Re: made for TV, made for social media
Dear all, the Yugo-mentions are spot-on but let me note that, like so many times before, Trump's tactics are straight out of Berlusconi's playbook -- on amphetamine, of course. Berlusconi never accepted the results of the Italian 2006 elections, his second major defeat. Like in the US, the elections were run by B's very government, but not having nobody to blame for the supposed fraud certainly did not stop him for making shit up. This included his own minister of the interior repeatedly claiming that the elections he had supervised had been fair. Sounds familiar? But why should reality get in the way of a wider political strategy. Berlusconi got to oppose a weak executive, backed by a shaky majority, which eventually led to a big centre-right victory in 2008. He was eventually given the boot by the EU troika as many will remember. Again, he could claim he had not been defied in the open democratic battlefield. Differences: First, the 2006 centre-left government was the 61st since WW2 (1 per year on average). The Italian system is unstable by design and B knew he'd soon have a new chance. Not so much in the US. Second, B literally OWNED a major political party. There was no room whatsoever for internal dissent or for alternative centre-right coalitions. The possibility has only materialized with his convictions and physical decline in the last few years, and with a changed political climate (his death will be even more disruptive for the right). In the current US situation one of the most interesting variables remains the Republican party. Even with all its authoritarian tendencies and unique ideological drives, the old guard may try to salvage it if the alternative is a complete surrender to a defeated Trump. Obviously B was also the product of a different media politics, owning most private TV networks -- and yet still calling out a supposed hegemony of left-wing media. Finally, B had no army of protofascist thugs to deploy, no major racial upheaval to capitalize upon (or let's just say that the war against minorities was completely asymmetrical and there were no big differences between the left and the right in terms of their role in it), nor was he interested in being seen as an authoritarian leader. No violent coup attempts there. Now, in other areas the similarities between B and T are quite striking. Like others before them, they both see the institutional democratic process as a fiction whose script can be rewritten. We knew that in the past this has led to a variety of different outcomes, not just to the Reichstag fire. Still processing what that means in today's US politics. Ciao from Canada a Put another way, was it the burning of the Reichstag or the storming of the Winter Palace? or neither? On Jan 8, 2021, at 7:47 AM, mp wrote: On 08/01/2021 04:07, Keith Sanborn wrote: Dear John, There is a difference between a fascist coup attempt lead from above and a mass insurrection. ... when you put it like that, it sounds like there is a difference. Does that mean that poor, white Americans have no sense of the local, of community, of constitutional rights or anything like a good enlightened liberal would? Are they all stupid, or all fascists, is that the meaning here? Whose values and whose baseline of reality defines the frame of reference here? # 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: # 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: # 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: A question in earnest
Hello, my two cents from Canada and with an eye on my old country Italy. While I share some of Brian's and Molly's hopes about the fall of the Republican party, I would not write Trump out just yet. He may very well manage to turn this hospitalization in his favour. Like for other contemporary populist politicians, the body of the leader is very much a biopolitical battleground here. I am thinking Berlusconi's sexual drive, for example -- or rather the way in which he managed to successfully use revelations about his habits as signals of his masculinity and youth. Trump has already started weaponizing his recovery from the virus. We can very well expect him and his entourage to use it as a key propaganda trope, e.g. portraying him as strong, moralizing his ability to 'defeat' the virus, and en passage confirming that the virus is not that dangerous after all. If he quickly gets out of the hospital and nobody in the White House outbreak dies or gets seriously ill, this may turn the table with regard to his role in the virus crisis. Finally, the American public and even more so the Republican electorate may not necessarily be aware and/or care, but let's not forget that many other leaders have caught the virus. Nobody was as careless as the White House, of course, but remember Johnson, Trudeau, ministers in many European countries and in Brasil... the list goes on. Biden may be able to step up his own biopolitical game and inject even more care and empathy in his public persona -- he is certainly good at that! -- and this will help defeat the evil egoistical superspreader president. On a different note, Biden and/or the Democratic Party have been incorporating demands and platforms from the