Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Florian Cramer]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 7:57 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> What we need, first of all, is a vision so carefully articulated that it
can become a strategy and a calculable plan.
> Exactly that is now emergent. The point is to make it actual. That means,
to make it into the really existing state.

Your wording is interesting, because it connects "emergence" with the
"state". Since the classical concept of emergence evolved around
self-organization, it was decentralist. The state is a (more or less)
centralist concept. The way you put it, it sounds as if you didn't have one
particular state in mind, but a global concept of statehood that can enact
global policies.

Here seems to lie the dilemma, if I'm not mistaken: No decentralist
politics can solve the climate change problem, since decentralization will
always produce incentives to a race to the bottom (of lowering
environmental standards/energy costs to attract capital and/or maintain
current living standards). What is realistically needed is world
governance, in order for it to be effective (more effective than the U.N.,
for example), a world government with direct authority over anything that
concerns the planet's ecology. Neither the anarchist principle of free
association, nor the liberal principle of self-interests balancing out each
other in equilibrium will work, since in the case of the planet, ecological
equilibrium cannot be gained through having opposite interests neutralize
each other, but only through common cause and action.

Such a global teleology is a scary thing. It's prone to result in
eco-fascism or eco-stalinism, with an authoritarian dictate over daily
lives. Even if one ignores the moral issues, it would be prone to power
abuse, misinformed (and therefore even ecologically counterproductive)
top-down decisions, and all the pitfalls and horrors of "wise men's states"
since Plato's Republic.

The concept of socialism creates additional complications, on top of the
above, since socialism is about social and economic justice involving
redistribution of resources. According to everything that I've read as an
amateur on the subject, including alternative economists like Niko Paech, a
global, climate-neutral lifestyle would have to (a) radically localize
production of goods, (b) radically reduce transport/distribution, (c) give
up 24/7 electricity - which, btw., would lead to the end of Internet as we
know it. (A glimpse into such a future is "Low-Tech Magazine", a website
whose editorial content covers all the issues we're discussing here on a
practical level, likely having more to say about them than Nettime:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com . Its server runs on solar power with
regular outages, and its pages have been designed by Roel Roscam Abbing to
use only a minimum amount of kilobytes.) - Combined, factors the (a), (b)
and (c) would make socialist redistribution tricky. A world that seriously
minimizes climate change could easily produce blatant inequality (in regard
to access to resources).

Alternatively, one can draw the conclusion that Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht just
drew in an interview with the German "tageszeitung" (
https://www.taz.de/Archiv-Suche/!5559348/): "As far as evolutionary history
and cosmology are concerned, the end of our species is guaranteed anyway,
despite all the rhetorical fuss regarding the long-term survival of
mankind".

-F

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 7:57 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 9:15 AM Vincent Gaulin 
> wrote:
>
> Where is the actual site of the surplus that intellectuals, protestors,
>> activists, caretakers and laborers draw upon while renovating the new
>> socialist state?
>>
>
>  Are you kidding? The problem of surplus is that there is too much of it.
> The actual site of surplus production is in largely automated mining sites,
> factories and farms around the world. An immense amount of this surplus
> goes either to the global oligarchy or to the military (US in particular).
> And the degree of automation is now rising as AI is rolled out, threatening
> a new unemployment crisis. As for the number of miners/scavengers,
> engineers, and electricians needed to create the solar field that will
> power a future society, they're all needed. Either we convert the energy
> grid to zero carbon over the next two decades or the future turns quite
> ugly indeed.
>
> The two key dangers on the horizon are mass unemployment and climate
> chaos. It's obvious to career bureaucrats and corporate planners that these
> things have to be faced. What's missing is the politics to do so.
>
> I don't think society can be remade in a utopian way where everyone
> behaves morally at a small scale of autonomous rural production. So I
> admire your cult of frugality, Vince, but I don't support it as a
> universal. Far as I can see, very few people want to give up either cities
> or the vast benefits of a global division of labor orchestrated by
> corporations and super-states. However the current configuration of 

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Florian Cramer]

While Zuboff popularized the term "surveillance capitalism" in 2015, she
wasn't the first person who wrote about it. The underlying issues had
already been analyzed in Wendy Chun's "Control and Freedom" from 2008.
Regarding the specific surveillance capitalism of the big social media
companies, Christian Fuchs' 2011 paper "An Alternative View of Privacy on
Facebook" strikes me as notable:

"Abstract: The predominant analysis of privacy on Facebook focuses on
personal information revelation. This paper is critical of this kind of
research and introduces an alternative analytical framework for studying
privacy on Facebook, social networking sites and web 2.0. This framework is
connecting the phenomenon of online privacy to the political economy of
capitalism—a focus that has thus far been rather neglected in research
literature about Internet and web 2.0 privacy. Liberal privacy philosophy
tends to ignore the political economy of privacy in capitalism that can
mask socio-economic inequality and protect capital and the rich from public
accountability. Facebook is in this paper analyzed with the help of an
approach, in which privacy for dominant groups, in regard to the ability of
keeping wealth and power secret from the public, is seen as problematic,
whereas privacy at the bottom of the power pyramid for consumers and normal
citizens is seen as a protection from dominant interests. Facebook's
understanding of privacy is based on an understanding that stresses
self-regulation and on an individualistic understanding of privacy. The
theoretical analysis of the political economy of privacy on Facebook in
this paper is based on the political theories of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt
and Jürgen Habermas. Based on the political economist Dallas Smythe's
concept of audience commodification, the process of prosumer
commodification on Facebook is analyzed. The political economy of privacy
on Facebook is analyzed with the help of a theory of drives that is
grounded in Herbert Marcuse's interpretation of Sigmund Freud, which allows
to analyze Facebook based on the concept of play labor (= the convergence
of play and labor).
Keywords: Facebook; social networking sites; political economy; privacy;
surveillance; capitalism"

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/1/140/htm


-- 
blog: *https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
*
bio:  http://floriancramer.nl


On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 1:38 PM Francis Hunger 
wrote:

> Indirectly related to Morozov's insightful discussion of Zuboffs
> "surveillance capitalism" is my own short blurb on "surveillancism" at
> http://databasecultures.irmielin.org/surveillancism (which I wrote
> without having read Zuboff)
>
> This tries to provide a kind of self-critique of how often discussions of
> that might become interesting, turn to "surveillance" instead. Comments
> would be welcome.
>
> best
>
> Francis
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2019, 9:00 AM Felix Stalder 
>>
>> I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.
>>
>> https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
>
>
> Yes I totally agree. Morozov presents the most important Marxist analyses
> that Zuboff doesn't bother to reference - exactly the ones that have been
> nettime mainstays for 20 years. He also shows the narrowness of an account
> centered only on corporate consumerism, remarking that the resistance and
> transformation Zuboff calls for
>
> " will not win before both managerial capitalism and surveillance
> capitalism are theorized as “capitalism”—a complex set of historical and
> social relationships between capital and labor, the state and the monetary
> system, the metropole and the periphery—and not just as an aggregate of
> individual firms responding to imperatives of technological and social
> change. "
>
> That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth
> reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but it's
> fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go. Morozov has
> written the perfect intro for a critical read of what might become a
> landmark book- if the situation it describes does not again suddenly change
> beyond recognition, as it easily could.
>
> Best, Brian
>
>>
>>
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> --
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>
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Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Florian Cramer]

Postscript to my last posting:

I had forgot to mention Constanze Kurz' and Frank Riegers 2011
German-language book "Die Datenfresser: Wie Internetfirmen und Staat sich
unsere persönlichen Daten einverleiben und wie wir die Kontrolle darüber
zurückerlangen" ("The Data-vores: How Internet companies and the state
swallow up our personal data and how we regain control over it"). Both were
Chaos Computer Club speakers and know their subject inside out, in practice
as well as in theory.

What I find exceptional about this book is how it doesn't simply put the
blame on bad corporate ethics and governance, but reconstructs - with a
small startup company as its scenario -, the Internet industry's systemic
necessity of collecting, mining and selling out customer data (under
real-life profitability pressures).

