Quarantine Samba

[Carsten Agger]

Brazilians singing samba in their quarantine, alone together or together
alone:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvEFkckDa7E


Everyone by themselves

Everyone looking inward

Everyone in their own frame

But the samba continues.




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Re: And there must be no bowing down - Today's Eleven

[Carsten Agger]

On 2020-03-23 22:34, Patrice Riemens wrote:

> On 2020-03-23 20:57, John Hopkins wrote:
>
> Actually the article specifies that the chloroquine is not a vaccine, 
> but a medicine that - allegedly - slows down but does not kill the 
> virus, in that is it combats infection. It has been included by the 
> State Pharma agency in the provisory treatment plan against Covid since 
> it had been administered with good results on patients in China.
>
> If one wants to read the whole article (in Dutch) deepl.com does a good 
> job translating to English.

It's important to note that treatment of coronavirus with chloroquine is
still experimental and as such this treatment is not ready at all to be
released to the general public. And releasing medicine too early because
we think they probably work (but haven't documented thoroughly yet) is a
very dangerous strategy, not least during a pandemic.

Clinical trials and in-hospital experimentation *may* show it effective,
but it's at that point we should ask it to be released to GPs etc.


Best,
Carsten




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Re: coronavirus questions

[Carsten Agger]

On 2020-03-12 10:19, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> 3-4% of each of these groups will die, so it will likely be a uniting
> experience, a dismal failure of the identity politics, and therefore a
> serious problem for powers that be.
>
> Unrelated, it's funny how coronavirus has the same effect at
> biological and social levels: the damage to the body is mostly due to
> the overreaction of the immune system, and the damage to the economy
> is due to the overreaction of the society. Somehow the ruling class
> calculated that it is worthwhile to decimate the economy to delay
> deaths by few weeks or months (idiotic statements about the virus
> getting tired notwithstanding.)

I do not think the lockdown practised in Europe right now is an
overreaction.

I'm glad my country (Denmark) hasn't enacted an outright curfew like
Spain, but look at the situation in Italy if you want to know what can
happen if we don't do what's currently being done.

Unfortunately, the USA and the UK seem to have volunteered as control
cases, so we may soon see if you're right about the overreaction.
(Indeed, I hope you are, I have loved ones in the UK - but I fear
you're not.)

Best,
Carsten



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Re: Facebook

[Carsten Agger]

On 11/3/19 5:28 PM, Frederic Neyrat wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists,
> environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on
> Facebook and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this
> "social" (?) network.
>
> This
> article 
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-politics-republicans-right
> is not the reason of my email, but its occasion.
>

I use Facebook. I use it to keep up with some important networks, among
others my local capoeira group is coordinating the training in a
Facebook Group, so if I was not on it I wouldn't know if training is
canceled etc.

That illustrates a very important point:

Your mileage may in vary according to your location and interests, but
Facebook is no longer "just" a social network you can choose to use,
it's the public communication infrastructure in a lot of contexts. To
illustrate my point, two years ago I visited a revolutionary communist
squat in Napoli, Italy, with graffitis and posters against the system
and for a worker's revolution /everywhere/.

Their online presence? A Facebook page.

That means, that in general, the IT giants - Facebook, Google, to a
lesser degree Twitter, Microsoft, definitely Amazon, Apple ... - are no
longer just annoyances that people can avoid by their individual
choices. I'm sorry to say that in some places even Uber, the
Über-exploiters, has become basic infrastructure. :-( If we say to
people they should not be on Facebook, never shop with Amazon, not use
any Google services and not even think about touching any software
provided by Microsoft (which I at least don't) or Apple, we should, at
the same time, explain to them how they will get back a similar level of
infrastructure.

This monopolization and privatization of public space can't be broken by
individuals choosing to be "on" or "not on", and it's pointless to
believe it could. It should be solved on a structural level.
Specifically, I think, by legislation and regulations, including a
complete ban on collecting data for advertising purposes (goodbye
Google, goodbye Facebook). If society fails to address the privatization
of information infrastructure, it makes no sense to chide individuals or
have them go without vital infrastructure. We could help people to
different infrastructure, by supplying it and by educating, but this
also requires dedicated resources - i.e., that's also a structural
problem that has no relation at all to individual choices.

And, also specifically, I don't think Facebook are worse than any of the
other companies I mentioneded. I think Google is probably the one
standing out as the truly worst and most ruthless of the bunch, but
singling out Facebook makes no sense. At least, Facebook doesn't treat
their workers as slaves, as Amazon does (or I assume they mostly don't).

My own Facebook account lives it life dangerously and might indeed go in
the near future - I could make some anonymous dummy one for the capoeira
class, that would work. But I don't think that it would be an act of
resistance against the evil social media empire, it would be down to
personal annoyance and nothing else. For many people, deleting their
social media would, as things stand, be tantamount to shooting
themselves in the foot - and nothing else. Their is a potential war
between decency, freedom and democracy and the likes of Facebook and
Google, but it does not lie in people's individual choices of
infrastructure.


Best
Carsten


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Re: Wash Post: Greta Thunberg weaponized shame in an era of shamelessness

[Carsten Agger]

On 10/2/19 10:25 AM, mp wrote:
>
> Volume I:
>
> In ACT I, I disclose that Greta Thunberg, the current child prodigy and
> face of the youth movement to combat climate change, serves as special
> youth advisor and trustee to the burgeoning mainstream tech start-up, We
> Don’t Have Time. I then explore the ambitions behind the tech company We
> Don’t Have Time.
For what it's worth, Greta Thunberg has responded to this and made clear
that her affiliation with "We don't Have Time" were only ever peripheral
and is now history:

"I was briefly a youth advisor for the board of the non profit
foundation “We don’t have time”. It turns out they used my name as part
of another branch of their organisation that is a start up business.
They have admitted clearly that they did so without the knowledge of me
or my family. I no longer have any connection to “We don’t have time”.
Nor has anyone in my family. They have deeply apologised and I have
accepted their apology."

It seems this would implode the whole argument in "The manufacturing of"
etc.

Below I copy her statement in its entirety.

/Carsten

(from:
https://www.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/photos/a.733630957004727/767646850269804/)
Recently I’ve seen many rumors circulating about me and enormous amounts
of hate. This is no surprise to me. I know that since most people are
not aware of the full meaning of the climate crisis (which is
understandable since it has never been treated as a crisis) a school
strike for the climate would seem very strange to people in general.
So let me make some things clear about my school strike.

In may 2018 I was one of the winners in a writing competition about the
environment held by Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish newspaper. I got my
article published and some people contacted me, among others was Bo
Thorén from Fossil Free Dalsland. He had some kind of group with people,
especially youth, who wanted to do something about the climate crisis.
I had a few phone meetings with other activists. The purpose was to come
up with ideas of new projects that would bring attention to the climate
crisis. Bo had a few ideas of things we could do. Everything from
marches to a loose idea of some kind of a school strike (that school
children would do something on the schoolyards or in the classrooms).
That idea was inspired by the Parkland Students, who had refused to go
to school after the school shootings.
I liked the idea of a school strike. So I developed that idea and tried
to get the other young people to join me, but no one was really
interested. They thought that a Swedish version of the Zero Hour march
was going to have a bigger impact. So I went on planning the school
strike all by myself and after that I didn’t participate in any more
meetings.

When I told my parents about my plans they weren’t very fond of it. They
did not support the idea of school striking and they said that if I were
to do this I would have to do it completely by myself and with no
support from them.
On the 20 of august I sat down outside the Swedish Parliament. I handed
out fliers with a long list of facts about the climate crisis and
explanations on why I was striking. The first thing I did was to post on
Twitter and Instagram what I was doing and it soon went viral. Then
journalists and newspapers started to come. A Swedish entrepreneur and
business man active in the climate movement, Ingmar Rentzhog, was among
the first to arrive. He spoke with me and took pictures that he posted
on Facebook. That was the first time I had ever met or spoken with him.
I had not communicated or encountered with him ever before.

Many people love to spread rumors saying that I have people ”behind me”
or that I’m being ”paid” or ”used” to do what I’m doing. But there is no
one ”behind” me except for myself. My parents were as far from climate
activists as possible before I made them aware of the situation.
I am not part of any organization. I sometimes support and cooperate
with several NGOs that work with the climate and environment. But I am
absolutely independent and I only represent myself. And I do what I do
completely for free, I have not received any money or any promise of
future payments in any form at all. And nor has anyone linked to me or
my family done so.
And of course it will stay this way. I have not met one single climate
activist who is fighting for the climate for money. That idea is
completely absurd.
Furthermore I only travel with permission from my school and my parents
pay for tickets and accommodations.

My family has written a book together about our family and how me and my
sister Beata have influenced my parents way of thinking and seeing the
world, especially when it comes to the climate. And about our diagnoses.
That book was due to be released in May. But since there was a major
disagreement with the book company, we ended up changing to a new
publisher and so the book was released in august instead.
Before the book was released my parents made it 

MIT's nearly complete disgrace

[Carsten Agger]

Things have really been looking bad for MIT and the "cool tech",
WIRED-style tech-optimist movement in the last weeks (or months).

First, it turns out several professors at MIT and Harvard have been
closely connected to the deceased billionaire and alleged trafficker and
convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Among the accused of either
complicity of rape and trafficking or, *at the very least*, enabling and
reputation-washing in exchange for money, are as renowned scientists as
Marvin Minsky, George Church and Steven Pinker.

After this, it turns out that Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab,
Mecca and bonanza of the WIRED-style technotopian movement, has secretly
been taken Epstein's money. The secrecy is allegedly so that it won't
help launder Epstein's reputation, but soon it seems to be much more
related to the embarassment of it all. Not only was Epstein a secret
donor - he was also a very important fundraising collaborator and even
showed up for meetings at MIT with his very young paid female
companions, raising eyebrows and concerns not least among female staff
and students.

Apparently, Ito had received this money and concealed its origin in
violation of MIT's rules on people like Epstein. But then it turned out
that MIT president Rafel Reif had just as secretly OK'd the deal; not
only that, he had signed receipts for at least one other donations from
Epstein in 2012, when Epstein was barely out of probation for his 2008
conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. 

And *then*, it turned out that one of the Media Lab's absolute flagship
creations of later years, the much-hyped food computer, never actually
worked. When they had to demo it, programme lead Caleb Harper had an
assistant fetch some lettuce or lavender plants in the supermarket and
dust off the dirt from the roots so it'd seem they were grown
hydroponically. This did not, however, dispel them from wasting several
schools' time by sending out assembly kits for the botched things for
the students to assemble.

And as if all of this wasn't enough, the MIT Media Lab and the Food
Computer programme consistently violated regulations by dumping toxic
waste from said non-functional food computers with far too much nitrogen
in it.

I honestly don't know what to say anymore.

Carsten

https://patch.com/massachusetts/cambridge/mit-media-lab-kept-regulators-dark-dumped-chemicals-excess-legal-limit

"

"This is not about Open Agriculture, per se, or Caleb Harper," he said.
"This is a bigger issue… I took every action I could, to go through the
right channels to address it. I came to a point that I realized that the
institution, apparently, has made a decision not to address this."

In January 2019, Joseph Cerutti, a DEP employee who handles its disposal
well program, emailed Carter, the EHS officer, asking for the monthly
reports her office was required to send to his agency the previous year.
Carter had told him the lab hadn't discharged anything into the well
from April through June of 2018, but there were still nine months of
missing reports.

After a month without a response, Cerutti wrote back with a terse
reminder, adding Harper to the email. If Cerutti didn't get answers
within the next two weeks, he would issue a notice of noncompliance,
followed by possible fines and revocation of the permit.

Harper responded quickly, writing, "We have been following the protocol
agreed with EHS which was for any agricultural effluent was to be spread
in the open field and NOT put into the UIC system."

Cerutti seemed unaware of this. The lab's permit only allowed MIT
researchers to use the well. "When was the protocol to exclusively
discharge the hydroponic growing solution to the open field rather than
to the UIC well implemented?" he wrote back.

After a phone call with Carter in April, Cerutti was still left with
basic questions. In June, he asked for copies of all nitrogen water
sample results since January 2018. Carter responded in early July,
attaching results since July 2018, but not the samples from March that
frequently showed concentrations more than 10 times the limit.

State regulators did an on-site inspection of the facility in July. The
investigation is ongoing."



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Re: It goes beyond the Meat Loaf Problem

[Carsten Agger]

On 8/20/19 12:05 AM, André Rebentisch wrote:
> Partisanism makes the world easier but does not get it right.
>
> You have to simply consider this from a political standpoint and just
> view the moves of the players.
>
> a. What does he sacrifice by proposing himself?
> b. What do MPs sacrifice if they support the opposition?
>
> a. nothing at all
> b. everything
>
Not entirely true.

If Corbyn becomes prime minister in an interim government to avoid no
deal, he will, on the one hand, actually get to inhabit 10 Downing
Street; on the other, the mission will be strictly that of overseeing
the interim period while figuring out what to do with Brexit, with his
hands tied on his back with regard to the political reforms that are his
(and Labour's, excluding the Blairites) political project. No matter who
takes on that job will likely end up being hugely unpopular and ruin
their political prospects for decades to come. And Corbyn doesn't *have*
that many decades to come.

Of course, it wouldn't have to turn out that way, but he would indeed be
running that risk. Not to speak of the risk of alienating pro-Brexit
Labour voters by supporting a new referendum.

As for the other options you outlined in a previous mail - there's no
way around the backstop. If the UK leaves the EU, either it stays in the
customs union, OR there is a hard bord in the Irish sea, OR there is a
hard border between Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. The UK Tories
would never accept a border in the Irish sea, and a hard border in
Ireland could reignite the Troubles and kickstart another ten years of
civil war in Ireland.