left but none stems directly from Biden. He is struggling to convey energetically any iconic policy or political proposal because his platform conflicts so much with his history and ideological dispositions. He's got nothing like Trump's wall, or Bernie's socialized healthcare system. From this viewpoint in my opinion he is even weaker than Clinton in a sense. Definitely NOT a boring election Alessandro Molly said it all, but let's give Joe Biden his two bits: "The economy. Climate change. Health care. Civil rights. Racial justice. The U.S. Supreme Court. Our democracy. They’re all on the line. Vote." (https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1312907856161705985) Biden is an old hack and a political weathervane, for sure. But we progressives and socialists are creating the weather. On all of the subjects listed here, we can make huge changes happen by pushing the Democrats to the left. This can be achieved by an explosion of pent-up demands nurtured by civil society during the long political quarantine of the Trump administration. The first step is removing Trump and discrediting the Republican party, which can be achieved by what's called a "blowout" - that's a crushing defeat that flips the Senate to Democratic control and increases the margin in the House. It's now a realistic possibility, after the utter disgrace of Trump's behavior in the debate, plus the deep sense of disgust generated by the White House superspreader event. If a blowout happens, does anyone think Progressives and Socialists will stop there, suddenly becoming passive and complicit with a don't-rock-the-boat administration? Hell no, after any sort of victory at the polls we're going to push urgently for structural changes in the way this country is run, including statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, which would add four new senators and solve the Republican problem for a long time to come, thereby opening up political space to deal rationally with economic, racial and ecological crises. There have been two major obstacles to the kind of changes we are seeking: 1. a hegemonic link between conservative values and neoliberal policy; and 2. fiscal austerity. The basic contradiction and stinking hypocrisy of the neocon link have been incarnated by Trump, and that coalition of cultural conservatives and extractivist capital will fall with him, for the time being at least. As for fiscal austerity, it will be replaced by a sweeping economic stimulus based on fiat money -- an urgent measure which will definitely pass a Democratic House and Senate, but whose final forms could vary tremendously, between maintenance of the status quo and transformation. This election offers a chance to push for the latter, along the lines sketched out by Bernie Sanders and AOC. The creation of fresh money for federal policy goals (and not just to support the financial system) is the only conceivable way to literally retool the economy, while simultaneously reshaping the racist and frankly imperialist social relations that are inseparable from the current extractivist toolkit. Biden is already proposing a Green New Deal in all but name, so let's add the name and make it really work. This US election is a potential
Re: Lessons from Amazon's Italian hub strike
Interesting points, but I believe that the relation between data and labour go in a further direction too. Data are of course used to feed the algorithms that organize work in the warehouse (i.e. choose the task that a “picker” will need to perform, and direct them through the barcode gun they use to “shoot” commodities). But the reality of work in e-commerce warehouses has to do with brutal command over workers’ bodies, and even big data are geared towards that goal. Working at Amazon is a matter of physicality, speed and resistance – you have to run and carry stuff all day. Management can manually tweak the algorithm so that a certain worker will have to pick heavier stuff, or commodities that are distant from each other in the “pick tower,” thus crushing their physical resistance and/or making it impossible for the worker to meet performance goals and exposing them to backlashes. This is how you discipline troublesome workers or set them up for dismissal. In sum, at Amazon (but the same is true for Zalando or IKEA, which also operate warehouses in the area) data are used in the service of quite an embodied form of capitalist command. So perhaps it is data-against-work? Or discipline-regardless-of-data? Finally, to add to the previous comment, turnover is so high that the local territory is no longer enough as a supplier of bodies. Indeed, Amazon has its own Google buses from hell: temp agencies now run buses that bring scores of young workers to Amazon from poor neighborhoods of Milan, Alessandria, and other cities that can be more than one hour away from the warehouse. Clearly big data has to do with this spatial configuration based on the need to increase the exploitation of masses of unemployed youth, but does not tell the whole story. As for the more political side, Amazon has been very good at keeping one specific union out of the warehouse. SI Cobas is the small militant union that has won many battles in the area, including