Re: Stormy weather?
Brian's original Stormy Weather post semed designed to wake up the many of us who feel we are all sleep walking towards the precipice. I couldn't help remembering the book “Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914” (Christopher Clark. 2012). The title alone seems an apt way to describe our own political elites. But the book might also offer something useful in Clarke’s particular way of engaging differently with the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ in his complex geopolitical analysis of the road to the “Great War”. In the introduction he points out that although *how* and *why* are logically inseparable they lead in two directions. The *how* invites us to look closely at the sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes [….] whilst the *why* invites us to go in search of remote categorical causes; imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance…ideas of national honour… [we might substitute colonialism, neo-liberalism, capitalism etc] “The why brings about a certain analytical clarity, but it also has a distorting effect, because it creates the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure [….] political actors become mere executors of forces long established and beyond their control.” In contrast Clark asserts that his story “is saturated, with agency” … decision makers at all levels from emperors to lesser officials (or even assassins) walked towards danger in watchful calculated steps.” […] His aim is to let the why answers grow out of the how answers rather than the other way around… Once we pose the question why responsibility or even guilt becomes the overriding focal point. It may not offer us much, but it just seemed that Clark’s approach might help us guard against us so over-regarding the explanatory power of large-scale historical forces that we underestimate the importance of amplifying our own collective and individual agency in confronting the power wielded by key (or elite) political actors. It might mitigate against the overwhelming feeling of impotence that sometimes seems to turn the least and the best us all into sleepwalkers. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Its a Language thing
It’s a Language Thing In a brilliant article in the FT, last September, Janen Ganesh correctly predicted that as ever the US mid term elections would be obsessively followed by the English political elite when many of the same people would struggle to name a cabinet minister in Berlin or Paris. The EU, Ganesh points out, is a regulatory superpower but our political class is far more interested in Iowa. From the perspective of a UK citizen the impact of this obsession is non-trivial. It is in fact the key to understanding the trouble we are in. The UK's political elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. And it has led the nation to act as though they too were a superpower… The question is why? Ganesh insists we do not invoke the usual bogyman of imperial nostalgia (if it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Instead he suggests we blame the distorting effect of language. Its because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations are comparable… Former Prime Minister Mad queen Liz and her Chancellor are not alone in the modern Tory party in their conviction that a bracing dose of deregulation would be enough to unchain Britania releasing US levels of entrepreneurial dynamism. But of course it won't. As Ganesh pointed out "The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people…" it did once but we voted to leave… David Garcia # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse
Nothing brings the gently glowing embers of nettime to life quite like the prospect of its immanent demise, when the mods launch one of their cunningly infrequent "shake-em-up" interventions. Whatever the outcome of this latest experiment the kick-up-the-arse alone makes it worthwhile. Thank You Mod-Fathers David Garcia On 2022-11-30 07:31, bernd kasparek wrote: Dear nettimers, I joined this list some months ago, have never posted but always read with great interest and consequential enlightenment. I of course fully agree with the argument about technical fixes to social problems, but still feel that this is something that should be explored more empirically in the context of the usage of this list. On the technical points: Yes, mail has become more difficult lately, but it is not impossible to run your own server. Furthermore, it is possible to run a mailman instance that is in full compliance with SPIF, DMARC and DKIM, with the only caveat being the rewriting of the from: header (the "... via mailinglistname" you might see on other mailing lists). But I really wanted to make a different point: I thoroughly enjoy nettime as a mailing list, I enjoy the long form mails exceeding 2k characters, I enjoy the built-in offline availability my MUA offers me, the discoverability, the searchability, the threadedness, etc. I am not convinced (but I am open to persuasion) that Mastodon et al. offer all that. Fundamentally, I do believe moving to social media-esque formats will alter the way we discuss and read each other and believe these consequences should be discussed a bit more in-depth before making such a move. I fully understand that infrastructure maintenance is tedious, boring and too often un-gratifying. But maintaining a mastodon instance will also be that, once the initial setup is done. The plight of the sysadmin is independent from the particular kind of tech she maintains. If I can help out there, I'm happy to join the effort. best wishes Bernd # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
I Am For... 1961
Yesterday at a ripe old age of 93 Claes Oldenburg died. For those who may know him only as a purveyor of bloated corporate pop art of his later years may be surprised just how radical he was when he started out and just how different he was from the pop-artists who bought uncritically into consumerist ethos. His early ‘floppy’ sculptures ( constructed largely by his wife who got little recognition) are raw and challenging. His drawings are some of the most vivid of the era. But to get a real flavour of his outlook you can do no better than his manifesto “I Am For…” 1961. Sixty years later it still rings true. I Am For… (Statement, 1961) I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top. I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself. I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways. I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky. I am for art that spills out of an old man’s purse when he is bounced off a passing fender. I am for the art out of a doggie’s mouth, falling five stories from the roof. I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper. I am for an art that joggles like everyone’s knees, when the bus traverses an excavation. I am for art that is smoked like a cigarette, smells like a pair of shoes. I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses like a handkerchief. I am for art that is put on and taken off like pants, which develops holes like socks, which is eaten like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt like a piece of shit. I am for art covered with bandages. I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps. I am for art that comes in a can or washes up on the shore. I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair. I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on. I am for art from a pocket, from deep channels of the ear, from the edge of a knife, from the corners of the mouth, stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist. I am for art under the skirts, and the art of pinching cockroaches. I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man’s metal stick. I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds and growls. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch. I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweetie’s arm, or kiss like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on like an old tablecloth. I am for an art that you can hammer with, stitch with, sew with, paste with, file with. I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street. I am for the art of the washing machine. I am for the art of a government check. I am for the art of last war’s raincoat. I am for the art that comes up in fogs from sewer holes in winter. I am for the art that splits when you step on a frozen puddle. I am for the worm’s art inside the apple. I am for the art of sweat that develops between crossed legs. I am for the art of neck hair and caked teacups, for the art between the tines of restaurant forks, for the odor of boiling dishwater. I am for the art of sailing on Sunday, and the art of red-and-white gasoline pumps. I am for the art of bright blue factory columns and blinking biscuit signs. I am for the art of cheap plaster and enamel. I am for the art of worn marble and smashed slate. I am for the art of rolling cobblestones and sliding sand. I am for the art of slag and black coal. I am for the art of dead birds. I am for the art of scratching in the asphalt, daubing at the walls. I am for the art of bending and kicking metal and breaking glass, and pulling at things to make them fall down. I am for the art of punching and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the art of kids’ smells. I am for the art of mama-babble. I am for the art of bar-babble, tooth-picking, beer-drinking, egg-salting, in-sulting. I am for the art of falling off a barstool. I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic art of dog turds, rising like cathedrals. I am for the art of bread wet by rain. I am for the rat’s dance between
Re: On the return of the interventionist state 7 fact-check
