) discussion but just as DIEM25 was being presented Bernie Sanders was winning the New Hampshire primary for the US Democratic party nomination on the basis of rebuilding US democracy and being a facilitator of a "democratic revolution" and "socialism" in the US. An interesting contrast I think in Sanders' self-identifying and embedding his campaign as part of a broad based, highly distributed, Internet enabled participative social movement with what appears to be a top down, (left) elite driven and non-participative process in DIEM25. Further it is quite clear that should by some chance Sanders were to become the next President of the US, the only possible means by which he can deliver on his promises (and his expressed strategy) to curb campaign finances, break the hold of Wall Street, implement single payer medicare etc.etc. is through continuing and extending his campaign mobilization of his broad based, highly distributed, Internet enabled participative social movement (something which to his eternal discredit Obama chose to demobilize immediately after his election... Another straw in the hurricane which doesn't seem to have wafted through the rarified halls in Berlin are Corbyn's broad based, highly distributed, Internet enabled participative social movement towards his ascension to the BLP leadership. And finally, here in Canada the quite spontaneous and largely unorganized and leaderless broad based, highly distributed, Internet enabled participative social movement which led to the sound defeat (70% to 30%) of Canada's version of austerity driven neo-liberalism (the hard right government of Stephen Harper) and the rather surprising election of a progressive centrist government through PM Justin Trudeau. Trudeau's government while not itself responsible for the anti-Harper movement is, in a wide number of interesting ways, attempting to govern as a broad based, highly distributed, Internet enabled participative social movement and directly opposite in social and at least for the moment, economic policies of its immediate predecessor. Some possible lessons to be learned? M -Original Message- From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org [mailto:nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org] On Behalf Of Frederic Janssens Sent: February 14, 2016 8:22 AM To: nettim...@kein.org Subject: Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch Some comments and proposals. (I only followed the live-stream.) Geert Lovink 12 February 2016 at 21:33 >"The real challenge DIEM has to tackle is the question of organization. >It is called a movement, but is it really? Someone mentioned that one >cannot "found" a movement. They emerge, bottom up. What will happen >over the next weeks, and perhaps months, are local DIEM events to start >with Madrid, Amsterdam and for sure more that I do not know about. This >is the age of the internet so how about some internet coordination?" >... >"The internet easily >replicates the celebs memes but the hard work of designing internal >democracy has yet to begin." Yes. My proposal would be to formulate it thus : <...> # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery announced
There is no complete disintegration or lack of organization (on or structureless) in the cosmos. (From the organizational point of view) What makes more sense is to talk about the change in the form, coherency, content, and scale of the organization -of the considered properties of the cosmos which is the ultimate organized whole. This discovery provides a possibility to develop, so far most clear and sharp 'view' of the universe as we know it, and may be the beyond. Yet how far the look will reach and how liberating the view will be depends on the looking eyes and the intention of the bearers of those eyes. "Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery announced: [1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/live/2016/fe b/11/gravitational-wave-announcement-latest-physics-einstein-ligo-black -holes-live [2]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/09/gravitational-waves- everything-you-need-to-know (Gravitational waves More about gravitational waves, how they are produced and how they will hopefully be detected: a survey of current detectors, how to make gravitational waves audible, the space-borne detector LISA, Einstein@Home This page features an overview of all our "Spotlights on relativity" dealing with gravitational waves. There is a spotlight text explaining the wave's [3]Basic properties, and a text in the category [4]Gravitational wave sourceswhich deals with ways of making gravitational waves audible; the texts under the heading [5]On the road to detection describes the experiments currently under way or under construction to detect gravitational waves directly. Also, there is a text describing one of the [6]Cosmological applications of gravitational waves. Useful background information on gravitational waves can be found in the introduction [7]Elementary Einstein, especially in the chapter [8]Gravitational waves.) References 1. https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/live/2016/feb/11/gravitational-wave-announcement-latest-physics-einstein-ligo-black-holes-live 2. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/09/gravitational-waves-everything-you-need-to-know 3. http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/gravWav#basics 4. http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/gravWav#sources 5. http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/gravWav#detection 6. http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/gravWav#cosmology 7. http://www.einstein-online.info/elementary 8. http://www.einstein-online.info/elementary/gravWav # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch
Some comments and proposals. (I only followed the live-stream.) Geert Lovink 12 February 2016 at 21:33 >"The real challenge DIEM has to tackle is the question of organization. >It is called a movement, but is it really? Someone mentioned that one >cannot "found" a movement. They emerge, bottom up. What will happen >over the next weeks, and perhaps months, are local DIEM events to start >with Madrid, Amsterdam and for sure more that I do not know about. This >is the age of the internet so how about some internet coordination?" >... >"The internet easily >replicates the celebs memes but the hard work of designing internal >democracy has yet to begin." Yes. My proposal would be to formulate it thus : What is needed for european level democracy to emerge is an internet protocol that enables large scale open discussion. It does not exist yet, we have to build it (if interested I have ideas how). The only discussion format that exists until now has not changed since millenia, and is limited to about 10 effective participants. (So yes, I think 'democracy' has mostly been flawed partly because of that limitation. It is only with the internet that it is technically possible to go beyond. I see this conjunction as an opportunity to try to do it effectively.) We need it internally to be democratic. And only if we can achieve that, can we convincingly propose it as a working model for official decision making. Alex Foti 13 February 2016 at 09:15 >"So this is my constructive criticism of diem. Be transparent and >radically democratic, certainly. But discuss and construct clearly >what the ultimate aim is in concrete terms. If we want to seize >power in Brussels and Frankfurt, we need to point out what kind of >European state we are fighting for." Not really. It is a good discussion subject, and proposals are welcome. But I think here the first task is more fundamental : trying to found democracy in a multinational, multicultural, multilinguistic space. We must first find an operational definition of who is 'we' and what is democracy before deciding the ultimate aim and starting to fight. Felix Stalder 13 February 2016 at 11:29 >"The only concrete demand, or action goal, was to increase transparency >in the ECB and the Eurogroup. >It was surprising, at least to me, that one of the best speeches of >the evening came from Zizek (delivered in a short video) who said >something like: Stick to a every simple demand, but pursue it >vigorously and to end and see how destabilizing this can be! >Given that the only concrete idea was to increase transparency, >this sounded really sensible strategy, something that a diverse >coalition could form around and then formulate more ambitious goals. >But there was no sense at all, how this even this relatively simple >and non-controversial demand could be energized, articulated and >executed beyond being voiced at talk shows." Yes. My proposal above includes transparency in internal working. If we succeed we can show the way by example. Prove the possibility of transparency by being transparent. >"Repressive orders crumble when people >start to loose their fear and act in large numbers, despite being >monitored not because they found ways to evade it. Security, in this >case, comes from social solidarity and collective action, not from >technology. >... >You cannot built a social movement in a dark corner." Yes. Anne Roth 13 February 2016 at 14:28 "Another question concerns the non-public parts during the day: how did that come to be actually? How did people get chosen, who chose them, what was the aim, what were the outcomes?" Yes. Internal transparency is required for the stated goals. -- Frederic # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Cryptome's searing critique of Snowden Inc.