Of course, someone like Boris Johnson doesn't really give a shit about
Ireland and would gladly take civil war if it means he can cling on to
an imperial possession, but the UK as such has too much capital invested
in the Good Friday agreement to make a hard Irish border a serious option.

Hence, the backstop. The problem is that Boris Johnson and the other
right-wing Brexiteers want to eat their cake and have it too. And that
is, of course, impossible.

Which means that the most likely scenario is that the UK WILL leave with
no deal, and, as a consequence, there WILL be a hard border in Ireland.
Or maybe the UK will lose Ulster, just as it seems on the way to lose
Scotland - two remarkable, if ironic, achievements for Mr. Johnson to
put on his CV.

And it is to avoid this clusterf**k that Corbyn s actually offering to
stick his neck out and take on a premiership that's doomed to fail. I
think he does deserve some credit for that, partisanships aside.


Best
Carsten



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Support the Pataxó in Bahia!

[Carsten Agger]

Guys, there's only 30 days left of our campaign to finance the Mutirão
(collective work sprint) for a Health Centre in the Pataxó village of
Pará (near Caraíva) in Bahia, Brazil.

With the current necropolitical and genocidal situation exposed for
everyone to see, this initiative for indigenous AUTONOMY is more
important than ever. The Pataxó are living examples of a way of life
much closer to the Earth, and this way of life is under threat. This
year, we've witnessed countless attempts to dismantle public health care
especially indigenous health care in Brazil.

We're calling for everyone to help! From October 12 to October 19 we'll
be constructing two Health Centres in Aldeia Pará (where we organized
the II International Festival of Technoshamanism) in response to calls
for aid from the community, where there's no suitable space for their
traditional health practices, nor for receiving doctors and nurses from
the outside.

Our crowdfunding: https://www.catarse.me/mutirao_da_saude_pataxo_2019

Help out, chip in, share, tell a friend!

Thanks
Carsten



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Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Carsten Agger]

On 6/11/19 5:27 PM, Jaromil wrote:
> dear Bruce and nettimers,
>
[...]
> 3. the "shamanic" value that can be embedded in uses of technologies,
>as opposed to the sanitized and rational interpretation given by
>designers in the west. Techno-shamanism is something Fabi Borges,
>Vicky Sinclair and other good folks in Bricolabs have been busy for
>ages!

Thanks for mentioning this, Jaromil!

Yes, the maker movement has been largely oblivious to the shamanic and
spiritual aspects and uses of technology, which also affects the very
definition of "technology" as a concept. We ay have our modern
technology, but the indigenous peoples have their ancestral technologies
which are in many ways superior to our own when it comes to interacting
with this our planet; *and* which combine with modern technologies in
many interesting ways.

At the moment, we in the technoshamanistm network (myself, Fabi Borges,
Rafael Frazão, Raísa Innocêncio and a number of others) have an ongoing
collaboration (since 2014) with the Pataxó village of Pará near Monte
Pascoal. These indigenous people are, in a way, the original makers:
They build their own houses and grow their food themselves - in these
modern times, this extends to fixing their own motorbikes and buggys.

Our current project is to raise money for a collaborative effort to
create a health centre in the village. The purpose is partly to offer
facilities for visiting nurses and doctors (so the Pataxó might be
attended, at intervals, without travelling too far), partly to create a
centre for indigenous healing methods. These structures will be built by
a communal effort in November, in which people are invited to
participate - to lend a hand, but also to learn from the Pataxó and
their ways. 

If you feel this sounds like a good idea and would like to help it
happen, feel free to chip in at the end of this link:

https://www.catarse.me/mutirao_da_saude_pataxo_2019


In the meanwhile, if you want to get a sense for who the Pataxó are and
what kind of work we do in the technoshamanism network, feel free to
check out the pictures from the festival we did with the Pataxó, back in
2016:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/22405820@N08/albums/72157673936765924


Best

Carsten


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Re: John Harris: Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy? (Guardian)

[Carsten Agger]

The author is complaining that "encryption would render everything
conveniently impenetrable"; whether that is for the government or the
platform itself is immaterial.

In fact, I'd say there is *no difference* whether communication is
monitored by governments or by platforms like Google and Facebook -
because information obtained and kept by the platforms can be
subpoenaed, and all data held by American surveillance capitalist
enterprises should be considered and treated as already in the
possession of the US government.

However, without going too far into that: The author complains that
encryption means citizen's conversations can't be monitored - i.e., he
contends that citizens of democratic nations should be seen and treated
as children that need adult supervision.

That was the part of the article that I was objecting to - and I'd like
to repeat myself while clarifying a little: "There *are* problems with
WhatsApp politics, but I'm not sure more surveillance (be it by
governments or platforms) is the answer."


Best

Carsten


On 5/22/19 6:44 AM, Future Tense wrote:
> Curious—the article doesn’t ever call for government surveillance. It
> does call for transparency, but the government (or government
> factions) is expressly called out as the source of bad actors.
> Transparency allows people to see how the bad actors are operating.
>
>
> Making the leap that public transparency is the same as “government
> surveillance” is akin to saying that open source software is
> somehow less secure, simply because bad actors can examine the code as
> well
>
> -S
>
> Sent from ProtonMail Mobile
>
>
> On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 1:51 AM, Carsten Agger  <mailto:ag...@modspil.dk>> wrote:
>> However, his point of view seems to be, among other things, that the
>> problem is that if people ("the children") are allowed to communicate in
>> private so the government or the platforms on behalf of the government
>> ("the adults") can't monitor them, all kinds of havoc will ensue. What
>> we need is for the government to monitor us.
>>
>> That's a very dangerous way of thinking. There *are* problems with
>> WhatsApp politics, but I'm not sure more government surveillance is the
>> answer.
>>
>>
>> On 5/13/19 8:54 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote:
>> >
>> > Nice key-word: 'hyper-politics' ...
>> >
>> >
>> > Original to:
>> >
>> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/big-tech-whatsapp-democracy-india
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy?
>> > John Harris, The Guardian, Mon 13 May 2019
>> >
>> >
>> > Social media such as WhatsApp may enable voters, but encrypted
>> > messaging polarises them and blocks public scrutiny
>> >
>> > In 10 days’ time, two political dramas will reach their denouement,
>> > thanks to the votes of a combined total of about 1.3 billion people.
>> > At the heart of both will be a mess of questions about democracy in
>> > the online age, and how – or even if – we can act to preserve it.
>> >
>> > Elections to the European parliament will begin on 23 May, and offer
>> > an illuminating test of the rightwing populism that has swept across
>> > the continent. In the UK, they will mark the decisive arrival of Nigel
>> > Farage’s Brexit party, whose packed rallies are serving notice of a
>> > politics brimming with bile and rage, masterminded by people with
>> > plenty of campaigning nous. The same day will see the result of the
>> > Indian election, a watershed moment for the ruling Hindu nationalist
>> > prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata party, or BJP.
>> > Whatever the outcomes, both contests will highlight something
>> > inescapable: that the politics of polarisation, anger and what
>> > political cliche calls “fake news” is going to be around for a long
>> > time to come.
>> >
>> > WhatsApp has more than 300 million Indian users, and it is Modi and
>> > his supporters who have made the most of it
>> >
>> > In Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, journalists have been
>> > shown the alleged wonders of the “war room” where staff are charged
>> > with monitoring European campaigning – in 24 languages – and somehow
>> > minimising hate speech and misinformation put around by “bad actors”.
>> > But this is as nothing compared with what is afoot in the world’s
>> > largest democracy, and a story centred on WhatsApp, the platform Mark
>> > Zuckerberg’s company acquired 

Re: John Harris: Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy? (Guardian)

[Carsten Agger]

However, his point of view seems to be, among other things, that the
problem is that if people ("the children") are allowed to communicate in
private so the government or the platforms on behalf of the government
("the adults") can't monitor them, all kinds of havoc will ensue. What
we need is for the government to monitor us.

That's a very dangerous way of thinking. There *are* problems with
WhatsApp politics, but I'm not sure more government surveillance is the
answer.


On 5/13/19 8:54 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote:
>
> Nice key-word: 'hyper-politics' ...
>
>
> Original to:
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/big-tech-whatsapp-democracy-india
>
>
>
> Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy?
> John Harris, The Guardian, Mon 13 May 2019
>
>
> Social media such as WhatsApp may enable voters, but encrypted
> messaging polarises them and blocks public scrutiny
>
> In 10 days’ time, two political dramas will reach their denouement,
> thanks to the votes of a combined total of about 1.3 billion people.
> At the heart of both will be a mess of questions about democracy in
> the online age, and how – or even if – we can act to preserve it.
>
> Elections to the European parliament will begin on 23 May, and offer
> an illuminating test of the rightwing populism that has swept across
> the continent. In the UK, they will mark the decisive arrival of Nigel
> Farage’s Brexit party, whose packed rallies are serving notice of a
> politics brimming with bile and rage, masterminded by people with
> plenty of campaigning nous. The same day will see the result of the
> Indian election, a watershed moment for the ruling Hindu nationalist
> prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata party, or BJP.
> Whatever the outcomes, both contests will highlight something
> inescapable: that the politics of polarisation, anger and what
> political cliche calls “fake news” is going to be around for a long
> time to come.
>
> WhatsApp has more than 300 million Indian users, and it is Modi and
> his supporters who have made the most of it
>
> In Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, journalists have been
> shown the alleged wonders of the “war room” where staff are charged
> with monitoring European campaigning – in 24 languages – and somehow
> minimising hate speech and misinformation put around by “bad actors”.
> But this is as nothing compared with what is afoot in the world’s
> largest democracy, and a story centred on WhatsApp, the platform Mark
> Zuckerberg’s company acquired in 2014 for $22bn, whose messages are
> end-to-end encrypted and thus beyond the reach of would-be moderators.
> WhatsApp is thought to have more than 300 million Indian users, and
> though it is central to political campaigning on all sides, it is Modi
> and his supporters who have made the most of it. The political aspects
> of this blur into incidents of murder and violence traced to rumours
> spread via WhatsApp groups – last week, the Financial Times quoted one
> Indian political source claiming that WhatsApp was “the echo chamber
> of all unmitigated lies, fakes and crap in India”.
>
> When I spoke to the UK-based Indian academic Indrajit Roy last week he
> acknowledged India’s “dangerous discourse” but emphasised how the
> online world had given a voice to people who were once outsiders. He
> talked about small, regional parties live-streaming rallies in “remote
> parts of north India”; memes that satirised “how idiotic and
> self-obsessed [Modi] is”; and people using the internet to loudly ask
> why India’s caste hierarchies held them back so much. But then came
> the flipside. In that context, he said, it was perhaps not surprising
> that Modi was now leading “an elite revolt against the kind of
> advances that have happened in the past five or six decades, whether
> it’s the rights of minorities, so-called lower castes, or women”. The
> fact that he and the BJP are using the most modern means of
> communication to do so is an irony evident in the rise of
> conservatives and nationalists just about everywhere.
>
> This, then, is an Indian story, but it chimes with what is happening
> all over the planet. With the help of as many as 900,000 WhatsApp
> activists, the BJP has reportedly collected reams of detailed data
> about individual voters and used it to precisely target messages
> through innumerable WhatsApp groups. A huge and belligerent online
> community known as the Internet Hindus maintains a shrill conversation
> about the things that its members think are standing in the way of
> their utopia: Muslims, “libtards”, secularists. There are highly
> charged online arguments about Indian history, often led by the kind
> of propagandists who never stand for office and thus put themselves
> beyond any accountability. Thanks to the Indian equivalent of
> birtherism, there are also claims that the Nehru-Gandhi family, who
> still dominate the opposition Congress party, have been secret
> followers 

Alan Moore on politics, local vs global etc.

[Carsten Agger]

I stumbled upon these videos, and as with many of Moore's works, I think
he makes some very interesting points:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nqZQ_GB62U=PL-eZcc0GI8-UBdPt04r9M0moJbmIzNhmE


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Re: Banality of code

[Carsten Agger]

On 3/19/19 6:19 AM, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> The most scary recent example I've seen are the new elevators: there
> are no buttons/controls inside. They will take you where you have been
> authorized to go, by someone else.
>
This makes me even happier that I've absolutely refused to use elevators
for a couple of decades now. This can lead to interesting situations, as
when visiting a friend who lives under the roof of a 20-story house in
Brussels, and my first demand upon entering, down below, was: Please
show me the stairs!  I'd probably never be friends with New York.
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Re: The list of European neocon shills

[Carsten Agger]

Actually I do respect some of the people on the list - or at least I
thought I did. Like Orhan Pamuk and Ian McEwan.

Of course I find it difficult to respect anyone who'd cosign as much as
a grocery list with a creep like BHL.