Hi Andreas, many thanks for the detailed fact-check and yes I should have been more careful. I do recognise that calling the Commissioners "unelected" was simplistic given that there the EU parliament must approve the appointments presented to them. But if I am honest this generally seems like a bit of a 'rubber stamping' operation like consulting the kids after the adults have finished 'horse trading' for these very powerful decision making positions. To my mind this falls well short of the even limited civic accountability we might expect in parliamentary democracy and as you conceded the EU equivalent still remains pretty weak. Why is that? It may be worth asking ourselves why there has been this reluctance to concede more power to the Parliament if it is not a fear of anything that would disturb the centrist neoliberal status quo. But yes I should have been more careful in describing the interesting byzantine mechanisms for appointing these powerful EU officials. Best David On 2021-09-15 12:23, Andreas Broeckmann wrote: Dear David, please, fact-check; this is incorrect: the most powerful decision-making body in the EU is the European Commission is comprised of unelected officials You may see deficits in the following procedure, but there are in fact elections and democratic confirmations: "The president-elect selects potential Vice-Presidents and Commissioners based on suggestions from EU countries. The list of nominees has to be approved by all EU heads of state or government, meeting in the European Council. ... Following Parliament's vote[*], the Commissioners are appointed by the European Council. ..." (* Remember that, in autumn 2019, the European Parliament rejected the Romanian and Hungarian commissioners-elect first proposed by U. von der Leyen, due to "conflicts of interest.") If the Commission is ruled, as you claim, by a "neo-liberal orthodoxy", then this selection process shows that the problem is much bigger than just the assembly of Commissioners. (And arguably the EU of 2021 is not any more the EU of 2010.) Moreover, the "most powerful decision-making body in the EU" is clearly the European Council: "The members of the European Council are the heads of state or government of the 27 EU member states, the European Council President and the President of the European Commission." As we have seen in the last years, the role of the European Parliament has been strengthened gradually, if too slowly. Otherwise, thank you for pointing out some of the problematic concepts and levels of argumentation in the reference text! Regards, -a Am 15.09.21 um 11:57 schrieb d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk: Thanks Paolo for this very interesting article. Just a few questions that I imagine will be answered by reading the book. I am unclear what is meant here by ‘the state’. Is it interchangeable with ‘government’? Does the argument that neoliberalism (market fundamentalism) is being replaced by ‘neostatism’ mean that you see neoliberalism as a kind of polity or set of constitutional arrangements rather than an economic orthodoxy? To take one example the most powerful decision-making body in the EU is the European Commission is comprised of unelected officials whose principal task is to ensure that no national election of a member state will ever overturn the parameters of the neo-liberal orthodoxy. Anyone who doubts this should remember what happened to Greece in the debt crisis of 2009/10. So do you see the Commission as an example of a ‘neostate’? Or is it something else again? Is the EU Commission included in the book? I am curious whether your analysis of the neo-state addresses the current position of ‘liberal democracy’which (for better or for worse) is in a (over used word) crisis. It seems to me that the liberal view of the state continues to trade on the old the increasingly tired old ruse of making a virtue of obscuring the answer to the question, who governs? them or us, people or government. This deliberate ambiguity is the beating heart of classical liberalism and seen as a way holding the line between tyranny vs mob rule. But its effect is simply to keep the status quo in place. This dubious magic trick (once described as the manufacturing of consent) has apart at the seams to be replaced by a techno/populist logic that depends on the ‘manufacture of dissent’. None of this hall of mirrors would matter if we were not facing a climate emergency that needs decision, action and immediate deep change. I am looking forward to reading the book. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: On the return of the interventionist state
Thanks Paolo for this very interesting article. Just a few questions that I imagine will be answered by reading the book. I am unclear what is meant here by ‘the state’. Is it interchangeable with ‘government’? Does the argument that neoliberalism (market fundamentalism) is being replaced by ‘neostatism’ mean that you see neoliberalism as a kind of polity or set of constitutional arrangements rather than an economic orthodoxy? To take one example the most powerful decision-making body in the EU is the European Commission is comprised of unelected officials whose principal task is to ensure that no national election of a member state will ever overturn the parameters of the neo-liberal orthodoxy. Anyone who doubts this should remember what happened to Greece in the debt crisis of 2009/10. So do you see the Commission as an example of a ‘neostate’? Or is it something else again? Is the EU Commission included in the book? I am curious whether your analysis of the neo-state addresses the current position of ‘liberal democracy’which (for better or for worse) is in a (over used word) crisis. It seems to me that the liberal view of the state continues to trade on the old the increasingly tired old ruse of making a virtue of obscuring the answer to the question, who governs? them or us, people or government. This deliberate ambiguity is the beating heart of classical liberalism and seen as a way holding the line between tyranny vs mob rule. But its effect is simply to keep the status quo in place. This dubious magic trick (once described as the manufacturing of consent) has apart at the seams to be replaced by a techno/populist logic that depends on the ‘manufacture of dissent’. None of this hall of mirrors would matter if we were not facing a climate emergency that needs decision, action and immediate deep change. I am looking forward to reading the book. On 2021-09-14 11:10, Paolo Gerbaudo wrote: Dear All, I would like to share some ideas contained in my new Verso book The Great Recoil, which I think some of you will be interested in. The key argument of the book is that we are moving away from neoliberalism and towards and neo-statism, a return of the interventionist state fundamentally concerned with issues of protection and security (in their manifold, regressive and progressive, manifestations). This neo-statism is visible at different levels: 1) in massive state mobilisation during the pandemic, 2) in the return of deficit spending and some elements of trade protectionism and industrial policy; 3) in the way in which climate change and the green transition seem to call for a return of state dirigisme. This neo-statism should be seen as the ideological (or better meta-ideological) master frame of a new ideological era, comparable to previous ideological eras (social-democratic and neoliberal as the most recent ones). It does not automatically mean a return of socialism or social-democracy. Rather it means that political common sense is changing and moving away from notion of self-regulating markets, forcing both the left and the right to find adaptive positions in this new landscape. The dividing question is who the new post-pandemic state should protect and from what. For the right it is obviously immigrants and foreign forces those that pose a threat, as well as the poor that demand redistribution away from the rich. But also the left is articulating its own discourse of state protection: from the mending of social safety nets, to the focus on health and care, to end with the discourse of safe-guarding democracy by the likes of AOC and Ilhan Omar. While until recently political debate was focused on the question of how should we manage the market, the key question now is how to use the state, with which means and to what ends. This has huge implications for strategy, discourse and practice. Now that the phantasy of self-regulating market and anti-power suspicion has partly dissolved the key question becomes what should be done with the state, and how its complicity in massive social inequality should be addressed. I hope this is of interest. I'd be glad to hear your ideas on this and particularly to what extent you agree with this diagnosis of neo-statism acquiring centre-stage in post-pandemic politics and what the implications may be. For more information on the book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3774-the-great-recoil Best, Paolo # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of
Re: Let the Archive Speak
Hi Ryan, thanks for the encouraging words and the link to what looks a very useful book by Debbie Gould.. I know it a little but have not yet fully engaged but I will. There is one general point I would add to what I took from Schulman's book and that is the answer to the question of what makes an archive into a 'living archive' and that is the act of actively reading and re-reading. Schulman does this by returning to certain questions around 'how happens'. And in relationship to this the importance of periods of latency. Schulman quotes second wave feminist philosopher Ti-Grace Atkinson observing in 1968 that women in society can only progress when men progress. If men do not move, women remain suppressed. Atkinson goes on to assert that the great leaps of progress cannot be forced they depend on the zeitgeist. But that the interim periods of latency are vitally important where small groups of people continue to practice what Gary Indiana called the “politics of repetition,” trying to stop the rate of giveback and regression. So when the zeitgeist moment hits -and AIDS activism was one of those moments- there is a mass surge forward as a movement forces the creation of social space where persistent voices can finally be heard. Best David On 2021-07-30 18:50, Ryan Griffis wrote: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Schulman’s book and personal reflections on ACT-UP’s significance, David. It definitely sounds like it’s worth checking out, even if one has read/viewed much of the other accounts of ACT-UP, so I really appreciate your taking the time to post this! I also wanted to make a plug for another, slightly older (and more academic) book by Debbie Gould - ”Moving Politics” that also focuses on the role of affect in ACT-UP and AIDS activism, just in case others are interested in more reading. A PDF is even available here: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0412da8a40_deborah-gould-moving-politics-emotion-and-act-ups-fight-against-aids.pdf Take care, Ryan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Let the Archive Speak