Cryptome's searing critique of Snowden Inc. http://timshorrock.com/?p=2354 https://soundcloud.com/rebootfm/interview-with-cryptome-2016-02-06 Posted on February 13, 2016 by Tim Shorrock The current corporate media business model of celebrity as an income producer and celebrity as a sensationalizing, titillating device for increasing the value of content is something we stay away from. It's deeply cynical to sensationalize this trusted transaction, when someone come to you with a document and puts it forward to you. This week, John Young and Deborah Natsios, the founders of Cryptome, one of the world's oldest and best-known repositories of leaked intelligence documents, quietly posted a URL to an interview they conducted on February 6 during a conference in Berlin, Germany. Young and Natsios are introduced, correctly, as "renowned figures within a larger community people interested in keeping governments and institutions accountable, and using documents to do that." But they also offer deep insights into the media and how it has handled revelations about U.S. intelligence and the National Security Agency. And their remarks, such as the quote above, clearly catch their host by surprise. In the 18th minute, they issue a scathing rebuke of "celebrity" journalism as practiced, in their opinion, by The Intercept, the publication owned by Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media. The interview is worth hearing in its entirety, and I urge anyone who's had questions and concerns about Edward Snowden and his relationship to The Intercept's founding editors, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, to listen to it and carefully consider their arguments. Why? Because Cryptome raises serious questions that nobody else on the left or in the media want to talk about, including how Omidar has created a business from Snowden's cache; what exactly Snowden may have been doing while he was working for the CIA prior to his time at NSA (and what else he may have been doing at NSA itself); and why Snowden and The Intercept continue to proselytize for Tor, the anonymization tool, despite its massive funding from the U.S. government, the Pentagon and the national security state. One of the most amazing moments comes when the host, Pit Shultz, grows nervous about how his questions are being answered. It's a sad insight into how the libertarian left responds to any criticism of its heroes and the arrogance and vitriol that's been thrown to people who've raised questions about Snowden, Tor or Omidyar's operations. To his credit, Shultz soldiers on -- but only after Natsios assures him that "robust debate" is crucial to democracy. Cryptome's critique, as expressed in the interview, is not new. Ever since Greenwald first wrote about Snowden's documents in The Guardian in 2013, the organization has been keeping careful track of the glacial pace of the documents' release and The Intercept's almost-total control over the cache. Their latest tally, posted this week, is 6,318 pages of what The Guardian first reported as 58,000 files. From the start, Young and Natsios made it clear that they strongly disapprove of the fact that this cache has not been made widely available to the public and posted for all to see -- as they have done with the tens of thousands of intelligence files they have released since the late 1990s (and as Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers). Take a look at how Gawker, a publication very friendly to The Intercept, reported on Cryptome in June 2013: When the Guardian and Washington Post published their blockbuster NSA reports based on Ed Snowden's leaks, journalists lined up conga-style to congratulate them on the scoops. Not Cryptome. Instead, the secret-killing site blasted the Guardian and Post for only publishing 4 of the 41 slides that Snowden gave them about PRISM, the NSA's system for spying on the internet. Mr. Snowden, please send your 41 PRISM slides and other information to less easily cowed and overly coddled commercial outlets than Washington Post and Guardian," Cryptome wrote in a June 10th dispatch titled "Snowden Censored by Craven Media." To longtime followers of Cryptome, this response was unsurprising. Before Wikileaks, before Ed Snowden, there was Cryptome. Manhattan-based architects John Young and Deborah Natsios founded Cryptome.org in 1996 as a repository for documents no one else would publish, including lists of CIA assets, in-depth technical schematics of sensitive national security installations, and copyrighted material. As leaking has created a vibrant media ecosystem in recent years, complete with favored outlets, journalists and sources, Cryptome has positioned itself as its curmudgeonly ombudsman, quietly but blisteringly cutting down the hype and blather it sees in its competitors while advocating a form of radical transparency as straightforward as Cryptome.org's bare-bones website. Until now, however, I've never seen an analysis like this. What follows