On 2/3/19 6:31 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> (conveniently compiled by Guardian at
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/25/fight-europe-wreckers-patriots-nationalist
> )
>
>
> Fight for Europe – or the wreckers will destroy it
>
> Fri 25 Jan 2019
> Bernard-Henri Lévy, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek,
> Orhan Pamuk and 25 others
>
> The idea of Europe is in peril.
>
> From all sides there are criticisms, insults and desertions from the
> cause.
>
> “Enough of ‘building Europe’!” is the cry. Let’s reconnect instead
> with our “national soul”! Let’s rediscover our “lost identity”! This
> is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the
> continent. Never mind that abstractions such as “soul” and “identity”
> often exist only in the imagination of demagogues.
>
> Europe is being attacked by false prophets who are drunk on
> resentment, and delirious at their opportunity to seize the limelight.
> It has been abandoned by the two great allies who in the previous
> century twice saved it from suicide; one across the Channel and the
> other across the Atlantic. The continent is vulnerable to the
> increasingly brazen meddling by the occupant of the Kremlin. Europe as
> an idea is falling apart before our eyes.
>
> This is the noxious climate in which Europe’s parliamentary elections
> will take place in May. Unless something changes; unless something
> comes along to turn back the rising, swelling, insistent tide; unless
> a new spirit of resistance emerges, these elections promise to be the
> most calamitous that we have known. They will give a victory to the
> wreckers. For those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante,
> Goethe and Comenius there will be only ignominious defeat. A politics
> of disdain for intelligence and culture will have triumphed. There
> will be explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism. Disaster will have
> befallen us.
>
> We, the undersigned, are among those who refuse to resign themselves
> to this looming catastrophe.
>
> We count ourselves among the European patriots (a group more numerous
> than is commonly thought, but that is often too quiet and too
> resigned), who understand what is at stake here. Three-quarters of a
> century after the defeat of fascism and 30 years after the fall of the
> Berlin Wall there is a new battle for civilisation.
>
> Our faith is in the great idea that we inherited, which we believe to
> have been the one force powerful enough to lift Europe’s peoples above
> themselves and their warring past. We believe it remains the one force
> today virtuous enough to ward off the new signs of totalitarianism
> that drag in their wake the old miseries of the dark ages. What is at
> stake forbids us from giving up.
>
> Hence this invitation to join in a new surge.
>
> Hence this appeal to action on the eve of an election that we refuse
> to abandon to the gravediggers of the European idea.
>
> Hence this exhortation to carry once more the torch of a Europe that,
> despite its mistakes, its lapses, and its occasional acts of
> cowardice, remains a beacon for every free man and woman on the planet.
>
> Our generation got it wrong. Like Garibaldi’s followers in the 19th
> century, who repeated, like a mantra, “Italia se farà da sè” (Italy
> will make herself by herself), we believed that the continent would
> come together on its own, without our needing to fight for it, or to
> work for it. This, we told ourselves, was “the direction of history”.
>
> We must make a clean break with that old conviction. We don’t have a
> choice. We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish
> beneath the waves of populism.
>
> In response to the nationalist and identitarian onslaught, we must
> rediscover the spirit of activism or accept that resentment and hatred
> will surround and submerge us. Urgently, we need to sound the alarm
> against these arsonists of soul and spirit who, from Paris to Rome,
> with stops along the way in Barcelona, Budapest, Dresden, Vienna and
> Warsaw, want to make a bonfire of our freedoms.
>
> In this strange defeat of “Europe” that looms on the horizon; this new
> crisis of the European conscience that promises to tear down
> everything that made our societies great, honourable, and prosperous,
> there is a challenge greater than any since the 1930s: a challenge to
> liberal democracy and its values.
>
> • Copyright: Libération/Bernard-Henri Lévy. Milan Kundera, Salman
> Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek and Orhan Pamuk are novelists. Bernard-Henri
> Lévy is a philosopher
>
> Other signatories: Vassilis Alexakis (Athens), Svetlana Alexievich
> (Minsk), Anne Applebaum (Warsaw), Jens Christian Grøndahl
> (Copenhagen), David Grossman (Jerusalem), Ágnes Heller (Budapest),
> 

Re: Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Carsten Agger]

On 11/1/18 12:46 PM, mp wrote:


On 01/11/2018 10:23, Carsten Agger wrote:


That's another question and a valid argument: Do we even want computers
to exist at all?

Note, that if we *do* want it, software needs to be free.  And, if we
can't avoid them to exist and we need to use software, software also
needs to be free.

There's an additional (meta)question: what kind of software/hardware?

The alphabetic culture that spawned book culture, which in turn led to
computers, is only one of an infinity of possible literacies (beware
conflating the general with the particular). "The book" (and now the
computer) has also historically been a colonial force that violently
destroyed all other forms of literacies: it is a monocultural literacy.


That's completely true. That a written culture was introduced, in my own 
part of the world as late as around 1000 along with the introduction of 
Christianity, doesn't mean that people were "ignorant" or "illiterate" 
before that time - on the contrary, they had a rich literature including 
thousands of poems, stories and songs, the vast majority of which are 
now lost, all of which was memorized and orally transmitted.


And as the written language takes over, the motivation and, in the end, 
the capacity for memorizing everything dies, and a rich way of thinking 
and transmitting and living with literature is lost.


So when advocating software freedom I'm not, let's be clear, saying we 
should necessarily have software or build our infrastructure with it and 
the hardware it runs on. I'm saying that software freedom is a necessary 
(not sufficient) condition for a society built on software to be free.


I also believe that widespread computer literacy, enough to enable 
groups without access to heavy funding to build their own 
infrastructure, is necessary for that purpose.


But, unlike Stallman, I don't love programming and working with software 
as such - I always considered it to be work, not fun. I'd definitely 
rather have a society without the extreme centralization of all 
communication infrastructure we're seeing in these years - Google, 
Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple be damned and go to hell.



See for instance attached paper. Here is a quote touching upon some of
the significant aspects of these colonial/conquest processes:

"The narrow vision of what ‘writing’ was led to the encoding of
indigenous languages in Roman script in an attempt to ‘render the spoken
visible.’ Latin was seen by those chronicling the ‘New World languages’
as a universal linguistic system, and as such this was taken as the
grammatical basis for the Amerindian languages (Mignolo, 1992,
p.  304). Since they were Spanish speakers, the early scholars’ attempts
to represent the sounds of the languages were governed by Spanish
phonographic rules (the lasting effect of which will be discussed in the
third section of this article). The first ‘alphabetizing’ of indigenous
languages, then, can be understood as an “opression symbolique” (Calvet,
1999, p. 233), a ‘symbolic oppression’ whereby languages are forced into
the norms of an external system and made an object which the
colonizers can ‘possess’ (Mignolo, 1992, p. 306). From the outset, the
‘technology of literacy’ was used in such a way that it removed language
and literacy from the indigenous peoples and reframed them to fit with a
colonial worldview."

Very interesting, thanks!

This kind of literacy has brought us detachment from the soil and the
earth as such, climate chaos and, in its Twitter form, Trumpisms.


Yes. And given the coming fascist takeover in Brazil, enabled by fake 
news (outright and very deplorable lies) spread through Facebooks 
WhatsApp product, all the more scary these years.



Best

Carsten

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Re: Tech for good or evil: Pls help me collect readings, bibliographies, & syllabi

[Carsten Agger]

On 11/2/18 8:57 AM, Yosem Companys wrote:

Hi All,

Could you help me collect any and all info that may be available on 
the use of technology for good and evil?


I'm looking for readings, bibliographies, syllabi, media articles, and 
any other resources you may know of.




Yasha Levine: Surveillance Valley is a good start.

One of the works it refers to is

Fred Turner: From Counterculture to Cyberculture

which describes many surprising and problematic aspects of the 
"Californian ideology".



Then there is *"*/All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", a TV 
series by Adam Curtis./


Especialle episode 2, "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts", on 
the influence of cybernetics on the 60s countercultural movement, is 
interesting (and chilling).



Adam Curtis' BBC program "The Trap" is also worth seeing, about the use 
(and abuse) of game theory in politics (and politicking).



//

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Re: Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Carsten Agger]

On 11/1/18 10:56 AM, mp wrote:


James Scott writes about peasant uprising that one of the first points
of attacks commonly are the offices of documentation/paper holding
bureaucracies: there where power is preserved and managed. That, today,
would be server farms, I suppose.

So, should we really fight to get 'free' software (when it actually
entails destruction and let's be honest, in great part serves to satisfy
our own screen addictions and brain candy obsessions, or, as they call
it, intellectual pursuits)?


That's another question and a valid argument: Do we even want computers 
to exist at all?


Note, that if we *do* want it, software needs to be free.  And, if we 
can't avoid them to exist and we need to use software, software also 
needs to be free.


Best

Carsten

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Re: Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Carsten Agger]

On 11/1/18 7:02 AM, Brian Holmes wrote:
On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 5:17 PM Frederick Noronha 
mailto:fredericknoro...@gmail.com>> wrote:


The 'freedom to afford software' should be actually included as
the Fifth Freedom of the Free Software Campaign worldwide. As
things stand, the outrageous pricing of software (notwithstanding
the FOSS challenge) has made it unaffordable to maybe 80% of the
world's population. Talking from an Indian context, it has been
sometimes roughly calculated how much a license fee would cost in
terms of the income of an average person, or even a middle-class
person.

People are excluded by the pricing (apart from the Freedom
aspect). Many millions more.

 This is a great thread, and to my mind the above statement is the 
most important one in it.


It *is* very important that all software necessary in our daily lives be 
available free of charge, in state of the art quality.


That was also an early value of the Ubuntu project - being, not 
incidentally, founded by an entrepeneur from South Africa.


It's important to remember, though, that "free as in beer" can never 
replace "free as in freedom". For a philanthropist to sponsor the 
development of proprietary software, withholding the source code and 
denying the right to fix bugs and redistribute, can never be a worthy 
cause. That would be like facebook's restricted Internet, that they 
wanted to impose on India's poor, all over again. Software *must* be 
free as in the four freedoms.


But, the fifth freedom that Frederick stipulates is more or less a 
consequence of the first four. If I develop some software and sell it 
under the GPL for $10,000 a pop, there's nothing to stop you from buying 
a copy and put it on your server for anyone to download. 10,000 people 
could give you one dollar each to support the initiative. So once free 
software exists, its market price will, if it's popular, quickly tend to 
zero.


But it still makes sense to *sell* free software - and that's because 
software doesn't create itself. Software development is (speaking as 
someone with 22 years of experience in the field) difficult, 
error-prone, time-consuming and thus expensive.  So whereas the software 
should be gratis, the developers' time shouldn't. Unpaid volunteers, 
whether they be idealistic activists, hackers just having fun or a 
mixture of both, can't be the base of the infrastructure of the future - 
and that's what we want free software to be: *all* software should be 
free software. That means selling the idea *and* selling the ideas, the 
individual development projects, to the companies and authorities that 
need new software.


And that is, of course, to a large extent what's already happening. 
That's what I've been doing at work for seven years now, writing 
software under free licenses for paying customers. And that's also how 
many of the largest projects are run, by professionals who get paid. Not 
all, but even many of those run entirely by volunteers are run of people 
with a background as IT professionals. A professional infrastructure, 
ready to use for all of humanity, will not be built by amateurs.


So yes: Software should be available free of charge - and, on the other 
hand, those who can should take part in its funding, because with no 
funding it won't happen.





Freedom that leaves no one out has to be organized collectively. 
That's not easy, there were major flaws in most efforts so far, but in 
an era when capitalism is showing its own fatal flaws, it's time to 
try again.


I agree completely! There needs to be a firm democratic control on the 
funding process I mentioned before.



Best

Carsten

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Re: Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Carsten Agger]

On 10/30/18 3:14 PM, Florian Cramer wrote:

Define "most". What you describe is true for the Linux kernel and 
other pieces of software that make up a typical Linux distribution 
such as RedHat, but even those are not 100% developed by paid 
developers. On top of that, crucial components such as OpenSSH 
(developed by OpenBSD) and popular applications such The Gimp are 
developed by volunteers. Free Software as a whole is an ecology that 
is made up by volunteer and paid developer contributions.


And I would argue that all these developers are underpaid in the light 
of the IBM/RedHat transaction which they will not profit from. (Quite 
on the opposite, with IBM's management taking over and making it part 
of its 'cloud' division, the question is how many free software 
developers on the RedHat payroll will stay in their jobs.)


People who contribute with voluntary work for any kind of project (not 
just free software) do so for a variety of reasons. Because it's fun, 
because they personally think it's important, because they like being a 
part of building this, etc.


Publishing work under a free license, especially under a non-copyleft 
license such as the BSD license used by OpenBSD, normally means that you 
know people may try to make money off the program you made, 
independently of you, and you're okay with that. Part of that deal is 
that you, on the other hand, also benefit from other people's 
contributions (and Red Hat have, at any rate, contributed to a huge 
number of projects as part of their daily operations).


It's one thing to sell your labor as alienated labor to a company, 
knowing full well that you get exploited. It's another thing to 
contribute to free software as a volunteer and (at least partially) 
idealist cause and see others make $30 billions with it.


If you contribute to a free software project you know people have the 
right to use it for any purpose - there's no 'non-commercial' clause in 
any of the free software licenses, for good reasons.


The GIMP may be a good example. The GIMP has certainly featured in Red 
Hat's GNU/Linux distributions since time immemorial. But how big a 
contribution towards the $30 billion sale has it made? If IBM really is 
after the "cloud" software, they're more likely to have bought it for 
KVM - but then, the GIMP may have contributed to Red Hat's initial 
success. Something like the worth of the man-hours that went into 
creating the GIMP multiplied by Red Hat's fraction of "consumption"? At 
$50 an hour (say), how many hours went into creating the program as it 
is today? That means that Red Hat's "share" of the GIMP might amount to 
some tens of thousands of dollars; but then, the developers of the GIMP 
have presumably also benefited from Red Hat's contributions to the 
ecosystem.


But how would we change the financial workings of the free software 
ecosystem to reflect that properly? It's an interesting idea; but I 
doubt, on the other hand, that the notion that they've been "cheated" by 
IBM buying Red Hat will find any resonance among these developers 
themselves.   People who do contribute are normally perfectly aware that 
such a possibility exists, even if sometimes and for smaller projects it 
could seem quite remote.


But yes, in a constructive vein, what changes would you suggest to solve 
this?