Let the Archive Speak All this week I’ve been reading (or rather devouring) Sarah Schulman’s book ‘Let the Record Show’ A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1983, a stunning history of the New York branch of the legendary campaigning ‘AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power” (ACT UP). Sometimes described as the ‘mother ship' of global AIDS activism. ACT UP pioneered uniquely powerful and expressive forms of activism that changed policies and saved lives at the height of the AIDS crisis in New York and in the process forever transformed the art of campaigning. Schulman’s book succeeds not just in telling the story of the movement but also embodies ACT UP’s experimental urgency, spirit and inventive methods. The book is both an extraordinary stand-alone document and the culmination of a long-term archival project, ‘The ACT UP oral History Project’ which Schulman and Jim Hubbard have been working on since 2001. There are good practical reasons to take note of the book’s archival dimension, as the printed document is constructed around multiple interviews with key ACTUPers drawn directly from the archive. And rather than quoting the interviews in extenso they are made more readable and by being paraphrased and accompanied with the author’s contextual reflections. However critical readers will wish to go to the source of these interpretations so access to full transcripts of the interviews can be downloaded from www.actuporalhistory.org allowing close readers and researchers to go back and forth between book and the archive. Moreover, the archive also includes five minutes of streaming videos of each of the 188 people profiled. The complete movies can be viewed in person at the New York and San Francisco Public Libraries. Finally, a vital aspect of the book are the many acts of remembrance that intersperse the interviews with affecting ‘recollections’ of individual ACTUPers who did not survive by those who knew them. The cumulative impact over the 700 pages is one of both apocalyptic loss coupled with an abiding sense of immediacy and relevance to the wider campaigning necessities of today. --- My single fast only reading scratches the surface but while its fresh in my mind I thought it worth sharing some notes and sharing a number of key points that still resonate. There are many more. * The AIDS crisis is not over- By definition historians attend to the past, but as Schulman sees it the AIDS epidemic is not over. Just from a local perspective of the hundred thousand New Yorkers who have died of AIDS, 1779 died in 2017. We can only wonder how many would have been saved had a fraction of the resources thrown ad Covid would have been directed to HIV AIDS. * Purpose continued relevance*- Schulman’s declared purpose “is not to look back with nostalgia, but rather to help contemporary and future activists learn from the past so that they can do more effective organising in the present. We wanted to show, clearly what we had witnessed in ACT UP: that people from all walks of life, working together can change the world. * Disrupting the trajectory of gay male history*- “AIDS activism’s most radical and socially revolutionary vision evolved when white men were in the same boat as everybody else who had AIDS: desperate. Because they were desperate, they acted differently. They listened. Anyone with no way out looks for a way out. And it is only in that moment that their prejudices, conventions and egos are up for grabs. Schulman analyses a previously ignored story of women, race and drugs and housing with regards to the AIDS crisis, and most of all, the power of groups over individuals. Schulman used the ACT UP Oral History Project to unearth real lessons for the future, which is our present. In the process and came to understand that, for one thing, AIDS activist history has been mistakenly placed overwhelmingly in the trajectory of gay male history. Many individual gay men with expertise in business organisation, public relations, advertising, graphic design, and health care often had never thought deeply about how to organise a popular meeting, or how to build an action outside of established institutional frameworks. This combination of shock at how little their lives meant to powerful institutions, and the need to quickly create a functional grassroots movement, meant that lesbians with tested organising experience from the lesbian and feminist movements were- for once – noticed, needed and very welcome. * Art* The book’s headline title ‘Let the Record Show’ refers to the name of an installation placed in the street facing window of the New Museum in SoHo, in the form of a visual display/montage with images associating hostile socio/political actors of the time with the war criminals tried at Nuremberg. The installation (or display) was by the artist’s collective that later became Gran Fury and
What ACT UP’s successes can teach today’s protest movements
This is article and book is a great reminder of the amazing ACT UP movement . Attending their meetings in Cooper Union in the early 90s was one of the most memorable moments of my life. It had impact on the fight against AIDS it also changed people's ideas about everything that activism could be. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/08/act-up-protest-movements-us-direct-action What ACT UP’s successes can teach today’s protest movements Sarah Schulman Our group, which forced the US to step up in fighting Aids in the 80s and 90s, favoured direct action over debate As we move into a new phase of the Covid crisis, it is hard to miss how the pandemic reveals the fissures in our society. Communities and countries of poor people of colour cannot access vaccines that are readily available to the most powerful and protected. Covid has been compared to Aids, but today’s pandemic is a collective public experience while Aids – especially during its height – was a private nightmare. Our group, ACT UP, fought to get it out into the public consciousness. Five years after science first noticed the pattern of illness that would come to be known as Aids, 40,000 people were dead in the United States and the government and pharmaceutical companies were doing nothing. ACT UP (The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in 1987 to use direct action to end the Aids pandemic. I was an active member of this grassroots political organisation, having covered the crisis as a journalist in New York since the early 80s. In many ways, Aids activism was one of the most successful social movements in recent history. In its first six years of existence, ACT UP transformed how pharmaceutical companies approached Aids medications by pushing for the use of unregulated treatments, and forced the government to make experimental drugs available to people who needed them. ACT UP won huge victories for women and poor people when we forced authorities to make needle exchange legal in New York City. ACT UP fought for four years to expand the government’s definition of Aids to include women’s symptoms, so that women could also qualify for benefits and get access to experimental treatments. ACT UP confronted the Catholic church when it tried to stop condom distribution in public schools, started housing for homeless people with Aids, and transformed how queer people and people with Aids were depicted in the media. I was a rank-and-file member, attending the major actions, going to meetings, living inside the group’s counter culture, and getting arrested twice: first at “Trumpsgiving” where we sat in at Trump Towers demanding housing for homeless people with Aids, and then on the “Day of Desperation” when ACT UP protested against the first Gulf war by occupying Grand Central Station and interrupting television news programmes, chanting: “Fight Aids, not Arabs.” Although I was an experienced activist from the women’s reproductive rights movement of the 1970s and 80s, I had never been in an organisation with so many resources, that was able to be so optimally effective, determining our agenda by making the needs of people with Aids its central drive. It is very difficult to access activist histories, and that is why my new book, Let the Record Show, is not rooted in nostalgia. Instead I interviewed 188 surviving members of ACT UP over 18 years and collated the most important strategies and tactics, many of which can be of use today. The biggest takeaways for today’s protest movements from ACT UP’s legacy are: it was not a consensus-based movement, not everyone had to agree on a strategy or action; a direct action movement, the needs of its members determined its agenda; while sectional interests were not allowed to get in the way of the aims of the organisation. ACT UP was solution-focused in its approach; eschewed corporate and government funding and raised its money primarily through community-based fundraising such as selling highly creative T-shirts and visual artwork. We were not afraid to proactively challenge the institutions comprising the power structure it fought against. There was no time for theoretical debate. As one of the leaders, Maxine Wolfe, would often say: theory “emerged” from action. As ACT UP moved forward with a campaign, questions would emerge about how to do the action, and that is when people’s values would cohere. But there was no time wasted on debate that had no real-world application. To this end, women and people of colour in ACT UP did not stop the action to do “consciousness raising” for men or white people on sexism and racism. After all, you can spend your life trying to change one person and fail. Instead, they marshalled the ample resources of the larger organisation to run campaigns that benefited women and people of colour with HIV. Decisions did not have to be unanimous and people did not have to agree. There
Re: Democracy Net Zero