at other e-commerce giants such as H or IKEA. They have no presence at Amazon, which is why the requests of this strike only addressed stable unionized workers while overlooking the problems faced by the thousands of “green badge” precarious workers hired via temp agencies. I know some of the workers involved in the Black Friday strike and I am by no mean blaming them. But I wanted to stress that the militant union has won by putting their bodies on the line with pickets and strikes, and going against all the powers that be (the center-left party which runs city and region, the co-operatives that provide precarious workers to logistical giants, and the traditional unions). Si Cobas even had one victim, Abd Elsalam, killed by a truck trying to cross a picket line last year – many Nettimers will remember about this tragedy. I don’t know what the future trends will look like, but for now successful struggles have been based on a model that resembles the 50s, plus one 21st century flavour: the key role of migrant labour in the struggles, especially workers from Maghreb who have won rights that the local white youth had no collective memory of. Data-based forms of intervention are difficult to imagine in this context of brutal exploitation and direct action response. I am researching exactly this stuff in Piacenza (my old hometown...) and would be very happy to keep on discussing. Ciao from Toronto a casilli.fr Lessons from Amazon's Italian hub strike: industrial action that does not factor in both work AND data is doomed to be ineffective https://www.casilli.fr/2017/11/28/lessons-from-amazons-italian-hub-strike-industrial-action-that-does-not-factor-in-both-work-and-data-is-doomed-to-be-ineffective/ On Nov 24, 2017, the three main Italian unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL) have called for a strike over the failure to negotiate Black Friday bonuses for the 1,600 permanent workers at the distribution hub near the Northern town of Piacenza. Unions say 50% of the workers partake in the strike. Amazon says it was more like 10%. Bottom line: the strike did not stop Black Friday in Italy. Someone was working. Yet, according to several sources, it was not not permanent workers, but the 2,000 temps that Amazon recruited until Xmas who saved the day. They were not hired to replace striking workers. Even in Italy, this would be illegal. They were hired to face Nov./Dec. surge in retail sales. And of course they did not stop working on Black Friday 2017. That said, Amazon is known internationally for its brutal workplace discipline, its anti-labor stance, and has been accused of hiring temps, contingent workers and even workampers to edge out unionized labor force. In Italy, one can recruit a lot of those. Unemployment is at 11.1% and there’s a millions-strong industrial reserve army of faux-freelance, part-timers, “coordinated collaborators”, “project-contractors”, “leased staff” and many other forms of non-standard employees.
Re: What is the meaning of Trump's victory?
Hello all, thanks for a great discussion in these obscure times. I wonder what the role of Silicon Valley will be in the next years. I don't strictly mean the communicative role of their platforms but rather the possible overall reaction by an industry that is the poster child of globalization and libertarianism. Silicon Valley corporations have showed a clear internal ideological cohesion, after all, while on the other hand Trump and his acolytes could represent a pretty concrete menace to all of them. There is a direct threat to their ability to outsource labor and move capital and goods across borders: "Apple will need to build those damn computers in America" (Trump). Even a slight move in this direction could wreck havoc on Silicon Valley operations. There is also a threat to their ability to profit from a global workforce beyond Chinese Foxconn workers, to put it bluntly. Just an example. No doubt, Silicon Valley companies are brutally unequal in terms of race and gender: no blacks, no women, although computer science degrees spit out graduates at much more balanced rates. Yet one group that is extremely overrepresented are Asians, and we already have Steve Bannon saying there are too many Asians working in the digital industry http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-disgusted-asian-ceos-silicon-valley_us_582c5d19e4b0e39c1fa71e48 Social media and other Silicon Valley companies may try to come to terms with Trump. But what would be the effect on an anti-trump movement or upheaval, or on the Democratic Party, if digital capitalism decided to wage war against him? Some signs are already there for us to try to understand Ciao from beyond-the-wall Canada a > sebastien, thanks for this brilliant explanation. i get it - no ethics > in what they are monetizing...got that. > > spin the spin for the sake of capitalist media profit, regardless. and > i'll have to look into "games of disruption" as you mention. seems > like its quite a bit about that...since there so much sudden activity, > for one, across social media, but also because, I sense this is going > to be an new era of info-war...and hacking...hacking already playing > such a mainstream role as to suspect the russians - but, seriously, > going to look for "said" information may wind up in pages which have > disappeared? and then there's clone sites and other means - seems like > we are moving in this direction - very quickly now - and cybersecurity > may transform in meaning, privilege print? <...> # 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: nettime The Gentrification of Hacking: How yuppies hacked the