Best

Carsten

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Re: Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Carsten Agger]

On 10/29/18 3:00 PM, Emery Hemingway wrote:

A fight for economic rights for software workers is a fight for paid/dual
licensing model of open source, and a fight against the entire open 
source
establishment. First against the naive/senile GNU theorists, next the 
Open
Source Initiative, then IBM and Microsoft (they love open source), and 
then

the Chinese multinationals, who have profited most from an environment of
"free as in free".

As someone who worked as a software worker since 1996, I disagree 
completely. Using proprietary licensing would not improve our economic 
wellbeing at all. Companies will always charge their customers as much 
as possible and pay their employees as little as possible. Using 
proprietary licenses allow companies to cheat their customers by 
charging many times over for the same work, but that  doesn't 
necessarily benefit their employees.


On the other hand, the vast infrastrucutre of free (as in Freedom) tools 
for whatever purpose makes the life of a programmer much easier and 
makes us much efficient, which also augments the value of the work we do.


Also, it's interesting and important for the potential democratization 
of modern technology that we can all download, use and even change 
absolutely top-notch, state of the art software in a lot of areas.




On Sunday, October 28, 2018 10:02:53 PM CET, Florian Cramer wrote:
Today, IBM announced that it will buy up Red Hat for $30 billion. 
That value was mostly created by the labor of volunteer, un- or 
underpaid developers of the Free/Libre/Open Source software that 
makes up Red Hat's products. These people will not see a dime of 
IBM’s money. There need to be discussions of economic flaws and 
exploitation in the FLOSS development/distribution model.


Most Free/Open Source Software is in fact not created by unpaid 
volunteers or even by underpaid workers, but by professional developers 
at the companies or organizations who sponsor the projects.


And Red Hat's value is not as much the free software it has used as its 
knowledge and infrastructure - which has arguably not been built by 
unpaid volunteers.


In general, I'd say, top-professional FOSS tools are not built by 
amateurs or volunteers - though maybe by people who like to make them 
and who also can get paid by consulting or doing other works related to 
that.


But as I said, it's not the licensing regime, but the exploitative 
nature of capitalist companies, that's the problem. Going proprietary 
wouldn't help a bit. Creating cooperatives that shared the income 
without any need for "bosses" or "owners" would be a safer bet.


Best

Carsten

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Technoshamanism meeting in Axat, Southern France on october 5

[Carsten Agger]

Portuguese on top, French below that, English in the bottom.

Hope to see some of you there!


MEETING-RENCONTRE-ENCONTRO / TECNOXAMANISM @ LE DOJO

Programação completa aqui / Le programme complet ici  / teteomplete 
programming will be placed here: 
https://pad.riseup.net/p/tcnxmnsm_axat-keep 



Français 
/English 
/Português 
below


Português

ENCONTRO DE TECNOXAMANISMO EM AXAT, FRANCE (5 a 8 de outubro)

Gostaríamos de convidar vocês para o encontro da rede Tecnoxamanismo, no 
sul da França, na cidade de Axat, no espaço de arte e associação Le Dojo.


Ainda gostamos das zonas autônomas temporárias, da invenção de modos de 
vida, da arte/vida, tentamos pensar e colaborar com a interdependência 
alimentar, com o reflorestamento da Terra, na adubagem imaginária 
ancestrofuturista. Nosso principal exercício é promover redes de 
inconscientes, fortalecendo  o desejo de comunidade, assim como propor 
alternativas ao pensamento “produtivo” da ciência e tecnologia.


A REDE

A rede Tecnoxamanismo existe desde 2014, conta com livro publicado e 
dois festivais internacionais realizados no sul da Bahia (estes 
produzidos com a parceria indígena da etnia Pataxó Aldeia Velha e Aldeia 
Pará – nas redondezas de Porto Seguro –  onde aconteceu a primeira 
invasão das caravelas – a colonização portuguesa). O terceiro festival 
está previsto para agosto de 2019 na Dinamarca.


O Tecnoxamanismo surge a partir da confluência de várias redes oriundas 
do movimento do software e cultura livre. Atua promovendo encontros, 
eventos, acontecimentos permeando performances rituais DIY, música 
eletrônica, agrofloresta e processos imersivos, remixando cosmovisões e 
promovendo a descolonização do pensamento. A rede congrega artistas, 
biohackers, pensadores, ativistas, indígenas e indigenistas promovendo 
uma clínica social do futuro, o encontro entre tecnologias, rituais, 
sinergias e sensibilidades.


Palavras-chave: cosmogonia livre, ancestrofuturismo, ruidocracia, 
perspectivismo, terracosmismo, tecnologias livres, descolonização do 
pensamento, produção de sentido e de cuidado de si e do outro.


O ENCONTRO

Nos reuniremos na cidade de Axat, no sul da França, no espaço e 
associação Dojo, uma casa que reúne artistas, ativistas, entre outros 
passantes desde 2011, durante os dias 5 a 8 de outubro. As refeições 
serão coletivas e compartilhadas entre os participantes. O custo da casa 
é de 2 euros por dia por pessoa.


Para chegar em Axat, é preciso pegar um transporte até as cidades 
próximas (Carcassone ou Perpignam) e depois um ônibus local à um euro. 
Tabela de horários (em francês) :


http://axat.fr/horaires-bus/ ; 
http://axat.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ST_29072015-_Ligne_53_-Carcassonne_Axat_horaires.pdf 
 
http://www.pays-axat.org/iso_album/ligne_100_quillan_-perpignan_septembre_2013.pdf 



A CONVOCATÓRIA

Se você tem interesse em conhecer mais do Tecnoxamanismo, se aprofundar 
sobre ancestralidades e ficção especulativa, convocamos os interessados, 
curiosos, terráqueos, hackers, cyborgs, entre outros estranhos deste 
mundo antropoceno à participar do nosso encontro, trazendo suas ideias, 
processos, experiências, práticas, etc. envie um resumo de até 300 
palavras para o e-mail xamanismotecnolog...@gmail.com 
. A chamada aberta termina dia 18 
de setembro.


Fiquem à disposição para tirar dúvidas ou fazer comentários. Bem-vindos 
à rede do Tecnoxamanismo!


Français

RENCONTRE DE TECHNOSHAMANISME À AXAT, DANS LE SUD DE LA FRANCE

Le réseau de Tecnoshamanime a le plaisir de vous inviter pour une 
immersion/rencontre au sûd de la France, dans la ville d’Axat, dans 
l’espace d’art et association le Dojo.


On croit toujours dans les zones autonomes temporaires, qui puisse 
rendre compte de l’invention des modes de vie alternatifs, l’art/vie, 
l’indépendance alimentaire, à travers de la fomentation des mémoires 
ancestrales et futuristes, le reforestation de la Terre et la 
fertilization de l’imagination. Notre but principal c’est de créer 
espaces pour penser d’autres possibilités d’existence horizontal, et 
également pour fortifier le désir et l’idée communal, ainsi que 
reformuler l’idéologie de la production scientifique et technologique.


LE RÉSEAU

Le réseau du Tecnochamanisme envisage ces rencontres et projets depuis 
2014, il compte avec un livre publié et deux festivals internationaux 
accomplis au sud de Bahia (ceux produits avec le partenariat indigène 
des indiens Pataxó- Aldeia Velha et Aldeia Pará – dans la rondeur de 
Porto 

Re: ZAD Press release - Intergalactic Call-Out

[Carsten Agger]

On 04/21/2018 10:22 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote:






Cheers, NDdL ZindabAD!

Dil mein tufanon ki toli
Aur nason mein inquilab

Inquilab zindabad!

My best wishes for the people at the ZAD.
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Richard Stallman: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

[Carsten Agger]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebook-abusing-data-law-privacy-big-tech-surveillance


Journalists have been asking me whether the revulsion against the abuse 
of Facebook data 
 
could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. That could 
happen, if the public makes its campaign broader and deeper.


Broader, meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just 
Facebook . Deeper, 
meaning to advance from regulating the use of data to regulating the 
accumulation of data. Because surveillance is so pervasive, restoring 
privacy is necessarily a big change, and requires powerful measures.


The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet 
Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of 
it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe 
database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s 
approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its 
General Data Protection Regulation  or GDPR), I 
propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.


The robust way to do that, the way that can’t be set aside at the whim 
of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect 
data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be 
designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be 
carried out without that data.


Data about who travels where is particularly sensitive, because it is an 
ideal basis for repressing any chosen target. We can take the London 
trains and buses as a case for study.


The Transport for London digital payment card system centrally records 
the trips any given Oyster or bank card has paid for. When a passenger 
feeds the card digitally, the system associates the card with the 
passenger’s identity. This adds up to complete surveillance.


I expect the transport system can justify this practice under the GDPR’s 
rules. My proposal, by contrast, would require the system to stop 
tracking who goes where. The card’s basic function is to pay for 
transport. That can be done without centralising that data, so the 
transport system would have to stop doing so. When it accepts digital 
payments, it should do so through an anonymous payment system.


Frills on the system, such as the feature of letting a passenger review 
the list of past journeys, are not part of the basic function, so they 
can’t justify incorporating any additional surveillance.


These additional services could be offered separately to users who 
request them. Even better, users could use their own personal systems to 
privately track their own journeys.


Black cabs demonstrate that a system for hiring cars with drivers does 
not need to identify passengers. Therefore such systems should not be 
/allowed /to identify passengers; they should be required to accept 
privacy-respecting cash from passengers without ever trying to identify 
them.


However, convenient digital payment systems can also protect passengers’ 
anonymity and privacy. We have already developed one: GNU Taler 
. It is designed to be anonymous for 
the payer, but payees are always identified. We designed it that way so 
as not to facilitate tax dodging. All digital payment systems should be 
required to defend anonymity using this or a similar method.


   An unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much
   security encourages an unjust state

What about security? Such systems in areas where the public are admitted 
must be designed so they cannot track people. Video cameras should make 
a local recording that can be checked for the next few weeks if a crime 
occurs, but should not allow remote viewing without physical collection 
of the recording. Biometric systems should be designed so they only 
recognise people on a court-ordered list of suspects, to respect the 
privacy of the rest of us. An unjust state is more dangerous than 
terrorism, and too much security encourages an unjust state.


The EU’s GDPR  regulations 
are well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much 
privacy, because its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data 
if it is somehow useful to the system, and it is easy to come up with a 
way to make any particular data useful for something.


The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent 
for the collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System 
designers have become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam 
Chomsky’s phrase). Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading 
them; a company that required 

Re: Surveillance Valley - a polemic review

[Carsten Agger]

On 04/08/2018 05:35 PM, Geoffrey Goodell wrote:

Hi Carsten,

On Sat, Apr 07, 2018 at 11:50:59PM +0200, Carsten Agger wrote:

Does that mean that I'm accusing Tor founder Roger Dingledine of being
duplicitous about this? No, but it *does* mean that I'm accusing him of
being politically naive. If you want to stick it to the Man you really
shouldn't be working for him.

This is not a fair characterisation of the motivation of the Tor project
leadership.  The purpose of the Tor project has never been to encumber the
legitimate work of any particular intelligence agency, and let's not forget
that the FVEY agencies are not the only powerful organisations who are
listening.
I'd say that part of the cognitive dissonance stems from the fact that 
this is not how it has always been presented by privacy activists. 
Specifically, Tor has been characterized as "NSA-proof" etc.

What Tor achieves is:

(1) to provide a strong low-latency anonymity infrastructure for honest people
seeking to protect the metadata about the origin or destination of their
Internet traffic (dishonest people such as criminals do not need such an
infrastructure to achieve anonymity)
And that's a worthy goal & would be a worthy goal for an activist 
project that did not receive the support from nor serve the foreign 
policy interests of the US government. Not because I'm 
government-phobic, but because these interests are actually related to 
warfare and colonialism (furthering of economic interests, "opening" of 
markets, etc.).


Said anonymity can also be achieved by using VPN, though that requires 
you to trust the VPN provider.


[...]

I would also like to suggest that we can support the mission of the FVEY
agencies even whilst working to keep them (and, importantly, everyone else)
away from our metadata.  And, incredible as it may seem, those agencies can
even support our intention to do so.
Honestly, I don't want to support the mission of the FVEY agencies at 
all. I see them as part of the military-industrial complex that gave us 
the Iraq war, in all probability one of the most heinous crimes of the 
21st century. Not to mention a large number of other things. I don't 
want anything to do with them if I can help it.


You may disagree at this point, and that's fair enough, but apart from 
our respective political standpoints I'd prefer an important privacy 
tool to not be involved in this kind of politics.


And, if Tor is really a tool which is built and maintained in the 
interest of the FVEY agencies (since they seem to be the ones footing 
the bill), what is it exactly we're doing when recommending Tor to 
activists in Russia or China or Iran? In a way, we're giving them a tool 
which was developed by the US government to give them cover for 
activities against their own government. I see that as quite problematic 
in its own right. I can only imagine the outrage if Tor didn't exist and 
activists were promoting a similar tool developed by the Russian 
government and emphasizing how useful it is for leaking information.


Once again, I think a privacy tool promoted by privacy and human rights 
activists should be above this sort of politics.


Right now there are no serious
low-latency anonymity projects with deployment and research attention
comparable to Tor.  Forgive me when I ask you not to stand in its way.




Given the information we've discussed in this email, which I discussed 
in my review of Surveillance Valley and which is presented in the 
corresponding chapter of that book, I no longer feel inclined to 
recommend the marketing of Tor as a privacy tool. And that's what I'm 
going to say if anyone asks me. But I'm just a  computer scientist and 
free software developer in Denmark and don't really have the power to 
stop people from using this. I also have too many other things to do to 
make this my crusade, so I'll limit myself to presenting my thoughts if 
the subject comes up and I deem it relevant.


But I hardly have the power to stand in anyone's way.