On 2021-06-02 18:54, Ryan Griffis wrote: Hi all. This is maybe jumping the tracks of this thread started by David's essay, or maybe it’s actually bringing it back online… not sure. But, Patrick’s anecdote about verbalizing the urgency of the climate catastrophe is something many of us here, I’m sure, relate to. Hi Ryan et al. Thanks for all the reflections and informative links.. For clarification around the text Writing Net Zero Democracy was driven by a need to understand in broad terms, the big changes in the underlying political logic of today's liberal democracies. And most importantly how these changes affect our capacity to avert climate catastrophe. For what its worth, my own belief is that action and change can’t happen without experiments that break out of the rigidities of a limited view of what democracy can be. The reference to Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ (apart from the intrinsic importance of her work) was to compare the way it was received and its impact in an era in which agreement between ideological opponents was sometimes possible to our own age. Today a relatively new political grammar that clusters around the structuring polarities of technocracy and populism appears to make agreement on anything between opponents impossible. The underlying argument of the piece is that whatever form our practice takes needs to take account of this new political grammar even as we seek to resist its logic. And that new democratic experiments operating within this logic must above all have a direct impact on decision making in relationship to the climate emergency. This is why I underscored the impact of the recent French Climate assembly and the resistance it has generated to the way Macron has broken his commitments and diluted the measures proposed by the assembly that he himself convened. There is much to be learned by what is unfolding in France as part of the wider process of cognitive mobilisation. Whether in the numerous experiments in participatory deliberative democracy around the world or ‘evidential realist’ investigative art movements that can be seen partnering important forms of on-line investigative activism (Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture). But a cognitively mobilised society also includes the toxic conspiracy narratives of the likes of QAnon.. whose followers also see themselves as independent thinkers and researchers. And like Wu Ming 1 recommended we must never simply dismiss or debunk these narratives but always look for the kernel of truth around which conspiracy fantasies invariably form.. Best David Garcia # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Telematics to Teletrust
Telepresence to Teletrust Call for Expressions of Interest to Participate in Day 2 of an Online Symposium 2021 The Telepresence to Teletrust Symposium is a two-day event focusing on the ‘third space’ between tangible and mediated presence’. The event takes place on-line on 8-9 July 2021 and is organised by EMERGE a research centre based at Bournemouth University Day 1 is open to the public to enjoy presentations from a rich list of expert speakers below. Day 2 is reserved for a limited number of participants interested in participating in workshops that take a ‘deep dive’ into the subject and designed to expand and intensify research opportunities in this field. Please take a look at the outline of the symposium’s principal aims below. If you care to participate then send an expression of interest with a brief summary (200-500 words) of how your research or practice relates to the themes. Please send your expressions of interest to: telepresence2teletr...@gmail.com Password: 2Teletrust! -- Telepresence to Teletrust Live telepresence through new platforms such as Zoom, Teams, Facetime, Jitsi etc have become fully embedded in our lives. Like it or not this way of being together is here to stay. In the post-Covid push for a zero-carbon economy, international travel will be radically curtailed and remote working will become if not the norm then far more common. Welcome to a world of virtual assemblies and blended communications. This seminar aims to recuperate the rich resource of spatial and temporal experimentation that artists and creative researchers have developed over many years. Our conviction is that these experiments will help us move towards richer and more embodied forms of virtual encounter. In addition we aim to use the event to crystalise these ambitions in the form of proposals for exhibitions and/or publishable texts, critical primers, a phenomenology of Telematics. The talks and presentations are encouraged in but not limited to of the themes of embodiment, society, aesthetics and politics, refracted through the lens of the following questions: • How is the proliferation telepresence changing what it means to be reflexively ‘present’ to one another? • what scope might there be to shape new directions for these platforms that go beyond the ghostly dance of endless ‘talking-heads’? • How we are to avoid the emergence new forms of alienation? • Given that billions of live feeds can be seen as just one more stage in a process of endless fragmentation what are the possibilities for creating a third space between tangible and mediated presence, stepping outside the usual binaries of the real and the virtual? • How do we provoke creative responses that break the frame and go beyond the limitations of existing platforms? Practical Information Description of the Symposium Day 1 in which principal speakers and presentations will be followed by panels and Q Day 2 in which intensive workshops will aim to generate chapter proposals for a critical primer on Telepresence. There will also be a facilitated workshop asking participants to use the one of the existing teleconferencing platforms in imaginative, anarchic, chaotic, collaborative, and unexpected ways modelling new modes of talking and thinking about Telepresence." Confirmed speakers: * Prof. Caroline Nevejan, Chief Science Officer City of Amsterdam www.nevejan.org http://openresearch.amsterdam/ https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/n/e/c.i.m.nevejan/c.i.m.nevejan.html?cb * Prof Paul Sermon, University of Brighton, PI on a UKRI/AHRC project working on the very thing… UKRI/AHRC COVID-19 Response Project: ‘Collaborative Solutions for the Performing Arts: A Telepresence Stage’ http://paulsermon.org/pandemic-encounters/ https://thirdspacenetwork.com/pandemic-encounters/ * Ghislaine Boddington is a Reader in Digital Imersion Reader, Digital Immersion - University of Greenwich - Creative Director, body>data>space and Women Shift Digital- The Internet of Bodies - Keynote Speaker and Studio Expert, BBC Digital Planet - BBC World Service * Dr Atau Tanaka, Professor of Media Computing Goldsmiths, University of London PI for AHRC project Hybrid Live https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FV009567%2F1 * Ali Hossaini, Co-director of National Gallery X, online gallery . https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/national-gallery-x * Professor Maria Chatzichristodoulou Associate Dean Research, Business & Innovation Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media (IJPADM) # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact:
Re: Democracy Net Zero
Hi Ryan, yes I take your point that calling Silent Spring 'fiction' when maybe the word fable might have been more appropriate was a mistake. I guess this usage followed without enough reflection on from work I have been doing over the last few years around the idea of 'fiction as method' https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/events/asif/. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fiction-method This particularly applied to an exhibition I curated in 2017/18 called 'How Much of this is Fiction'. Which worked with artists whose work used simulations or hoaxes to satirise or un-veil hidden political realities.https://www.fact.co.uk/event/how-much-of-this-is-fiction That said I was probably quite clumsy in the way I characterised Carson's ground breaking work. Best David On 2021-05-30 18:52, Ryan Griffis wrote: Thanks for this David! Minor point: "Silent Spring" is not a work of fiction in any sense of the word; the short first chapter "Fable for Tomorrow," is, as its title suggests, a fable (of a "town that does not actually exist"). That chapter is obviously a literary device that establishes the stakes up front and in an accessible and compressed manner, but I wouldn't use it to classify the rest of the book as even "creative nonfiction." The book is otherwise a work of reportage, probably *the* model for popular contemporary climate/science journalists such as Elizabeth Kolbert who rely on a combination of first-person observations, interviews, and syntheses of scientific papers and policy documents. Unfortunately, it's still deeply relevant 50 years later... Take care all, Ryan "To get a comparative sense of where we currently stand its useful to contrast today?s environmental politics with the political impact of Rachel Carson?s ?Silent Spring? published in 1962. As is well known this was an account of an imaginary community afflicted by environmental calamity. Although a fiction the narrative drew on detailed evidence from events that had already actually happened in a number of separate incidents. Carson had simply and brilliantly drawn these threads together into a worst-case scenario." # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Democracy Net Zero
Full text: http://new-tactical-research.co.uk/blog/net-zero-democracy/ Net Zero Democracy “by the end of the twentieth century, the era of party democracy had effectively passed: although parties themselves remain they have become so disconnected from wider society and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form” (Peter Mair, Governing the Void, 2013) So what logic, if any, is governing today's void so eloquently described in Peter Mair’s classic? It is the ‘epistemic turn’ that is fast becoming the ascendent political paradigm of our age. Manifestations of this new logic operate at every level of power from national political parties at the apex of electoral success to the back alleys of the internet spawning progressive evidential art and activist networks bubbling alongside sulphuric conspiracy cults and much else besides. This relatively new political grammar is founded on a growing consensus on the need to give a central place to ‘knowledge’ in what we take democratic politics to be. But there are in play very different understandings of what constitutes knowledge or truth for the structuring polarities of today’s politics: *populism* and *technocracy*. Although populists and technocrats are often seen as pitted against each other Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (1) have persuasively argued that the populist and the technocrat have an underlying affinity in that both associate politics with a kind of truth. For the populist truth lies with ‘the people’ in popular common sense, in folksonomies, in the wisdom of the crowds, frequently channelled through leaders who claim to know what the (ordinary) people think and believe. Whilst for the technocrat the truth is located in the evidence, expertly interpreted in order to arrive at the appropriate policy outcome. It is this underlying affinity that allows populism and technocracy