Hi all, Johan Soderberg and I are writing this paper titled Repurposing the hacker. Three temporalities of recuperation. We do adopt a deeper historical framework while trying to understand how hacking has been hacked, and try to answer a more general question on how to analyze/avoid what Brett calls gentrification -- more traditionally, we call it recuperation -- and believe this is part of a series of processes of co-option that go much further than hacking. Indeed we describe recuperation of hacking in terms of social movement development and evolution of capitalism. You can download it here, please note it is just a draft! http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9c86493g#page-5 A summary: The spread of hacker practices to new fields, such as open hardware development and do-it-yourself biology, brings with it a renewed necessity to analyse the significance of hacking in relation to industrial and institutional innovation. We sketch out a framework drawing on the idea of recuperation and use it to situate an emerging body of works on hackers. By adopting the concept of recuperation, we highlight how hacker practices and innovations are adopted, adapted and repurposed by corporate and political institutions. In other words, hacking is being hacked. We suggest three temporalities within which this dynamics can be studied: 1) the life cycle of an individual hacker project-community, 2) the co-evolution of hacker movements and relevant industries or institutions, 3) the place of hacking within the ???spirit of the times???, or, differently put, the transformations of capitalism seen through the lens of hacking. Ciao, Alessandro dear Brett, your essay is brilliant and obvious at the same time. I did enjoy reading it, but still feels like scratching the surface as it does not dig into other historical examples of cultural gentrification. ... # 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hackers 2.0 IGEM produces 'hacker ethic' for biology
Hi Michael, that's quite an interesting take on biohacking. People who have witnessed the emergence of DIYbio (the do-it-yourself biology network that was started back in 2008 in the US) say that the direct intervention of the FBI was key in shaping the movement. The FBI attended DIYbio meetings, organized meetings of its own and flew amateurs there from all over the world, etc. Rather than a biosecurity concern, this was the FBI acknowledging they couldn't fuck up again after what they did to Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble (if you don't remember the story: it happened in NY during the antrax attacks, google it). Yet as a result of this, the movement has taken the form of a very cautious, a-critical subject that is going towards mostly educational or entrepreneurial paths. Sara Tocchetti from LSE is writing a great piece on this but I don't think it's out there yet. Of course do-it-yourself biology's current shape is also linked to other genealogies, i.e. diybio was mostly born within scientific institutions and with their paternal blessing and is currently being co-opted and integrated at all institutional levels (museums, start-ups, scientific crowdsourcing projects). Althought it might be scientifically poor, biohacking is very important to the synbio industry, as it portraits it as a friendly, fun, open, creative activity and also reverses the spectrum of life privatisation through its copyleft ethos. It also creates new hopes after decades of promises (remember the human genome?) that have been only partially matched so far, to say the least. In fact I see synthetic biology as a project for re-moralizing biotech, and diybio is an integral part of it - which might help explain why high-end biologists care about those kids playing with cell cultures. Now the question is: will distributed creativity and hyper-individualized markets appear in biology? Well, probably no bio commercial breakthrough will come from a garage, but a new soul for the biotech industry is created there, and those references to a hacker ethos are a big part of it ???http://www.etcgroup.org/synthetic_biology_explained Certainly seems that the hipster grassroots bottom up ethic of the hacker is being brought to new places. Nettime participants have for some time been sceptical of the 'hacker ethic'; was it now being colonised? I remember a while back on this list discussion of security exploits, the remark that now days the State was more interested to keep exploits hidden and activists are the one most interested in making exploits public. Quite a reversal where the underdog (once associated with the hackers hidden exploit) becomes the locksmith calling for public discussion of security in the name of protecting democracy partisans in the middle-east. ... # 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