Best
Carsten
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Re: Surveillance Valley - a polemic review

[Carsten Agger]

On 04/06/2018 01:19 PM, Patrice Riemens wrote off-list, I'm bringing it 
in with his permission:



I knew from day one that TOR was co-financed by the USgov, just like 
ICANN is.
But the USGov is not a monolith, agencies are fairy autonomous and 
some are very much so. I was never really bothered. Jake also never 
made a mystery of it. Still one can be very opposed to the USGov, but 
then other deppts/agencies, like NSA,FBI,CIA (who love to fight each 
other btw)




Like I wrote to Patrice, I didn't really bother until I read the story 
and the history more closely, checking some of the reference in 
Surveillance Valley (i.e., Yasha Levine's book).


I'm not an anti-government libertarian (well, technically speaking I'm a 
*left* libertarian, being from the European tradition), so I realize the 
American government is doing many sensible things.


However, for many years (and still, indirectly through the Open 
Technology Fund), Tor's main sponsor was the Broadcasting Board of 
Governors, the BBG.  The BBG is not just any odd part of the US 
Government - it's not the weather service, nor is it the national parks. 
The BBG is a branch that originated in the CIA but was later split out 
as its own entity in order to run the American propaganda radios such as 
Voice of America, with a very long etcetera, including Radio Free Asia. 
That is, the BBG was conceived as a branch of the American foreign 
policy aimed at destabilizing the governments of countries deemed 
hostile to the United States of America. That is, it's practically a 
part of the American military, practicing the very same sort of  
belligerence that gave us the war against Iraq in 2003, also known as 
the 21st century's so far greatest crime against humanity.


I think this connection is, politically speaking, very problematic for 
Tor. Did the BBG fund Tor to help Americans protect their privacy? Of 
course not, they did it to further their mission, the destabilization of 
"hostile" countries. And the BBG was not just a philanthropic "here's 
the money, we trust you" sponsor - the Tor project worked as a 
contractor, including project management, goals and monthly briefings to 
the BBG.


At the same time, even if some of this story could be gleaned from the 
public financial reports, this was very definitely not how Tor presented 
itself to the world, nor how it was presented by the EFF and by 
thousands of privacy activists - it was presented as a free software 
project run by a privacy NGO. While at the same time it was funded by an 
agency who was actually buying a cyberwar weapon for the "soft" 
information and propaganda wars against e.g. Russia, China and Iraq.


Why would the BBG then want the Tor project to market itself as a 
privacy project? Well, to gain credibility. If you said to a Russian or 
an Iranian that this is American military software they made to keep 
dissidents safe, why would they trust it? All Iranian or Chinese 
dissidents would probably resent the idea that they were using a tool 
"with" the American government and "against" them all. But a privacy 
NGO, EFF backing, thousands of activists acting as a cover - now, this 
tool which the BBG (by its very mission) funds as a part of the 
political machinations of the US colonial project gets a benevolent, 
human rights activist face. And ain't that nice?


Does that mean that I'm accusing Tor founder Roger Dingledine of being 
duplicitous about this? No, but it *does* mean that I'm accusing him of 
being politically naive. If you want to stick it to the Man you really 
shouldn't be working for him.


Honestly, like I said, after this I find it difficult to recommend Tor 
as a project. The tool, maybe, for specific things, but honestly - I 
think I'd like a privacy tool whose ongoing funding isn't part of the 
American war effort.


Best
Carsten

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Re: Surveillance Valley - a polemic review

[Carsten Agger]

On 04/05/2018 04:30 PM, Carsten Agger wrote:

*http://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/2018/04/05/surveillance-valley-a-review/*


Thunderbird unfortunately ate the link to the source of that review - it is:

http://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/2018/04/05/surveillance-valley-a-review/

(thanks, Patrice!)
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Re: Uber Blues

[Carsten Agger]

On 03/27/2018 05:54 PM, Patrice Riemens wrote:


re: 


(pdf available on request)

The company is unreformable because its 'disruptive' business model 
sucks from A to Z & back again.


Uber & clones should simply be outlawed. No compromise.

Last in Marseille, back from dinner at R's, one of the guests booked a 
Uber car. There was still one seat left, so I joined, my first Uber 
ride. Nice guy, nice car. It was around 11pm, and the ride was not 
very long, but quite complicated (Marseille is part very hilly, with 
tortuous, badly maintained streets) We were unloaded downtown, near 
the hotel and I asked what I my share of the ride was. This was waived 
away with a laughter since it was only €6 - exactly 3 busfares (save 
that buses don't run anymore at that time of day).


This is completely ludicrous.

And it was my first, but also last Uber ride. I'd rather walk. No 
compromise.


Word! I'm happy to say that here in DK, Uber was banned by a recent 
court ruling that said that if Uber wants to offer rides, it must follow 
the same rules as taxi cabs, including meters, insurance and 
professional driving licenses. It really needs to be done away with 
completely, thrown in the same historical dustbin where we throw Amazon 
and other companies that depend on massively exploitative practices (I 
recently stopped buying books at Amazon. No compromise.)


Best
Carsten

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Re: accelerating eats the world

[Carsten Agger]

On 03/21/2018 07:36 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote:
It doesn't seem likely that the Chinese (4 mints in China mainland 
control 50+% of the hash power) will agree to such fork (even if it is 
technically feasible, which I doubt), that is capable of removing 
arbitrary transactions in the past - that would make everyone unsafe 
(like while the legislature is in session :) They have already killed 
the block size change proposal (by effectively telling 'Bitcoin core 
developers' to go f*ck themselves.)
It's *technically* feasible, as Blockchain history is what a majority of 
computing power says it is. That's one of the weaknesses of the system, 
but the original assumption was that mining would be decentralised, so 
"a majority" would be thousands of small miners with no common interests 
in changing history. That's *not* the case today, where Bitcoin mining 
is very centralized.


Also, there's precedent - e.g., the Ethereum blockchain was forked to 
cancel the DAO heist. In general, 51% of the computing power can rewrite 
the history. The cost is another matter, which will be a practical 
impediment.


However: The laws against possession of child pornography are not likely 
to be going anywhere. Maybe it's just time to get some popcorn and sit 
down & enjoy the show - presumably, the slow burning into nothingness of 
the red Bitcoin herring.




Brute force is out of question, as re-calculating everything would 
mean stopping all Bitcoin transaction activity for the period roughly 
equal to the age of the oldest incriminating insertion - who would pay 
for those terawatt hours?


There may be more to come. The currently discovered child pornography 
was in plaintext payloads. There are thousands, if not millions, 
encrypted non-transactional payloads in the Bitcoin blockchain. What 
if some of these are also illegal porn or something equivalently 
criminalized? The perpetrators may simply publish individual keys, at 
their own pace, and make any repair attempts a bad joke. Come to think 
of it, that would be ideal poison pill for the Bitcoin. Maybe someone 
is on it as we speak ... it's easy: there are dozens of commercial 
services that you can pay to insert anything in the Bitcoin blockchain 
(like https://inthebitcoin.com )


Interesting times ahead.

The takeaway is that you don't want something in the loop of social 
interactions that majority does not understand and that doesn't have 
corrective strategy. Humans are simply not bright enough to create 
fool-proof technologies. Just go to some Bitcoin meeting and listen to 
blathering of CEOs and CTOs.



Or, given that a majority of stakes on the blockchain *can* change
history, and a majority of stakes with very strong financial interest
(as in who's already wasting most electricity) might want to keep their
toys, these images *will* be removed - along with forever removing all
credibility of blockchain as an "indelible" or unchangeable public 
ledger.


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Re: accelerating eats the world

[Carsten Agger]

On 20-03-2018 22:43, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Heavy involvement of technology in social interactions keeps producing 
new challenges, that someone needs to deal with. That someone is 
getting more and more busy.


The latest event is discovery that someone was/is burning child 
pornography into ... blockchain. To be more specific, into Bitcoin 
blockchain: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf


As everyone knows, the blockchain is immutable and lasts forever.

Possession of child pornography is widely classified as felony, 
usually with no exceptions for 'accidental possession'.


This means that something has to give: either possessing Bitcoin 
blockchain is a felony (those images will *never* be removed), or 
inadvertent possession of child pornography is not a crime (which will 
give rise to new child pornography storage medium: blockchain.)
Or, given that a majority of stakes on the blockchain *can* change 
history, and a majority of stakes with very strong financial interest 
(as in who's already wasting most electricity) might want to keep their 
toys, these images *will* be removed - along with forever removing all 
credibility of blockchain as an "indelible" or unchangeable public ledger.

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Re: The untenable technophobia of the Left

[Carsten Agger]

On 03/05/2018 08:03 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Wait - is this the public evidence of breaking WhatsApp's end-to-end 
encryption? Or was it leaked by one of correspondents?


El Diario wrote about it at the time, and it was leaked by one of the 
correspondents who did not approve of the message.

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Re: Josh Hall: Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead (Guardian)

[Carsten Agger]

On 03/03/2018 09:20 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote:

And then, cryptocurrencies don't make very much economic sense either. 
Their only merit is have bootstrapped rethinking money and currencies 
- even though not necessarily in the 'right' direction.


Talking about monetary alternatives, I find LETS currencies much more 
interesting, such as (e.g.) the Puma in Seville, 
https://monedasocialpuma.wordpress.com/


One important difference from Bitcoin etc. is that the scope of LETS 
currencies are strictly local - they simply don't work outside of their 
area. Also, they are strictly community-based, meaning that they will 
only work if you build a community around them or use them to strengthen 
an existing one - they are much more collectivist, even "socialist" or 
at least left anarchist in mobilizing local communities around, e.g., 
the creation of food markets; thirdly, this means that their value as a 
currency is directly proportional to how much the money circulate - the 
more they do, the more of the local economy is being build by people in 
that locality itself, and the better; but fourthly, that also means that 
these currencies are complimentary and can't stand alone (you can't by 
oil or electric power with money that's only good in your own 
neighbourhood).


If we want to rethink money, there are many more directions in which to 
go than the cryptocurrencies' neoliberal vision of a return to the gold 
standard. The concept of "aging money" as defended in Michael Ende's 
novel "Momo", among other places, is an example.


Nice weekend to everyone!
Carsten
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Re: Josh Hall: Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead (Guardian)

[Carsten Agger]

On 03/02/2018 09:17 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote:
That article is technical nonsense. 'Blockchain' that has PoW 
consisting of 1.6 second of handset CPU is trivial to fake. And where 
is the consensus? Car does the same? Or is car running 500KW GPU 
cluster doing hash verified by ... who? Cheap PoW ("Proof of Work") is 
contradiction in terms.


This is actually a good illustration of utter bullshit that passes for 
'technology'.


We need blockchain powered nettime! BLOCKTIME!

The good thing about the Blockchain-based dystopian visions is that they 
won't ever actually come to pass. Blockchain is impractical and useless 
from a technical point of view. It's pure hype and nothing more.


On the other hand, the bad thing about the Blockchain-based dystopian 
visions is that everything bad that you could conceivably do with a 
Blockchain you could do better and much more efficiently with an 
ordinary database.


So there are definitely reasons to worry about the future surveillance 
nightmare, but Blockchain is not one of those reasons, because it won't 
ever make much of a difference in the technological sense. Its hype 
might, but Blockchain itself is useless outside the realm of 
cryptocurrencies. I say that as someone whose background is in 
technology, specifically computer science.


Best
Carsten
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Re: Josh Hall: Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead (Guardian)

[Carsten Agger]

On 23-02-2018 13:11, Patrice Riemens wrote:



Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/23/blockchain-reshape-world-far-right-ahead-crypto-technology 





Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead
Crypto technology is coming to a crossroads. Those who want to use it 
to radically redistribute wealth must take urgent action

[...]

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain reads the title of a 2017 book. From 
currency speculation through to verifying the provenance of food, 
blockchain technology is eking out space in a vast range of fields.


It's ironic, amusing more likely, that the conclusion of the book 
"Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain" is that the "Blockchain revolution" 
will likely not amount to much of anything. The main reason is this: Who 
needs a global, public and distributed ledger? What's it good for?


As a matter of fact, all proposed use cases I've seen founder on the 
problem of reliability: Yes, if your crate of organic bananas has a bar 
code, and that bar code was entered on the block chain along with a 
statement that the crate was shipped from a fair trade/fair pay organic 
cooperative in Costa Rica, nobody can know if that means that the 
physical crate was actually there only that someone says that it was. 
You might improve on that situation with tamperproof, sealed 
cryptographic tokens, but you still don't know if the bananas were in 
the crate at the time. An ordinary inspections regime would probably 
work better. I.e., all use cases for blockchains which require 
real-world interaction requires some sort of verification that the data 
entered is correct, which the blockchain itself can't certify - anything 
beyond the simple fact that the information was entered. And that sort 
of tracking could ordinarily best be achieved by that high-end bleeding 
edge innovation called a "database"; along with an external verification 
process, the advantages of using a blockchain over a database are 
exactly zip.


Now, if the data had to do with the blockchain itself and were entirely 
digital ... then it's another matter. That's why blockchains make sense 
for cryptocurrencies. But cryptocurrencies are not really useful, and in 
their current incarnation are riddled by scams to an extent where the 
best advice anyone could give is to stay the f... away.


Distributed ledger systems do exist, though - one is called "Git". And 
it's very useful for tracking source code changes. And as opposed to 
blockchain, transactions can be reversed and history can be rewritten, 
which is actually a necessary feature (e.g., with the GDPR coming up 
here in the EU).


So, fortunately or unfortunately, it's not likely that Blockchain is 
going to reshape anything, except for possibly the wallets of some quick 
movers and scam artists.