to fuse into ‘technopopulism’. This recent synthesis paradoxically claims to simultaneously represent ‘the people’ whilst also draping itself in a mantle of superior technocratic competence. Macron’s En Marche, the Italian 5Star movement (M5S) and Boris Johnson’s freshly purged Conservative party are all contrasting examples of the way the technopopulist paradigm is playing out in electoral terms. It is this form of politics that currently governs the ideological vacuum at the heart of societies typified by fragmented, individualised and weakened class affiliations. It is not enough however to see this new logic only in terms of the hollow superstructure of electoral politics. The sustaining vitality of the epistemic turn originates in a wider set of prevailing social processes that can be brought together under the umbrella term ‘cognitive mobilisation’. We return to this aspect of the story later. The Spring is Still Silent What gives these questions so much urgency is that it is by no means clear that our current democracies are capable of rising to the herculean challenge of tackling the climate emergency. Particularly when autocratic regimes, most notably China are challenging the West by selling themselves as pragmatic alternatives to the chaos of liberal democracies. To get a comparative sense of where we currently stand its useful to contrast today’s environmental politics with the political impact of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ published in 1962. As is well known this was an account of an imaginary community afflicted by environmental calamity. Although a fiction the narrative drew on detailed evidence from events that had already actually happened in a number of separate incidents. Carson had simply and brilliantly drawn these threads together into a worst-case scenario. Amazingly within a short time ‘Silent Spring’ had come to the attention of Kennedy who referred her conclusions to the Presidential Advisory Committee on pesticides in 1963. “Their report eventually found that Carson’s warnings were largely sound [… ] and a decade later the use of DDT was banned.” Another land-mark moment occurred in 1970, when during Richard Nixon’s first term the Clean Air Act was passed in the Senate by a vote of 73-0. Unanimity on any issue, above all an environmental one, is almost unimaginable in the current climate”.2 This obvious case of deterioration in liberal democracy is starkly underscored by the salutary fact that Richard Nixon was able to achieve more in environmental policy than Obama. Anyone today who is looking hopefully towards the Biden administration will not be reassured by recent interviews with climate czar, John Kerry making it clear that too much of the administration’s strategy is being premised on technological fixes that do not yet exist. In some ways more insight into the problems and possibilities of today’s environmental politics can be found in the
Re: International anti slavery BLM
Hi I think that some attention needs to be paid to some institutional changes that occurred in the Netherlands (I don't live there anymore so some of this maybe behind the curve). Out of the anti-modern art blood bath of recent years in NL that was concurrent with the populist ascendancy. This saw the defunding of historically important contemporary art provision such as De Appel and Montevideo/Time Based Arts and many others. Into the vacuum of public provision a number of new project spaces arose.. one of a number is Framer Framed https://framerframed.nl/en/ that began as a research project founded on critical museology with a specific post-colonial narrative and a program of exhibitions that runs counter to the protocols of legitimisation and other forms of social filters that constitute the international art scene. Framer Framed for one has received structural funding that would have been unthinkable in an earlier age.. so just maybe paradoxically something progressive emerged out of the institutional decimation. But I am sure others on the list who live in NL might have more up to date detail Best David Garcia On 2021-05-20 03:51, Molly Hankwitz wrote: hi I am frequently cranky about US and Europe and have Europe envy but that might be nostalgic, but today I find this article below on this big show opening in the Netherlands about artifacts stolen from colonial people and the whole thing about giving them back...and I’m following this story with great interest. I had read about the Dutch govt giving back stuff they’d pillaged. Just as assists are becoming so invisible, right? I teach in Art History and the post-colonial discourse has only just begun to heat up after last summer and the civil rights movement. Kathy High had sent me a document called Decentering Whiteness and I’ve shared it to my colleagues. Its’s focused upon design. But, wondering what other strategies are being used in your worlds to counteract Western imperialist history? Maybe there are more bridges between our continents...all this scholarship about the slave trade links us undisputedly, and now to think that BLM would be influential Holland. I’m sorry if that is no longer the name. I have often been jealous that European countries are able to change their names. Molly https://apnews.com/article/europe-race-and-ethnicity-slavery-global-trade-health-bc419a8e4b3c5abed828378ced37fca8 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: 3 or 4 good links on NFTs
But when a supermodel is doing tactical media that's far more compelling than all of nettime combined, and writing about it in ways that radiate relevance to issues that are (let's say) less 'pale, male, and stale,' it's time for a rethink. I found Ted's list of articles is very useful (thanks). Particularly Emily Ratajkowski's extraordinary text 'The Cut' on her struggle to regain control of her own image. And the wider exasperated challenge for us to work harder to break out of our cognitive and political confinement is well taken. So in this spirit I suggest that the process should start by acknowledging that reducing Ratajkowski's brilliant essay to "supermodel doing tactical media..'is really "not ok" (at least give her name!). Apart from also being a serious actor and a fine essayist Ratajkowski also studied fine art at UCLA. Her article makes clear that this education meant that her encounter with Richard Prince's work was mediated through her knowledge of its Warholian ethos (and as it later turned out she was able to use her erudition to diagnose an acute moral vacuum). So my point is that there is more than a hint of a further step in a process of 'objectifying' Ratajkowski going on in Ted's commentary. So yes agreed, less 'pale, male and stale' please. David Garcia (1) How many layers of copyright infringement are in Emily Ratajkowski’s new NFT? Ratajkowski trolls an art troll Jacob Kastrenakes Apr 24, 2021 https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/24/22399790/emily-ratajkowski-nft-christies-copyright-nightmare-richard-prince note the link to her essay "Buying Myself Back When does a model own her own image?" (Sept. 15, 2020) https://www.thecut.com/article/emily-ratajkowski-owning-my-image-essay.html (2) The Downward Spiral: Popular Things Dean Kissick (n.d.) https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/downward-spiral-popular-things-dean-kissick (3) The One Redeeming Quality of NFTs Might Not Even Exist Kal Raustiala and Christopher Jon Sprigman April 14, 2021 https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/nfts-digital-art-authenticity-problem.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: 3 or 4 good links on NFTs
But when a supermodel is doing tactical media that's far more compelling than all of nettime combined, and writing about it in ways that radiate relevance to issues that are (let's say) less 'pale, male, and stale,' it's time for a rethink. I found Ted's list of articles is very useful (thanks). Particularly Emily Ratajkowski's extraordinary text 'The Cut' on her struggle to regain control of her own image. And the wider exasperated challenge for us to work harder to break out of our cognitive and political confinement is well taken. So in this spirit I suggest that the process should start by acknowledging that reducing Ratajkowski's brilliant essay to "supermodel doing tactical media..'is really "not ok" (at least give her name!). Apart from also being a serious actor and a fine essayist Ratajkowski also studied fine art at UCLA. Her article makes clear that this education meant that her encounter with Richard Prince's work was mediated through her knowledge of its Warholian ethos (and as it later turned out she was able to use her erudition to diagnose an acute moral vacuum). So my point is that there is more than a hint of a further step in a process of 'objectifying' Ratajkowski going on in Ted's commentary. So yes agreed, less 'pale, male and stale' please. David Garcia # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: deep humanities initiative
On 2021-04-24 08:10, Geert Lovink wrote: And do not forget the term 'deep Europe', one of the many inventions coming from the nettime scene… neither East nor West or continental… https://v2.nl/events/deep-europe/view We could track contemporary versions of the so called ‘depth narrative’ back to structuralists such as Levi Strause arguing that beneath the surface of the social world is a structure or a grammar. As well as seeing the antecedence of Marx and Freud who don’t believe that whats happening on the surface tell you as much as knowing what is going on below in the depths. Geology is the model here for way of knowing about how shape of the landscape came to be the way it is by digging below the surface. This depth narrative has never been without its critics later structuralists and post-structuralists inverted the story by celebrating the surface at the expense of depth. Particularly Barthes who was famously uncomfortable with “meaning”, which he described as heavy, sticky declaring that “I’ve always wanted to be exempt from meaning the way one is exempt from military service”. “ As a realist he recognised that he couldn't escape it altogether but applies for some kind of temporary exemption, a rest from meaning.” From a visual arts standpoint I have always seen this tussle as echoing the arrival of Warhol on the scene whose slippery serious anti-seriousness effectively disrupted Abstract Expressionism’s existentialist claims to psychological depth. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: what does monetary value indicate?