Best
Carsten
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Algorithmic and pathological children's videos

[Carsten Agger]

These are some speculations that were started by this article,
"Something is wrong on the Internet"
(https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2)
about a phenomenon which I wasn't aware of and is apparently also quite
new, exploitative clock-bait videos for very small children.

These videos' modus operandi is that a parent hands a toddler a tablet
or a cell phone and finds them a YouTube video. If youTube is on
autoplay, a "similar" video is played after that, and so forth. So, if
many parents hand their toddlers an Internet device, videos that are
"similar" to other videos that parents would find for their toddlers
will receive many views. Like, if the video comes up when searching for
"nursery rhymes learning video". If you haven't experienced this before,
I suggest you try to enter that search and see what comes up. Click on
one of the videos and look at the suggestions.

Now click on one of *those* and look at the suggestions. It seems clear
that a toddler left alone with a tablet is more or less bound to be
sucked in by a feedback loop of eerily similar videos, meticulously
crafted to imitate thousands of other videos that happen to have
received astronomical numbers of views, often in the millions.

This video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7p0nSW0RI8 is typical  in
many ways - it's simple, strange, creepy in an eerie way, and
algorithmically situated to come up as "related videos" when a 2-3-year
old is binge-watching YouTube. It has 15 MILLION views.

"Wrong heads" and "learn colors" is one of the most popular tropes.
Right now, there are three million(!) of them on YouTube. And this video
alone has more than six million views.

Another trope, which we could call "finger family learning video" yields
7 million hits on YouTube. The top search result (this
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivFefy28M10) has 82 MILLION views.

So how did 7 MILLION of one kind of video, three MILLION of another, and
MILLIONS more of other tropes, e.g. "bad baby learns colors" which has
about 8 million, all come into existence the last few years?

What the actual fuck is going on here? Who make them and how does it work?

Of course, this has been under some discussion since James Bridle's
article (linked above), among other things under the topic #elsagate:

While many of the videos already discussed are sickeningly repetitive,
with titles obviously designed to attract algorithmic matches rather
than human eyes ("Wrong Dress Frozen Elsa Sofia Talking Angela Hulk
Finger Family Learn Colors For Kids"), others are decidedly
inappropriate and not a little creepy, including urination, defecation,
pregnancy and strong sexual allusions, all in material very obviously
targeted at toddlers without adult supervision.

And that is part of Bridle's and other people's angle: Can
binge-watching these, surprisingly *very* popular and apparently
numbering in the hundreds if millions, of videos be harmful for children
- what effect can this algorithmic tour de force have on toddlers left
hour after hour to themselves?

However, I also have another suggestion - that this video industry and
its objective, being watched by toddlers, displays a very strange
feedback loop that actually us something about the toddler's minds. In a
way, this video industry is a kind of AI investigating the ways of
thinking that appeal to very small children, what they feel is funny,
what can preoccupy them ... like looking at colors, listening to
recognizable nursery rhymes, seeing favorite cartoon characters do funny
stuff, watch unboxings of fancy toys, on the innocent side - but also
tricking people, not being able to go to the toilet, peeing in
inappropriate places, etc.

So in a way, this video artist/toddler feedback loop is an AI
investigation of the psychology of very small children, where the AI is
implemented not just by computers, but by thousands (apparently) of
video production houses doing both cartoons and live action all trying
to find the exact sweet spot where the toddlers just want to keep
watching - by pressing the very buttons that appeal to children that
way. As a feedback loop always changes what it reproduces, this also
appears to be an example of what the Brazilian pshychologist Fabiane M.
Borges (disclaimer, a very good friend of mine) calls "hacking the
unconscious" - the videos is hacking the unconscious, to use the
psychoanalytical term, of millions of very small children, thus
displaying what goes on in them - but, also changing them and being
changed by them at the same time, all mediated by YouTube's algorithms
(but possibly not for a lot longer, YouTube appears to be cracking down
and maybe this phenomenon will soon be history).

This may be only a much more blatant and in-your-face version of the
feedback loop we have seen with adults and television for many years -
but in that case, I find it quite eye-opening. If anyone has the stomach
for a further analysis (I'd generally 

Technoshamanism and Free Digital Territories in Benevento, Italy

[Carsten Agger]

https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/10/30/technoshamanism-and-free-digital-territories-in-benevento-italy/



"The actual seminar took place in much more rural settings outside
Reino, in the country known locally as “terra delle streghe” or “land of
the witches”. With respect to our desire to work with free territories
and the inherent project of recuperating and learning from ancestral
traditions, the area is interesting in the sense that the land is
currently inhabited by the last generation of farmers to cultivate the
land with traditional methods supported by an oral tradition which has
mostly been lost in the most recent decades.  During the seminar, we had
the opportunity to meet up with people from the local
cooperative Lentamente ,
which is working to preserve and recuperate the traditional ways of
growing crops and keeping animals without machines (hence the name
“lentamente”, slowly) as well as trying to preserve as much as possible
of the existing oral traditions".
___
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Impressions from the demonstration in Barcelon yesterday

[Carsten Agger]

Yesterday, I went to the protest in Barcelona against the incarceration
of the leaders of Omnium and ANC, two important separatist movements.

The Catalan question is complex, and there are lots of opinions on all
sides. However, after speaking with a lot of people down here and
witnessing a quite large demonstration it seems clear that Catalan
nationalism is *not* about excluding anyone the way (say) Danish racism
and British UKIP-ism is.

After all, Catalonia has been an immigration destination for years, and
people are used to living together with two or more languages, with
family members from all over Spain. The all-too-familiar right-wing
obsession with Islam and the "terror threat" is conspicuously absent
from Catalan politics.

And it's not all about language or regional identity, as many
Spanish-speaking people with origins in other parts of Spain
wholeheartedly support Catalan indepence.

Rather, it's about a rejection of and rebellion against the Spanish
state which is seen as oppressive and riddled by remnants of Francoism.
The slogans were radical: "Fora les forces d'ocupació", "out with the
occupation forces!" and "the streets will always be ours!"

Indeed, for many of the young people it seems to be about getting rid of
the Spanish state in order to implement a much more leftist policy on
all levels of society - as one sign had it, "we're seditious, we want to
rebel and declare independence and have a revolution!" First
independence, afterwards people will take charge themselves, seems to be
the sentiment.

"The people rules and the government obeys!" - is another slogan. The
conservative forces behind Puigdemont (the current president) may have
other ideas, but for now these are the people they have allied
themselves with - people who actually believe in the direct rule of the
people themselves. Looking at the people present in the demo, it's clear
that it's a really broad section of society - old and young, but
everybody very peaceful and friendly. There were so many people in the
streets that it was getting too much, some especially old people had to
be escorted out through the completely filled streets.

The European Union may have decided that Catalans should forget all
about independence for the sake of the peace of mind of everyone, but
these people honestly don't seem to give a damn.

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Re: Catalonia and mainstream opinion

[Carsten Agger]

One minor correction:


On 10/07/2017 06:15 PM, Molly Hankwitz wrote:
> I have the opposite impression from reading news here in States. Spain
> made to look like overly brutal respressive regime. They had to apologize.

That's inaccurate, at least - the Spanish government has most certainly
not apologized for anything.

Best
Carsten
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Fwd: Public Money? Public Code! - Sign our Open Letter!

[Carsten Agger]

Digital services offered and used by our public administrations are part
of the critical infrastructure of 21st century democratic nations. Due
to restrictive software licences, however, many public bodies do not
have full control over its digital infrastructure. And although sharing
publicly funded software under a free licence generates great benefits
for governments and civil society, policy makers are still reluctant to
improve legislation. It is time to change this. Since it is our public
money, it should be our public code as well!

Today the Free Software Foundation Europe publishes an open letter in
which we call for legislation requiring that publicly financed software
developed for the public sector must be made publicly available under a
Free Software licence. This will allow everybody to use, study, share,
and improve the software. 31 civil society organisations throughout the
EU have already signed it. Also Edward Snowden, President of Freedom of
the Press Foundation, supports our campaign, stating "Right now, the
blueprints for much of our most critical public infrastructure are
simply unavailable to the public. By aligning public funding with a Free
Software requirement -- "Free" referring to public code availability,
not cost -- we can find and fix flaws before they are used to turn the
lights out in the next hospital."

Now it is up to you! Please help and join us by signing this letter and
ask your friends and colleagues to do likewise:

* Sign the open letter: https://publiccode.eu/#action

Why is this important? Public institutions spend millions of euros every
year for the development of new software for them. But the public
sector's procurement choices play a significant role in determining
which companies are allowed to compete and what software is supported
with taxpayers' money. This means, that changing policies in public
procurement will have a huge positive impact on the Free Software
community.

Great chances for improvement and synergies are missed when proprietary
licences restrict our freedom to use, study, share and improve publicly
funded software. Nowadays,  we often have the absurd situation that
public administrations on federal or local level have problems to share
code with each other - even if they funded its complete development on
their own. Without the option to run audits or other security checks on
the code, sensible citizen data may be at risk.

* That's why you should sign the letter: https://publiccode.eu/#action

Experience from many projects all over the world show that Free Software
and public administration can be a perfect match. Some EU member states
have taken initial legislative steps for supporting Free Software in
public administrations. With this campaign we reach out to those still
hesitating. Please help us, to make Free Software the new gold standard
in public procurement.

Sincerely,
Matthias Kirschner, President Free Software Foundation Europe

PS: You can support this campaign as well by ordering and distributing
stickers ,
by sharing the campaign video  and by
using one of our web graphics or banners
.



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Re: Zuckerberg 2020 election candidate?

[Carsten Agger]

On 09/02/2017 03:02 PM, Max Dovey wrote:
>
> the odds at the bookmakers for Zuckerberg to run as democratic
> candidate down to 16/1 (from 25/1) forecasting him at equal odds with
> Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson
> (http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/341269-campaign-committee-for-dwayne-the-rock-johnson-filed-with-fec)
> what are peoples thoughts on this, and more importantly*_if_ *there is
> any legitimacy in these rumours what is the general response?
>
>
Well, would he run for the Democans or the Republicrats?

More importantly, would his presidency combined with Facebook's virtual
monopolization of electronic communication more places on Earth than I
like to think of through ownership of Facebook Messenger *and* WhatsApp
violate anti-trust laws? He'd have the most powerful media engine on
Earth to create support for his policies.


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Re: Technoshamanism in Aarhus - rethink technology and shamanism

[Carsten Agger]

On 08/15/2017 08:37 AM, Carsten Agger wrote:
>
> This is only the free radio section of the event. There are photos from the 
> performances and rituals which will be published later.
This is a report with all photos, audio and video so far of the main event:

https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/08/17/review-tcnxmnsm-in-aarhus-denmark2017/

This is the report with photos and video of a talk we gave at the
university the day before:

https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/tcnxmnsm-in-aarhus-university/


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Re: Technoshamanism in Aarhus - rethink technology and shamanism

[Carsten Agger]

On 08/08/2017 03:03 PM, Carsten Agger wrote:
> Following the response to the Open Call, we now have a detailed schedule
> for the event:
>
> https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/technoshamanism-in-aarhus-rethink-ancestrality-and-technology-2/
>
> The event is free and everybody is welcome!
>

Due to several last-minute problems, the event was live-streamed from a
mobile phone on The Site Which Shall Not Be Named.

The video of this streaming is on YouTube now.

Part 1:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Oaw89rEQhw

Part 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFI59YucR1I


This is only the free radio section of the event. There are photos from the 
performances and rituals which will be published later.



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Re: Technoshamanism in Aarhus - rethink technology and shamanism

[Carsten Agger]

Following the response to the Open Call, we now have a detailed schedule
for the event:

https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/technoshamanism-in-aarhus-rethink-ancestrality-and-technology-2/

The event is free and everybody is welcome!