In 1977 the Tate gallery bought the work 'Equivalent VIII' from US minimalist Carl Andre. It was a rectangular arrangement of 120 fire bricks all of which shared the same height, mass and volume and were therefore ‘equivalent’ to each other. Andre used common industrial materials that could be bought anywhere and assembled by anyone. And in this case it was bought by the Tate for £2,297. Even in those days, this wasn’t huge money for a museum to pay for an art work but the scandal and general hoo haa was huge at the time and to this day holds a special place in UK tabloid culture as the ultimate signifier of art world bullshit. “Two grand for a pile of bricks!” Like the NFT discussions Equivalent VIII also revolved around and raised questions of provenance. Might, someone not have secretly substituted another set of fire bricks for Andre’s original ? How could we ever know whether we were experiencing the original Andre? Etc etc. Signed certificates by the artist were the metadata of the day. Although he denied it the fuss might well have delighted Andre who as a Marxist had at some point had advocated selling art by weight. And in truth the politics of the best art of that era was the very opposite of the pro market obsession of the NFT venture. It was best captured by a book, Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Artwork from 1966 to 1972. From the book’s title to the way its contents were arranged it shares the bare faced literalness of Andre’s work. And as her introduction makes clear the works represented were valued by Lippard in part because they embodied the impulse to explode any possibility of entering the market place on terms that allowed the works to function as market tokens or as “exchange value”. It was a different time. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism
Very much looking forward to this discussion... The approach of Q's followers (along with myriad other conspiracy theorists) reflects the Ninth lesson from historian Timothy Snyder’s text ‘On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the 20th Century’ which begins with the sentence: ‘Investigate. Figure things out for yourself.’ Worryingly that is precisely what Q's followers feel they are doing. The epistemology of these movements could be characterised as a hermeneutics of un-quenchable suspicion in which “every official narrative and mainstream institution is suspect […] and in which real knowledge is produced by like-minded strangers working together on the internet “to do their own research”.” These are potent grass roots research orientated sub-cultures who experience the sheer excitement of feeling that they are unmasking a world of lies and revealing through their own research efforts a network of hidden causes. This fact that makes it particularly hard terrain those on the left to contest. Although not exactly an activist I find it useful to recall Roland Barthes's evolution thinker from the early days as an unmasker of 'mythologies' to a later understanding that you can’t get rid of a mythology by telling or demonstrating that it’s a 'myth'. It can only ever be replaced it with a better myth. Faith in evidence and exposure is not enough. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Thoughts on coups
On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:20 PM Sean Cubitt wrote: ‘The unthinkable has to be thought.’ Sean Cubitt ‘An eco-state’ Brian Holmes The wretchedness of Covid has gifted one important good. It is easier to *think the unthinkable* as the unthinkable has already happened. The revelation I’m referring to is not the pandemic (that was extensively pre-mediated) but rather to the extraordinary degree of latent human agency exhibited in the response. The trouble is that we are in immediate danger of frittering this new knowledge away in our rush to snap back the old normal. I don’t want to sentimentalise the plague but it has radically opened up our sense of what we are collectively capable of. If any serious individual in late February had argued that under conditions, other than war, that wealthy technologically advanced states were capable of shutting down 80% of the global economy, furloughing large swathes of the workforce along with 1.4 billion students and in the process bringing mass air transportation to a grinding halt, the proposition would not just have been dismissed it would simply not even have been heard. As the usually sober and measured political economist Helen Thomas declared in a recent podcast "We have to face up to the fact that we have been through something, as a world,.. that in some sense was beyond our imaginations in the west at the beginning of this year." The appearance of this degree of agency lead the other participant in the discussion, Adam Tooze to declare this to be -THE shock discovery of 2020- “hands down, flat out, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened in modern economic history.” All of which forces us to ask whether or rather how the same level of agency can be made available to address the far more profound and existential threat of the climate emergency? And why is it that in comparison with Covid the ecological crisis yields little more than a collective shrug of the shoulders ? On the surface the reason for this is obvious. Covid is an imminent threat of death. Everyone rich and poor alike has been touched by the virus in some way. In comparison the threat to life through climate damage appears diffuse and distant with the gravest risks in the short term likely to be bourn by others. But its clear that this explanation is flawed when we recall that it is equally hard to make the argument that we are neglecting treatments and diagnosis of other fatal diseases likely to claim more lives than Covid. It seems that for reasons we don’t full understand we remain uniquely hypnotised by this virus. Perhaps its partly the element of surprise. "Its just not something we ever imagined dying from". At least some aspects of the problem will be related to how knowledge circulates and delivered which in this case appears to have resolved into that most reductive of metrics; the ritual of the nightly Covid death toll. So must we conclude that only fear of imminent death provides the communicative apparatus able to create the appropriate level of urgency ? What would that look like? Nightly briefings on the increasing number of wild fires, floods and famines delivered from behind lecterns by worried looking ministers flanked by climate scientists.? Merely describing the scenario renders it immediately laughable but as we seek to rise to Brian Holmes’ challenge of creating an ‘eco state’ what would the alternatives look like ? Just a month ago the scientific consensus was there was no way back to the pre- Covid life. The best we could hope for was a combination of increasingly effective treatments combined with partially effective vaccines (like annual flu jabs) all of which would mitigate but not eliminate the virus. The oft-repeated mantra was ‘there is no silver bullet’. But for once it appears scientific consensus was wrong. The vaccines look like being closer to being a ‘silver bullet’ that we had a right to expect. The ubiquitous cliché “the new normal” has been excitedly replaced by simply “getting back to normal” albeit darkly laced with the likelihood of mass unemployment. We already see the ‘snap back” has begun as cities in China are roaring back into frenetic production encouraged by the regime’s rampant state managed capitalism. The likelihood is that we will not be far behind. But we must not forget that what we have learned means the terms of reference for these arguments have changed and radical action harder to dismiss Nothing should detract from an extraordinary scientific and humanitarian achievement. But amidst the triumphalism we should not forget the widespread though largely unarticulated expectation that the difficult task of learning to live to with the virus would have provided the much needed social and psychological apparatus to help us make the sacrifices and the investment needed to begin mend the task of mending the damage crisis. David Garcia #
Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)
This recent piece in the New Yorker (below) shows that Felix's anxieties are well unfounded. And ably facilitated by the rise and rise of Don Junior the once despised prodigal son who has morphed into the formidable and terrifying heir apparent's fascistic rants about 'total war', aided and abetted by the supine Republican establishment. Is it too alarming to imagine that US democracy is at risk of going from an extended midlife crisis into a terminal end game? The coming weeks will test the republic's constitutional arrangements as never before. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-far-could-republicans-take-trumps-claims-of-election-fraud On 13 Nov 2020, at 10:10, Felix Stalder wrote: Hi everyone, I must admit, amidst post-terror assault on civil liberties and covid cases spiraling out of control here in Austria, the US election drama has moved a bit lower in my attention, but not that much. From what I understand, the numbers show that Trump lost. Period. No recount will change that. But, the game of the Republicans is to create so much doubt about the fairness of the elections (without any evidence) to make it impossible to certify them in time. Frivolous lawsuits are great at gumming things up. This would then allow the Republican dominated legislatures in swing states to appoint their own electors which would bring Trump the majority. In the mean time, the minister of defense, who previously refused to send in troops against mostly peaceful protestors, has been fired and replaced with a loyalist. Apparently, similar moves are in the wings for the FBI and CIA. I know, Trump is often portrayed as an incompetent child, and the strategy is totally outlandish, but the Republican party has shown to be a pretty ruthless and successful power machine playing both a short and a long game, and it's exactly the outlandishness of the strategy that is its strongest point. In the mean time, the democrats pretend all of this to be irrelevant (an 'embarrassment' at worst) and happily appoint a transition team full of corporate insiders like it's 1992. Am I totally misreading the situation? Felix -- | || http://felix.openflows.com | | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt | # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: A question in earnest (Max Herman)