On 06/29/2017 06:44 AM, Carsten Agger wrote:
> *OPEN CALL*
>
> https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/technoshamanism-in-aarhus-rethink-ancestrality-and-technology/
>
> On *August 12, 2017 from 14:00 to 22:00* there will be a
> technoshamanism meeting in Dome of Visions <http://domeofvisions.dk/>,
> Aarhus, Denmark.
>
> The purpose of the meeting is to unite people who are interested
> in the combination of DIY technologies such as free software and
> permaculture with ancestral, ancestorfuturist and shamanistic
> practices. We are calling all the cyborgs, witches, heretics,
> technoshamans, programmers, hackers, artists, alchemists, thinkers and
> everyone who might be curious to join us and explore the possiblities
> of combining ancestral and indigenous worldviews with the looming
> disasters of the anthropocene.
>
> If you feel attracted by the combination of these terms, techno
> + shamanism and ancestrality + futurism and if you’re worried
> about the destruction of the Earth and the hegemony of capital and
> neoliberal ontologies, this event is for you. In view of Aarhus’
> slogan as European Cultural Capital of 2017, the theme of this event
> could be: Rethink ancestrality and technology!
>
> We welcome all proposals for rituals, musical and artistic
> performances, talks, discussions and technological workshops. Please
> send your proposal to xamanismotecnolog...@gmail.com.
>
> The proposal needs to be short (250 words) with your web site (if any)
> and a short bio.
>
>
> *PROGRAM*
>
> *FREE RADIO*
>
> The verbal talks will be structured as roundtable discussions with
> several participants which are recorded and simultaneously live streamed
> as Internet radio.
>
> Topics:
>
>   * TECHNOSHAMANISM – What is it?
>   * Ancestrality and ancestrofuturism
>   * Experiences from the II International Festival and other events
>   * Immigration and new ontologies arriving in Europe
>   * Self-organizing with free software and DIY technology
>   * Your proposal!
>
> *PERFORMANCE AND RITUAL*
>
> A collaborative DIY ritual to end the event – bring costumes, proposals,
> visual effects, ideas and musical instruments.
>
> We welcome proposals for all kinds of performance, rituals and
> narratives along the lines of this open call – all proposals to be sent
> to xamanismotecnolog...@gmail.com <mailto:xamanismotecnolog...@gmail.com>.
>
> *NOTE*
>
> When we have received your proposals, we will organize them and publish
> a detailed program around August 1, for the discussions and workshops as
> well as for the rituals.
>
> *ACCOMODATION*
>
> If you don’t live in Aarhus and need accomodation, that can be arranged
> (for free). Bring your sleeping bag!
>
> *WHO ARE WE?*
>
> This encounter is organized by Carsten Agger, Beatriz Ricci, Fabiane M.
> Borges and Ouafa Rian.
>
> *TECHNOSHAMANISM – THE NETWORK*
>
> Tecnoshamanism is an international network for people interested in
> living out their ideas in everyday life while focusing on open science,
> open technology, free and DIY cosmological visions and feel the
> necessity of maintaining a strong connection to the Earth as a living,
> ecological organism.
>
> In recent years, we have had meetings in Spain, England, Denmark,
> Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland. In November 2016,
> we had the II International Festival of Tecnoxamanism in the indigenous
> Pataxó village of Pará in Bahia, Brazil. The purpoose of this meeting is
> to discuss technoshamanism as outlined above and to strengthen and grow
> this network, hopefully reaching out to new partners in Denmark and
> beyond. The network is based in Brazil but draws inspiration from all
> over the world.
>
> You can find more information on technoshamanism in these articles:
>
>   * Technoshamanism and Wasted Ontologies
>
> <https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/technoshamanism-and-wasted-ontologies>
>   * Installing Baobaxia at the II International Festival of
> Technoshamanism
>
> <https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/installing-baobaxia-at-the-ii-international-festival-of-technoshamanism/>
>
>
> *ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS*
>
> This event is supported by Digital Living Research Commons
> <https://www.facebook.com/DLRCommons/>, Aarhus University
> <http://www.au.dk/>.
>
>
>
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>

Technoshamanism and wasted ontologies

[Carsten Agger]

http://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/2017/06/14/technoshamanism-and-wasted-ontologies/


/Interview with Fabiane M. Borges published on May 21, 2017^1
<#sdfootnote1sym>/

/By Bia Martins and Reynaldo Carvalho Translated by Carsten Agger/


In a state of permanent warfare and fierce disputes over visions
of the future, /technoshamanism/ emerges as a resistance and as
an endeavour to influence contemporary thinking, technological
production, scientific questions, and everyday practices. This is
how the Brazilian Ph.D. in clinical psychology, researcher and
essayist /Fabiane M. Borges/ presents this international network of
collaboration which unites academics, activists, indigenous people
and many more people who are interested in a search for ideas and
practices which go beyond the instrumental logic of capital. In this
interview with Em Rede, she elaborates her reflections on shamanism
as a technology for producing knowledge and indicates some of the
experiences that were made in this context.



– *At first, technology and shamanism seem like contradictory
notions or at least difficult to combine. The first refers to
the instrumental rationalism that underlies an unstoppable
developmentalist project. The second makes you think of indigenous
worldviews, healing rituals and altered states of consciousness. What
is the result of this combination?*



In a text that I wrote for the magazine /Geni^2 <#sdfootnote2sym>/ in
2015, I said this: that techno + shamanism has three quite evident meanings:

 1. The technology of shamanism (shamanism seen as a technology for the
production of knowledge);

 2. The shamanism of technology (the pursuit of shamanic powers through
the use of technology);

 3. The combination of these two fields of knowledge historically
obstructed by the Church and later by science, especially in the
transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Each of these meanings unfolds into many others, but here is an
attempt to discuss each one:

1) When we perceive shamanism not as tribal religions or as the
beliefs of archaic people (as is still very common) but as a
technology of knowledge production, we radically change the perception
of its meaning. The studies of e.g. ayahuasca shows that intensified
states of consciousness produces a kind of experience which reshapes
the state of the body, broadening the spectrum of sensation,
affection, and perception. These “plants of power” are probably
that which brings us closest to the “magical thinking” of native
communities and consequently to the shamanic consciousness e– that
is, to that alternative ontology, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
alerts us when he refers to the Amerindian ontology in his book
/Cannibal Metaphysics^3 <#sdfootnote3sym>/, or Davi Kopenawa with his
shamanic education with /yakoana/, as described in /The Falling Sky^4
<#sdfootnote4sym>/. It is obviously not only through plants of power
that we can access this ontology, but they are a portal which draws
us singularly near this way of seeing the world, life itself. Here,
we should consider the hypotheses of Jeremy Narby in his /The Cosmic
Serpent: DNA and origins of knowledge/ where he explains that the
indigenous knowledge of herbs, roots and medicine arises partly from
dreams and from the effects of entheogens.



When I say that shamanism is a technology of knowledge production,
it is because it has its own methods for constructing narratives,
mythologies, medicine and healing as well as for collecting data
and creating artifacts and modes of existence, among other things.
So this is neither ancient history nor obsolete – it lives on,
pervading our technological and mass media controlled societies and
becoming gradually more appreciated, especially since the 1960s where
ecological movements, contact with traditional communities and ways
of life as well as with psychoactive substances all became popular,
sometimes because of the struggles of these communities and sometimes
because of an increased interest in mainstream society. A question
arose: If we were to recuperate these wasted ontologies with the help
of these surviving communities and of our own ruins of narratives and
experiences, would we not be broadening the spectrum of technology
itself to other issues and questions?



2) The shamanism of technology. It is said that such theories
as parallel universes, string theory and quantum physics, among
others, bring us closer to the shamanic ontology than to the
theological/capitalist ontology which guides current technological
production. But although this current technology is geared towards
war, pervasive control and towards over-exploitation of human,
terrestrial and extra-terrestrial resources, we still possess
a speculative, curious and procedural technology which seeks
to construct hypotheses and open interpretations which are not
necessarily committed to the logic of capital (this is the meaning of
the free software, DIY a

Technoshamanism in the South-South dialog

[Carsten Agger]

An interview with Fabiane M. Borges, coordinator of the
technoshamanism network.

http://www.goethe.de/ins/br/lp/prj/eps/nsu/en16159670.htm


/From your point of view, what are the main questions and problems of
the Global South? /

The usuals: impoverishment of the lower classes, media coverage
brokered by market interests, industry exploitation, mass insecurity,
depletion of natural resources in order to sustain developed
countries, elites uncommitted to the interests of their own people who
collaborate assiduously to maintain misery for their own interests,
government corruption, monocultures destroying forests, simplistic
development projects imported by rich countries with no attention to
regional particularities, the lack of investment in local brainpower,
etc.

/What are the gaps in the South-South dialog? ?/

When I arrived in Africa or in India, in the Middle East or traveled
to countries in Latin America, I had the same impression: that I
knew hardly anything about these places. There is a machine that
produces information, which is transmitted by a, well, biased,
fetishist media, and which does not deal with the issues from an
informed perspective, but instead with opportune metaphors and ethnic
discrimination; that constantly shows either traditional exoticism or
the chaos of violence, terrorism or proverty. They try to hide ways
of life, relationships, negotiations, ways of surviving or community
relationships, promoting through this massive ignorance convenient
ground for the most diverse “interventions” with the support of
the mediotized.

I signal the media as one of the biggest problems in relation to
dialog in the Globlal South, since they mediate “truth” and
homogenize problems, forging images and giving them importance
according to their pacts with market interests or war. Barring a few
exceptions of media outlets that are more committed to criticism and
the depth of the field – but even in those cases, in most, terribly
vertical. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Internet was
the great generational promise for more horizontal communication
platforms, where through open channels, networks, emails, sites, blogs
it was possible to access in a less mediated way local realities and
with this you will have more access to the general occurences around
the Global South. This type of access is more active, since it allows
for manifestation, criticism, increased knowledge, more equal exchange
among those interested. The Internet worked to broaden the terrestrial
spectrum and still works and has brought us more clarity about the
ways of life in “Third World” countries, since the ways of life
in “developed” countries like the fateful /American way of life/,
have been internalized in us ad naseum.

This promise, however, is at risk. All the horizontality
technologically possible amounts to sites, bits of land, sources
in dispute. A strange landscape drawn (programmed) by libertarians
and mercenaries, the first being under the power’s watch, people
driven to suicide, dead, hidden in fear, exiled; and the second
create design, engineer projects, set trends, according to market
interests and maintaining their own power. The rest are the users who
still exercise their minor freedom while providing figures for big
data, whether these figures are revolutionary or reactionary. What
is interesting to note here is that communication remains mediated
by market interests, but it is STILL possible, through the Internet,
to create niche transcontinental relationships and, yes, niche
relationships among the Global South. This is, at the very least, a
process of disalienation and self-recognition that should be broadly
strengthened by the involved States.

It is important, nonetheless, that these networks not be promoted
only by States, or large corporations, or university conferences
fashioned like those imported from Europe or North America, but rather
that these relationships be promoted on a large scale, strengthening
projects, meetings, massive exchange between these countries of the
Global South. What would be surprising and liberating, in these
encounters where new paradigms emerge over and above the timeworn idea
of progress and development, would be that more real questions be
debated, questions that are more linked to the demands of our planet
and its inhabitants (eco-demands).

/How do the episodes "At the Table" and "Technoshamanism", in which
you participated, relate to these gaps and problems? /

I think that the important aspect of that table was to clarify a
few questions related to technoshamanism. For example: it is not an
anthropologists’ network, despite having some very interesting
ones around. Nor is it a network of indigenism, despite its
obvious indigenism and its many programs with indigenous goups’
participation and references to those groups. It is not an artists’
network, in spite of many artists being involved with it. It is not
a network of permaculturists, in spite of its 

Re: will someone explain

[Carsten Agger]

On 02/04/2017 04:47 AM, Scot Mcphee wrote:


(after the death of Nero) Thus it variously motivated minds, not only
in the city amongst the fathers, the people and the urban soldiers,
but it roused all the legions and their leaders: for the secret of the
empire was divulged - it was possible to create a prince somewhere
other than Rome.

Kinda sums up a lot of the history thereafter.


This is definitely the danger post Trump, to a less extent *with* Trump.

Personally I think that Trump won't make it to dictator. He's far too 
divisive. His travel ban has been contested in court, and the Department 
of Homeland Security is no longer upholding it.


The president may write as many executive orders as he like, but the 
executive branch is not ready to simply disregard the courts yet. This 
means that building the wall, banning Muslims, etc., will need a lot of 
legislative work which Trump and his government may have a hard time 
getting through even a Republican-owned Congress.


There is the danger that he might start a war against Iran or China, 
just as he might start a trade war against Mexico - but Trump is not a 
man to lead the country to war. He may have his supporters, but he 
doesn't have the popular support and credibility even of George W. Bush 
- he's so polarizing that the country seems likely to become 
ungovernable if he does something like that.


So unless Trump has got some serious - well - trumps up his sleeve, it 
seems he's going to be huffing and puffing a lot rather than actually 
achieving anything - other than destroying the reputation, credibility 
and economy of the United States, of course.


Best

Carsten

--
http://www.modspil.dk
http://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com

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Re: The Guardian's Summary of Julian Assange's Interview

[Carsten Agger]

On 01/03/2017 10:18 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote:

On 2017-01-02 22:45, C.Robbins wrote:


Without question the article on Assange was the epitomy of "bad
journalism", "Fake news" or whatever trending tagline one wishes to
assign to biased delivery of, and 24/7 consumption of propaganda
... and, yes, Ben Jacobs, accompanied by thousands of other
"journalists", should be hung out to dry by his virtual thumbs.

Meanwhile, the Guardian has corrected the article on the two points
made by Greenwald:

<...>

However, they did not address the most important of Greenwald's points, 
namely that Assange doesn't appear to "offer praise", guarded or 
otherwise, of Trump, but rather seems to be analyzing the situation.


That still looks like an intentional journalistic hit job to me.



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On receiving an interview request from Uber

[Carsten Agger]

   Yesterday, I received a LinkedIn email from a talent scout at Uber
   asking if I'd like to work on their core infrastructure.

   My reply:

   "Thanks for reaching out, but this is not something I am interested in.
   A bit on principle, as I won't work with Uber on the grounds that

   * their apps are not free software

   * I don't sympathize with their undermining of the taxi business,
   replacing trained and insured drivers with what is effectively what
   used to be called "illegal taxis" paying "app taxes" to an American
   company.

   All the best to you too,
   (signed)"

   The first reason is really sufficient as I won't work with proprietary
   software if I can help it (and right now I can, thankfully), but the
   second would also be sufficient in itself if their app *were* free
   software.

   Best

   Carsten

___
Discussion mailing list
discuss...@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

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Re: Urban dystopia is unavoidable, says the Pentagon

[Carsten Agger]

On 10/29/2016 03:35 PM, Felix Stalder wrote:

[If you ever thought you were pessimistic and/or cynical about the
future, just take a look at this Pentagon video. A dark, fully
dystopian view of the near future in urbanized metropolitan regions.
What strikes me the most is that this future is deemed "unavoidable"
hence the military needs to prepare to deal with it. No alternatives,
no possibilities. This the neo-liberal "TINA" dogma taken to the
logical end. The film was not made for public consumption, but for
internal training. Felix]


https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/pentagon-video-warns-of-unavoidable-dystopian-future-for-worlds-biggest-cities/



This is not necessarily a realistic or even qualified prediction of
the future. It may just as well be the result of a marketing discource
based on fear, uncertainty and doubt from the military industry
wanting to sell drones, armed vehicles etc. to combat urban uprisings.