Hi Max et al, In terms of how things look from here, Biden as a candidate cuts a distinctly unimpressive figure. Not only is he the ultimate compromise candidate (a political 'weather vane' as Brian Holmes put it) but also his age and frailty stands in stark contrast to Trump’s remarkable vigour for a 74 year old. Whenever Biden appears, I find myself holding my breath hoping he won’t stumble verbally or literally. But the speech he gave in Pennsylvania on Tuesday was (to my European ears) an uncharacteristically strong performance. It laid out with genuine force and clarity what was at stake. And the sad fact is that his strongest card is that; *whatever you think of him he is not the worst that can happen to American democracy.* The core of his pitch was to an insistence that this MUST be the moment of reckoning on racism in the US (as it must for us in Europe) combined with making the horror of Charlottesville the centrepiece of his speech by declaring that it was the Charlottesville that made him decide to run.. He made clear without equivocation who the enemy are, by painting a powerful picture of the very worst "Neo Nazis, white supremacists, and the KK coming out of the fields with torches alight, veins bulging. Chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the 30s. It was hate on the march. In the open. In America.” So responding to the question that prompted this thread, from this side of the pond this election cannot achieve the best but it can and MUST avoid the worst in the form of another 4 years of Trump. Those who live in the US should be in no doubt that though diminished the US still retains an enormous grip on the global political imaginary. And Trump's malign presence squats like a huge toad blocking progress. When he goes the relief though short lived will be deep and palpable. PS I suspect that 2 things that we tend to miss on this side of the pond is 1.importance of control of the supreme court in US political life.. and 2. The power of incumbency for a 1st term president. 1. Agreement over the importance of supreme court appointments is perhaps the one remaining thing that unites the warring tribes within the main parties. And though Trump's real support in the Republican party is thin his perceived success in appointing conservative justices to the supreme court could help him hold some of his fraying alliances within the party.. 2. Those of us not following US politics closely forget just how rare it is for a challenger to successfully defeat an incumbent. Trump is the 45th president and in the 20th century there have been just 4 first term presidents ejected from office at the hands of the electorate (William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, George. H. W. Bush.) The incumbent has enormous resources at their disposal to dominate the news cycle, make eye catching foreign policy interventions and generally exploit the optics of the White House and the Rose Garden as backdrop. Trump has not been shy of exploiting these advantages to the full and beyond! But there are signs that he has overplayed his hand. And that Biden’s low key start may have inadvertently been a bit of a ‘rope-a-dope’ tactic tempting a desperate Trump (with creditors waiting their moment) to punch himself out too early. Moreover occasionally incumbency is a disadvantage. Hoover and Carter respectively faced the great depression of the 30s and the great recession of the 1970s and it is very likely that Trump would have been in a strong position to roundly defeat Biden were it not for Covid. The very darkest of dark clouds can have a silver haired lining. David Garcia # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
Thanks Felix, yes I take your point about the importance of adjusting our/my frame of reference. And yes I got a bit 'up myself' so would like to apologise to Ingrid for (Ted's term) the snarky reaction. Best David On 2020-09-28 15:51, Felix Stalder wrote: Hi David, Nobody doubts the difficulties you and many, many others are facing right now and there is no use in competing in suffering. It's something we all want less of. I think the point re: Couldry and Schneir, was that already before Covid-19, many people did not have the luxury of planning their lifes against a stable horizon. I've always been amazed at my own capacity (more structural than personal, obviously) to be able to deliver on a promise to be at a particular spot, at a particular hour, far into the future, across a large distance. But that has always been a rather unusual position. And under Covid, it's downright rare. But what struck me as really strange in this article is that everything that Covid does in terms of making the future less certain, climate change will do at orders of magnitude greater. Of course, many people are living through climate disaster already, but it will help none that many more will experience it the near future as well. So, I generally think we should adjust our frame of reference to understand the dislocations caused by the pandemic as an instance of more dramatic things to come. Not all of them need to be bad. Felix On 28.09.20 14:22, d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote: Boohoo indeed Ingrid, strange that you think this is a condition only suffered by white males in these weird and particular times. In the UK at least Black and Asian minorities are disproportionally affected by the pandemic and so also highly likely to be disorientated not just in the old but also in wholly new ways. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
Boohoo indeed Ingrid, strange that you think this is a condition only suffered by white males in these weird and particular times. In the UK at least Black and Asian minorities are disproportionally affected by the pandemic and so also highly likely to be disorientated not just in the old but also in wholly new ways. And from the giddy heights of the middle class privileged life (not) my youngest daughter is currently locked down in a small room in her university housing in Scotland unable to leave her room or mingle with fellow students and neither she nor I have any idea what kind of education she will get. There is no horizon as the lock downs will be a feature for a while to come. And along with the parents of colour this worried white parent is on the phone every day struggling to figure out how to help her get through it. But maybe (as Higher Education is also one of your targets) you think she is also one of the privileged whose turn it is to taste a bit of despair. And maybe my white privileged worry for her future is also richly deserved. But your right we could have it a lot worse so lets reach for the world's tiniest violin Boohoohoo David On 2020-09-28 12:40, Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) wrote: Dear David and all, Oh boohoo. Nick Couldry cum suis are rather late to the party of general hopelessness and lack of future perspective that so many others have suffered from for decades already. Who is the 'we' they are talking about - all the white privileged men who could up until recently still believe in the radical progressiveness of higher education and new media technologies? Welcome to the despair of the rest of the world, Nick and Bruce. Cheers, Ingrid. -Original Message- From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org On Behalf Of d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk Sent: Monday, 28 September 2020 10:53 To: Nettime Subject: 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world' Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier's 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world' which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed we are more likely be suffering from the condition of Acedia. A malady of medieval monks described as no longer caring about caring, a feeling of dislocation when all the normal future contexts that give our lives meaning are suspended no longer providing stable temporal horizon. Here is an extract. At the bottom is a link to the full essay. "Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It’s a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice things we regularly do. What’s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones — real though those worries are. It isn’t even the sense that, if we’re really honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty self-indulgent when held up against the urgency of a global pandemic. It is something more troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go on doing much of what for years we’d taken for granted as inherently valuable." "It’s here, moving back to the particular features of the global pandemic, that we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and dislocation so many have been feeling. The source of our current acedia is not the literal loss of a future; even the most pessimistic scenarios surrounding Covid-19 have our species surviving. The dislocation is more subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on which just going on in the present relies. Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive. What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building. That’s what many of us are feeling. That’s today’s acedia." Full essay here... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/opinions/unrelenting-horizonlessness-of-covid-world-couldry-schneier/index.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info:
'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier's 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world' which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed we are more likely be suffering from the condition of Acedia. A malady of medieval monks described as no longer caring about caring, a feeling of dislocation when all the normal future contexts that give our lives meaning are suspended no longer providing stable temporal horizon. Here is an extract. At the bottom is a link to the full essay. "Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It’s a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice things we regularly do. What’s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones — real though those worries are. It isn’t even the sense that, if we’re really honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty self-indulgent when held up against the urgency of a global pandemic. It is something more troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go on doing much of what for years we’d taken for granted as inherently valuable." "It’s here, moving back to the particular features of the global pandemic, that we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and dislocation so many have been feeling. The source of our current acedia is not the literal loss of a future; even the most pessimistic scenarios surrounding Covid-19 have our species surviving. The dislocation is more subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on which just going on in the present relies. Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive. What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building. That’s what many of us are feeling. That’s today’s acedia." Full essay here... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/opinions/unrelenting-horizonlessness-of-covid-world-couldry-schneier/index.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Lev on the embarressment of digital art
Before the digital cultures insurgency of the 1990s the previous decade had seen a similar burst of excitement around so called video art. Like "new media” or digital cultures movement the power of the video moment came from the breadth of its reach and multiple touch points in art, political activism, popular culture through MTV and (later) through camcorder formats like Video Diaries transformed television helping to normalise the idea of TV as a visual medium and participatory sociological medium. Many of todays reality TV formats were pioneered by MTV. Importantly one of the most important (and neglected) contributions of video was to researchers (particularly in the behavioural, sociological a psychological sciences). Child Psychologists like Alison Gopnik argued that for the infant psychology the arrival of video was as important as the introduction of the microscope was for the life sciences. We can see the way that many of todays artist/researchers are building on video’s forensic immediacy notably in the work of the "evidentiary realists" whose broader ambitions and greater technological affordances enable them to escape from the gravitational pull of the art world. What am I getting at? That there is far more at stake in these historical interludes and their momentary but powerful eco-systems than whether or not the art world or some influential figure remains interested or not. Technology's shaping power is not determinism. Like digital media, video had a host of specialist festivals and organisations that sprang up to manage the curatorial challenges of dealing with practices that required new forms of technical expertise and investment. People called themselves (or were designated) video artists and a world of video art galleries and curators appeared and disappeared. I remember arguing early in the life of nettime that we shouldn’t make the same mistake and so should avoid terms like nettart as it was perfectly obvious that no serious artist were any longer calling themselves ‘video artists’. So why should our milieu fall into the same elephant trap? I was probably wrong as the temporary and tactical adoption of labels are necessary communications short-cuts and useful devices in creating temporary whirlpools of interest. Fashion hypes have their uses and mis-uses . It might be a useful moment artists to imagine how we might might usefully mis-apply Clay Shirkey’s memorable aphorism:“communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring”. If we add the words *aesthetically and* to the word *socially* in this sentence we might get to a place outside the circle of Lev’s world weary gloom. David Garcia On 2020-09-21 07:38, Geert Lovink wrote: Great postings, Brian, Molly, John and so many others. Lev or no Lev, the whereabouts of new media arts occupy us here, for a reason. From a political and personal perspective the opening up of a new communication medium offers unheard possibilities. Then things close down and the real struggle starts—in this case against Facebook, Google and other monopolies and state actors that aim to close down the temporary tele-commons that mutlitudes of geeks, artists and activists built up. Dialectics hurt. The problem is here is that, in order for electronic, video, digital, new media net.art to reach wider audiences it has to be become ‘normal’ (and disguise its technical knowledge) like all other art (as defined by galleries, museums and websites with their curators, critics, editors, journalists). Does this also mean that specific institutions created to support the x.art need to disappear? Or renamed? Most new media arts programs have already been closed or renamed. There are less festivals, publications, study (and a related rise of the history industries). Do we still need specific niches or shoud we reinvent ourselves and just work on the urgent issues of our times? This is not such an easy question. If only we could just close down Ars Electronica, ZKM, ISEA (and our own INC first, of course) and then move on… Take about the ‘platform’ question and its relation to current movements such as BLM… Should we just stop discussing internet politics and pretend that is just all a technological given? We are all aware that digital tech, unfortunately, are not merely tools… But who and where can we study its politics (and aesthetics)? Lev wrote about his personal aesthetic experience in the age of the digital default. I do not share the fascination for high-production images. I love noise, experimentations, failures and see them a journeys into the heart of matter: the media question, to understand the essence of form, of the material. good art for me not only tells a story and is political but is at the same time actutely aware of the way in which hardware, software and interfaces and related cultures dictate our ways of seeing. Geert On 21 Sep 2020, at 7:11 am, Brian
Re: This is what fascism looks like
How to survive the American autumn? How to de-nazify the USA? How to set up new local, national and regional systems for the heavy weather that's coming - the heavy weather of the Anthropocene? --- Dear Brian, thank you for rattling our cages with the rage and the terror that runs through every sentence of your tirade… However nn a boring response to your final three questions is to get out the vote. Given that the most terrible short-term outcome is the re-election of the unspeakable Trump. All those who can walk, crawl ride or drive should fight to get out every last single Democrat vote out. No matter how disappointing and uninspiring the Biden/Harris ticket may be we know its not the worst that can happen to the American polity. We know it won't be enough in and of itself "de-nazify the USA" but in terms of your first imperative which is to “survive the American Autumn”, it will at the very least buy a little time for progressive forces to re-group and find new ways to confront the deep reckoning that is upon us all. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
nettime Just Like Us
Just Like Us: From Cyber-Separatism to the Politics of Anyone Can the occupation of the cyber mainstream of the big social media platforms by post 2011 political protesters be seen as the repudiation of the cyber separatism of the Indymedia of the 90s and early Noughties? Could this development be symptomatic a wider -majoritarian turn- of a new generation of activists', encapsulated in the slogan we are the 99%? If true, does this suggest that it may be time to take another look at the new political economies of scale pioneered by the much maligned clicktivists, the massive web based initiatives such as MoveOn and Avaaz as offering important tools in harnessing that most dangerous of all political phantoms; the public? New Sense of the Commons - New Common Sense Last week’s conference Digital Activism, at Kings College London drew a large audience. High expectations of the event were generated (I think) principally because it was convened by Paolo Gerbaudo, whose book Tweets and the Streets, is an insightful account of the assumptions and contradictions surrounding the new practices of protest and politics that he found visiting the three primary locations of protest in the 2011 yearof protest. Based on extensive ethnographic research with extracts frommore than 80 interviews, he structures his account through his encounters with, what he describes as -the tortuous interaction between online communication and on-the-ground organising which characterized the emergence of this movement.- From this research he has made important progress on influential contemporary narratives around horizontalism and leaderless movements, subjecting familiar tropes to sympathetic but critical scrutiny. In any event the only panel (I attended) where these high expectations were met was the panelon Social Networks and Digital Organising. Unsurprisingly this was where Gerbaudo himself made a presentation. His talk was preceded and complemented by a presentation from Marta G. Franco, a journalist, researcher with the grass roots newspaper Diagonal based in Madrid and also a activist with 15-M Movement. On the surface Franco's talk was a basic summary of the role of various apps andother digital tools for activist organization and mobilization. But the core of herpresentation emphasized the way these tools were deployed in a continuationof collective action against evictions. The pragmatic and personal nature of this campaign, often involving neighbors, bolstered her central argument that from the outset the the Spanish Indignados practiceda politics she called the ‘Politics of Anyone’. We are normal people she declaredin Spain as elsewhere the uprisings post crash were characterized by theheterogeneity of the protesters coming from all walks of life. This emphasis on normality was something evident in the Spanish national press coverage of the 2011 which in Spain departed from the usual formulaic reporting of mass protest with its reflexive demonizing of civil disobedience as part of a common impulse to legitimize state violence against protestors.In 2011 the usual process of demonization was largely absent from a broadlysympathetic media marked a phase shift. Franco portrayed this as part of a movement with a desire to depart from previous stereotypes of protest movements as emphasizing sub-cultures and tribalised difference, towards what Franco portrayed as thethe politics of difference towards a new generation keen to identify with the generosity of regular people. What she called the new commonsense. In contrast to the Unlike Us, conference on Social Media in Amsterdam last year The these presentations suggest the obvious inversion to this ethos to: Just Like Us. From Cyber Separatism to the Majoritarian Turn Paolo Gerbaudo's presentation further developed the themes beyond the Spanish context to what has been characterized elsewhere the 'majoritarian turn'. Gerbaudo argues that an important distinction can be made between between the uprisings of 2011 with its predecessor, the anti-globalisation or anti G7 protests of the late 90s and early Noughties and their principal media arm, Indymedia which as he puts it -was not only the voice but also fundamental to the organizational infrastructure- and exemplifying what Gerbaudo refers to as 'Cyber-Separatism, with its commitment to the creation autonomous infrastructure or ‘islands on the net’ , as THE precondition of avoiding capture and complicity with communicative capitalism. As Gerbaudo wrote in the March 2014 edition of Occupy Times At the height of the anti-globalist summit protests, Indymedia became the veritable voice of the anti-globalisation movement and it also constituted a fundamental organizational infrastructure for protestors, with editorial nodes often doubling as political collectives. Besides Indymedia, alternative service providers (ISPs) such as Riseup, Aktivist, Inventati, and Autistici catered for the internal communication needs of the
Re: nettime How Silicon Valley’s CEOs
Re: The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley?s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers? wages By Mark Ames --- This story reinforces the need to focus more analytical energy and imagination on the wider problem of how to re-connect political activism to some form of re-booted labor movement able garner credibility from the workforce in these van garde creative economies exemplified by Silicon Valley. Mass movements of civil disobedience however important are never sufficient to create structural long-term change without the additional power to organise and to withdraw labour en mass. In the wider world nothing has proved more effective in raising the life chances of the mass of people, than the leverage afforded them by the ability to go on strike. And the increasing gulf between the 1% and rest can be traced back directly to the erosion of labor movement and labor power. The symbolic (as opposed to actual) beginnings of which can be traced back, in the US, to Reagan's victory over the air traffic controllers discussed in an earlier nettime post which unfortunately became bogged down in arguments about safety records, when the implications of this struggle went far wider. In a discussion in 2012 with Paul Mason at the LSE, Manuel Castells argued that the new industries would take time to evolve a new kind of labor movement with many trials and many errors ?It took 20-30 years from the arrival of mass industrialization to the point when the union power and the labor movement became part of political institutions?[?]. ?It is a long journey from the minds of people to the institutions of society.? However much we may disagree with Castells's implied faith in networks as the teleogical solution at least his arguments have implications suggesting the need to revive the connection between labor power, networks, political activism. The meaning and historical consequences of directly connecting new forms of labor power to a re-energised democracy seems to be lost at least in Britain as we see the labor party leader, Ed Milliband, currently engaged in a process of 'transforming' (read seeking to further weaken) the structural connection between the UK's union movement and the political labor party. His equivalent to Blair's famous clause 4 moment! Milliband has had to bow to (or worse internalise) the public perception that the power of organised labour is no longer able to innovate and transform individual and collective life chances, unable to re-imagine and re-position themselves in ways likely to attract the support of foot soldiers in the van-garde creative economies exemplified by Siliicon Valley. Let alone address the need for the wider majority of the labor force to find ways to participate in the creative and material benefits of digital industries and cultures. Maybe some workshops or focussed discussions from INC's Money Lab team could help suggest some new ways to make progress on these questions ? d a v i d g a r c i a new-tactical-research.co.uk # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