I found the reference to the US counter-insurgence tactics "honed
in Iraq" and the talk of "draining the swamp of ordinary citizens"
especially chilling. What happened in e.g. Fallujah were massacres and
war crimes with no justification whatsoever. Maybe this fantasy video
is about gearing up to more war crimes, rather than to a dystopian
future.


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Re: #jakegate explained ... by a Dummy

[Carsten Agger]

""

On 10/13/2016 03:44 PM, Patrice Riemens wrote:


NB Two days ago, The Guardian newspaper published a long article
about Jacob Appelbaum, the first text in mainstream media since
the two pieces in Die Zeit Online (see refs below), and only the
second publication I am aware of since the storm around 'Jake' abated
somewhere in last Summer.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/jacob-appelbaum-tor-project-sexual-assault-allegations

This post was largely written in Romania a few weeks ago, and hence
is not informed by the article in The Guardian. It also looks at the
whole affair from a different angle, less focused on the person(age)
himself.


[...]

Thanks for your article, Patrice, I rather think you nailed it with the 
context of the security hacking circles in Berlin, and in the world!


Two small comments:

In the Guardian piece, we read:

>Appelbaum says that he has stopped drinking and begun therapy. “I have 
obviously seriously hurt people’s feelings unintentionally and I deeply 
regret this,” he said.


To me, that sounds eerily like the words of an unrepentant bully who has 
been called out. He denies all allegations, but he's stopped drinking 
and entered therapy. If the allegations are false, why does he need therapy?


My own experience is that if people have a behaviour problem related to 
drinking too much, they're always very acutely aware of it, as much as 
they might deny it (the lady doth protest too much). Though, it must be 
said, many of us respond badly to high-level pressure and stress of the 
kind Appelbaum has been under. Still, a man in his position, as 
spokesman for Tor, Wikileaks, and even Edward Snowden, don't get off so 
easily because they frankly have a responsibiliy to the movement and the 
cause - both of which do *not* need tarnishing with allegations of 
bullying and sexual abuse. I.e., people in that situation have a 
responsiblity not to let drink problems or behaviour problems get the 
better of them, and Appelbaum does not seem to have lived up to that 
responsibility.


My other, and much more important, point is that things like this shows 
that these social movements - of hackers, hackerspaces, free software, 
free culture, homeless people's rights, etc. - don't need rock stars.


If someone in such a movement behaves like a "rock star" and everyone 
around him thinks he can expect to be treated like a rock star, mistrust 
that person and mistrust that movement. Persons should not matter. Where 
people are inevitably important (think Lawrence Lessig or Richard 
Stallman), it should be possible to recognize their contributions 
without elevating them to stardom. The "rock stardom" may have been the 
very trap in which Appelbaum as well as his victims were caught up, and 
everybody colluding in that elevation bear some co-responsibility of 
their own for the situation.


Best
Carsten

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Re: England leaves Europe

[Carsten Agger]

I just want to make one minor point about this discussion.

England does not "leave Europe". The EU is not "Europe". It's a 
political and bureaucratic structure that we can be happy or unhappy 
about, and many large and well-functioning European countries are not 
part of the EU.




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Re: Richard Stallman: Eradicate Facebook!

[Carsten Agger]

Den 20-03-2016 kl. 11:43 skrev Patrice Riemens:


original to:
http://sivertimes.com/richard-stallman-wants-to-destroy-facebook-to-protect-privacy/17274

original interview in Le Devoir (Montreal) (in French):
http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/actualites-en-societe/465389/eradiquer-facebook-pour-sauver-la-democratie


Off-topic, it's strange to see as slick-looking a web site as 
silvertimes.com apparently use Google Translate to get articles from 
French; rendering their text barely legible compared with the original.


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Re: aaaaarg lawsuit digest #ANON

[Carsten Agger]

Den 14-01-2016 kl. 19:58 skrev morlockel...@yahoo.com:


So you will keep and feed your own poet in your basement?

Or is he going to be paid by the enlightened government?

Or we'll just have to do with:

- the already existing poetry?
- bad poetry by Uber drivers written in their spare time?
- free propaganda poetry funded by various parties?

Pick one.


I don't know of any modern poet who is actually able to make a living 
from the sale of books in copyright. Poetry is the perennial example of 
an art which people are not in for the money.


And if we have a look of the really big poets, we'll find that normally, 
poetry was not the way they made their living, and if it was, the 
important factor was readings (like Dylan Thomas) rather than book sales.


Shelley bungled his way through a lot of debts, had practically no 
readers while he was alive and definitely didn't make a lot of money 
from his poetry.


Byron did make some money from book sales, but they didn't precisely 
finance his life style.


Yeats made money as a playwright rather than as a poet (if you can 
separate these things).


And given that, the American poet Judson Jerome seriously questioned 
whether restricting the circulation of one's poetry is really in the 
best interest of any poet.


As he said:

"Like patents, copyrights are intended to enable creators to profit from 
their work, and if what you write is likely to earn big profits, that 
may well concern you.  Certainly it concerns commercial publishers:  as 
I will explain later, copyrights are the mainstay of their business.  
But since a poet is likely to derive little income from his work at 
best, and none at all unless there is some public demand for his work, 
and since copyright limits circulation, I don't see why a poet should 
want it.  I just pulled out of the wastebasket one of the dozens of 
privately printed first collections of poetry I receive each year.  It 
bears this imposing notice:


Copyright 1976 by 

All rights reserved.  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced 
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, 
including recording, photocopying, offset, or by any information storage 
and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author, 
except by reviewers who may quote brief passages to be printed in a 
magazine or newspaper.


The poor lady may have paid some lucky attorney to help her draw up that 
statement, but you may copy it for your own book if you please.  It even 
keeps people from reading her poems over the telephone.  I wonder what 
she hopes to protect herself from.  In my view she would have done 
better to say, "I beg you to reproduce or transmit in any form or by any 
means ...".  That way someone might hear of her or benefit from or enjoy 
what she has written.  Someone might like her work and hire her to write 
something for money.  Some commercial publisher might track her down and 
ask to bring out her next collection – if free circulation of this book 
created a demand.  As it is, she could hardly have tied up her 
manuscript more securely by locking it in her trunk."


http://www.poemtree.com/Jerome/Publishing-Chapter04.htm

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Re: The Gentrification of Hacking: How yuppies hacked the

[Carsten Agger]

Den 21-10-2015 kl. 17:15 skrev Jaromil:

<...>

I don't get what you mean, can you explain?

meanwhile:

http://ilmanifesto.info/maker-faire-alla-sapienza-violenta-carica-della-polizia-contro-gli-studenti/

protests escalated with 4 student arrests, 10 students armed
of which 2 with serious head injuries. All this on the premises
of a university where once upon a time it was very unkosher
to have just one cop in uniform stepping in.


[...]

Ironically, the article you link to is behind a pay/login wall and I'm 
asked to choose if I want to "enter with Google+" or "Enter with Facebook".


Another example of the encroaching colonization of the Internet, I guess.


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Re: nettime Open call: Technoshamanism encounter in Aarhus, Denmark

[Carsten Agger]

Just a brief follow-up to the call:

The event was a success. It was a strong confluence of permaculture, 
Amerindian shamanism and hacker spirit, located in our hacker space in 
Aarhus, involving a healing sound ritual with the participants' 
harmonies supported by frequencies composed in source code.


There are pictures from the event here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/22405820@N08/sets/72157649435839485/

Sound from day one here, with talks on nature and permaculture, 
technoshamanism and waste and Amerindian perspectivism, afrofuturism and 
the ritual:


https://archive.org/details/TechnoshamanismInAarhus

Sound from day two, with talks and lots of discussions on cultural 
scripting, greenhouse IT, sustainability and strategies to support the 
homeless - and a noise concert:


https://archive.org/details/TecnoshamanismMeetingAarhusDinamarc-SecondDay

A lot of people turned up who had never seen each other before, and we 
had many vibrant disucssions.


Carsten

Den 11-11-2014 kl. 22:21 skrev Carsten Agger:


Autodetermination, liberty and sustainability in the anthropocene
=

http://osaa.dk/2014/11/open-call-technoshamanism-encounter-in-aarhus/


In the weekend of November 22.-23. we’re organizing an encounter with
the purpose of strengthening and enhancing the networks created at the
1st International Festival for Technoshamanism, which took place on
April 23-30 in Arraial d’Ajuda, Bahia, Brazil.

...


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Re: nettime tensions within the bay area elites

[Carsten Agger]

On 05/11/2014 03:57 PM, Geert Lovink wrote:

 To me, it is somehow super clear that Facebook is evil. Not hard to 
 understand. But Google? Why are tensions rising so high lately around them? 
 Look at the tone of the Cory Doctorow blog post to Boing Boing… Don't get me 
 wrong. But have they really gone down lately? In my humble view they are as 
 evil as were a decade ago... What happened? Have we changed?
 

I think many people have been switching back and forth between being
suspicious, apprehensive and hopeful regarding Google - suspicious
because of their centralization and monitoring, hopeful because of their
technical cluefulness and huge contributions to free software, and
apprehensive because of some of their inclinations towards right-wing
politics - as in Schmidt's case.

On the other hand, I don't see how Doctorow became part of the bay area
elites. He's a notoriously leftist British-Canadian science fiction
writer living in London. He did live in SF once, but it might take more
than that to become part of the local elite?





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nettime First International Festival of Technoshamanism

[Carsten Agger]

This event will take place in Arraial d'Ajuda, Bahia, Brazil. The
people behind the event describe it like this:

Tecnoshamans from the entire world put their energies in movement to
make the 1st International Tecnoshamanism Festival happen from April
23rd to 30th. We want it to be a magical gathering that will provoke
a profound experience to think time, technology, Earth, the future
of humanity, alien ways of living, shamanic and scientific knowledge
technologies.

Following the camping, hack lab, free radio, TAZ, tent of cure,
debates, workshops and party style, we will be among the ITAPECO
permaculture institute and the Cultural house of Aldeia Velha of the
Pataxó indigenous people.

But what is technoshamanism? I spent the last week translating an
article explaining the subject by the Brazilian writer and scholar
Fabiane Borges, which I will insert below. The article was originally
written as a presentation for Transmediale 2014.

A PDF of the text with notes, images, references etc. can be found at
http://www.modspil.dk/docs/technoshamanism_fabi_borges.pdf


The event is still in need of crowdfunding, among other things to pay
for food and transportation. If you think the concept is interesting,
please consider chipping in at http://catarse.me/en/tecnoxamanismo

Best,

Carsten Agger




SEMINAL THOUGHTS FOR A POSSIBLE TECNOSHAMANISM
+++



By Fabiane M. Borges*

Translated by Carsten Agger+

Many people have an idea as to what technoshamanism means. These ideas
are generic and point towards something between science and religion, or
between technology and ecstasy. I prefer to present this as a subject
which is under construction - a challenge we are all currently facing,
and to which we need to find solutions.

This text will cover a small number of ecological, anthropological and
philosophical concepts which I will try to delineate clearly, even if
they may seem shrouded in mist. For reference I will use such thinkers
as Viveiros de Castro, Bruno Latour, Fabiá Ludueña, among others. It is
important to emphasize that the concept of technoshamanism is open and
means many things to many people. This text is only an attempt to bring
about a few clarifications in the apparent deadlock between two
seemingly opposed forces.

I will divide the text in seven parts:

1- The tragedy of the Guarani Kaiowa
2- The Maracanã Village
3- Earthlings versus Humans
4- Xawara and the water from Heaven
5- Perspectivismo and ontological inversion
6- Transversal shamanism,  dirty or noisy
7- Technoshamanism



1- THE TRAGEDY OF THE GUARANI-KAIOWÁ


I will begin by presenting a contemporary tragedy. I am talking about a
community of 12,000 Guarani-Kaiowá Indians from the Indian village
Bororo in Mato Grosso do Sul, situated in the city of Dourados. The
lands that the Brazilian government had given to the Guarani-Kaiowá in
previous decades became disputed during the military dictatorship. These
indigenous lands became the objects of barter between the State and
rural businesses. The lands were invaded by industrial farming,
destroyed by monoculture and surrounded by barbed wire, and the
Guarani-Kaiowá lost their lands altogether or were relocated.

The Kaiowás have an enormous mortality rate due to fights between
Indians and white people as well as malnutrition, alcoholism and
excessive drug abuse. What really frightens the Indians and their
supporters, however, is the alarming number of suicides. I believe that
the word epidemic is the one best suited to qualify a practise of
great numbers of suicides (at the end of the 2000 decade the norm was
between fifty and sixty suicides every year). The majority of those who
practise jejuvy (death by hanging or strangulation) are adolescents -
these also account for a large percentage of the community.

I will proceed to qualify these deaths as an epidemic, attempting at
the same time to make it absolutely clear that what is killing the
Guarani-Kaiowá is the same Xawara that is affecting the lands of the
Yamomami, since xawara means epidemic, a sickness caused by the
pollution caused by the digging of gold, the symbol of development.

Scene from the film Terra Vermelha  - 2008

I will make clear that Jejuvy is a ritual form of suicide based in the
cultural behaviour of the Guarani-Kaiowá. According to the Guaraní, the
soul resides in the word, and if the word cannot be expressed, if there
is space for it to be uttered, it will be suffocated. For this reason,
the suicides are by strangulation or hanging, so that the word will not
be lost and may be able to return at some other time. The Guaraní
believe in a kind of reincarnation or, rather, in a concentrated energy
which does not disintegrate. In the Guaraní worldview, death by cutting
or stabbing implies the total loss of the word, since it fades away and
its form loses its consistency. When they commit