-F


-- 
blog: *https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
<https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561>*
bio:  http://floriancramer.nl


On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 6:54 PM Florian Cramer  wrote:

> While Zuboff popularized the term "surveillance capitalism" in 2015, she
> wasn't the first person who wrote about it. The underlying issues had
> already been analyzed in Wendy Chun's "Control and Freedom" from 2008.
> Regarding the specific surveillance capitalism of the big social media
> companies, Christian Fuchs' 2011 paper "An Alternative View of Privacy on
> Facebook" strikes me as notable:
>
> "Abstract: The predominant analysis of privacy on Facebook focuses on
> personal information revelation. This paper is critical of this kind of
> research and introduces an alternative analytical framework for studying
> privacy on Facebook, social networking sites and web 2.0. This framework is
> connecting the phenomenon of online privacy to the political economy of
> capitalism—a focus that has thus far been rather neglected in research
> literature about Internet and web 2.0 privacy. Liberal privacy philosophy
> tends to ignore the political economy of privacy in capitalism that can
> mask socio-economic inequality and protect capital and the rich from public
> accountability. Facebook is in this paper analyzed with the help of an
> approach, in which privacy for dominant groups, in regard to the ability of
> keeping wealth and power secret from the public, is seen as problematic,
> whereas privacy at the bottom of the power pyramid for consumers and normal
> citizens is seen as a protection from dominant interests. Facebook's
> understanding of privacy is based on an understanding that stresses
> self-regulation and on an individualistic understanding of privacy. The
> theoretical analysis of the political economy of privacy on Facebook in
> this paper is based on the political theories of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt
> and Jürgen Habermas. Based on the political economist Dallas Smythe's
> concept of audience commodification, the process of prosumer
> commodification on Facebook is analyzed. The political economy of privacy
> on Facebook is analyzed with the help of a theory of drives that is
> grounded in Herbert Marcuse's interpretation of Sigmund Freud, which allows
> to analyze Facebook based on the concept of play labor (= the convergence
> of play and labor).
> Keywords: Facebook; social networking sites; political economy; privacy;
> surveillance; capitalism"
>
> https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/1/140/htm
>
>
> --
> blog: *https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
> <https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561>*
> bio:  http://floriancramer.nl
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 1:38 PM Francis Hunger <
> francis.hun...@irmielin.org> wrote:
>
>> Indirectly related to Morozov's insightful discussion of Zuboffs
>> "surveillance capitalism" is my own short blurb on "surveillancism" at
>> http://databasecultures.irmielin.org/surveillancism (which I wrote
>> without having read Zuboff)
>>
>> This tries to provide a kind of self-critique of how often discussions of
>> that might become interesting, turn to "surveillance" instead. Comments
>> would be welcome.
>>
>> best
>>
>> Francis
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 5, 2019, 9:00 AM Felix Stalder >
>>>
>>> I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.
>>>
>>> https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
>>
>>
>> Yes I totally agree. Morozov presents the most important Marxist analyses
>> that Zuboff doesn't bother to reference - exactly the ones that have been
>> nettime mainstays for 20 years. He also s

Re: Christchurch and the Dark Social Web by Luke Munn

[Florian Cramer]

>
> although I agree with  a large part of Lukes analyse let me put in
> question the point of machinic agency.


All the more since 8chan, where the Christchurch killer was at culturally
and literally at home and posted his announcement, is (along with the other
chans) the least algorithmically regulated social medium of them all -
which is exactly the reason of its attraction to counter and fringe
culture, including racist murderers.

-F
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Re: rage against the machine

[Florian Cramer]

Having zero knowledge of airplane technology, I do not know whether the
following writeup/opinion piece on the 737 Max is a trustworthy source or
not.
It was written by a software developer (that I could verify) named Gregory
Travis who claims to have been a "pilot and aircraft owner for over thirty
years"
and who blogged on airplane engineering in the past:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1249KS8xtIDKb5SxgpeFI6AD-PSC6nFA5/view

Travis suggests that the 737 MAX fiasco resulted from a combination of
market economics/cost-optimization management and software
being used to correct hardware design flaws.

Here's an extensive, selective quote from this document:

> "Over the years, market and technological forces pushed the 737 into
larger versions with more electronic
> and mechanical complexity. This is not, by any means, unique to the 737.
All
> airliners, enormous capital investments both for the industries that make
them as well as
> the customers who buy them, go through a similar growth process.
> The majority of those market and technical forces allied on the side of
economics, not safety.
> They were allied to relentlessly drive down what the industry calls
'seat-mile costs' – the cost of flying a seat from one point to another."
>
> To improve capacity and efficiency (I'm still paraphrasing the document),
engines had to become physically larger:
> "problem: the original 737 had (by today’s standards) tiny little engines
that easily cleared the ground beneath the wings. As the 737 grew and was
fitted with bigger engines, the
> clearance between the engines and the ground started to get a little,
umm, 'tight.' [...]
>
> With the 737 MAX the situation became critical. [...] The solution was to
extend the engine up and well in front of the wing. However,
> doing so also meant that the centerline of the engine’s thrust changed.
Now, when the pilots applied power to the
> engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to 'pitch up' –
raise its nose. [...]
>
> Apparently the 737 MAX pitched up a bit too much for comfort on power
application as well as
> at already-high-angles-of-attack. It violated that most ancient of
aviation canons and probably
> violated the FAA’s certification criteria. But, instead of going back to
the drawing board and
> getting the airframe hardware right (more on that below), Boeing’s
solution was something
> called the 'Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,' or MCAS.
> Boeing’s solution to their hardware problem was software."

Software that didn't work as expected.

- By itself, this story doesn't sound new, but (particularly to European
readers) like a flashback from more than twenty years ago
when Mercedes botched the aerodynamic design of its "A series" car (its
first entry into the compact car segment) and corrected it with
computerized Electronic Stability Control (ESC/ESP), a textbook example of
a cybernetic feedback-and-control system based on sensors and software.

Here is an article that explains the basics of Boeing's MCAS system, which
sounds similar to ESC/ESP indeed:
https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the-boeing-737-max-maneuvering-characteristics-augmentation-system-mcas-jt610/
(For lay people like me, the surprising bit was that MCAS "activates
automatically when [...] autopilot is off".)

-F

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*
bio:  http://floriancramer.nl
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'Making Matters' conference in The Hague, Netherlands

[Florian Cramer]

Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical Making

Tickets € 7,50-20: https://tinyurl.com/MakingMattersSymposium
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2FMakingMattersSymposium%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR28zcCAIXEN1voHuAsMlc_6dySv1bIsubwRIWbur7rBh7S-orhbzd8xpxI&h=AT3HM71MMgC9odGH5EIl432AyJ77Z5u2gXc1SClvfgUpaiMmgZVMq5qhprLkBsOg9S0_mbjub6bH1wRa612oMlmlv9e7WUawQyyMJkhw9TcUCWIMnkPXUJUvl9nQWzO6uoyG>

The partners and researchers of the project Bridging Art, Design and
Technology through Critical Making are excited to announce the two-day
symposium Making Matters. The symposium takes place from 9-10th of May at
West Den Haag, Lange Voorhout 102 in The Hague.

Making Matters invites makers, artists, students, activists, theorists,
designers, humans and non-humans to think about making practices and their
critical potential. By offering opportunity for exchange across
disciplines, the symposium attempts to shift the discourse of making from
maker culture to a wider set of creative practices, thereby proposing
alternatives to the solutionism of contemporary techno-creative industries.

The project ˜Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical Making'
investigates how Critical Making — a notion originally developed in the
context of social research, design and technology — can be adopted and
developed in relation to artistic research and (post)critical theory.

Confirmed speakers include: Ramon Amaro / Liesbeth Bik / Loes Bogers /
Letizia Chiappini / ginger coons / Florian Cramer / Dyne.org
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FDyne.org%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3eJC2T4aLpnkV_VFUzGyhUNFlv1mbwHeakmTCfDa7VSycOlg7rC7kncQA&h=AT1oFfSNlHxYBjc96uiXCGd--O-7zwDnzWkbCZDHxUieXpvmb0MHK5QdHke_OEsZkh49VIMfrX_Nh6Ial32hl8UxKknGSoUClCOOM3Dgmm1EEKRsp1ba7pxDHRlq0ifcPkI2>
/ Anja Groten / Frans-Willem Korsten / Pia Louwerens / Ulrike Möntmann /
Shailoh Phillips / Dani Ploeger / Constant (Femke Snelting) / Janneke
Wesseling

Program:
THURSDAY 9 MAY 2019
9.30 Welcome (coffee & tea)
10.00 Introduction Critical Making Consortium:
Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Het Nieuwe Instituut) / Janneke Wesseling / Lucas
Evers (Waag)
10.30 Presentation Liesbeth Bik followed by dialogue with Florian Cramer
11.15 Coffee break
11.30 Presentations: Dyne.org
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FDyne.org%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1sG9MdNfiF9tYt7K_w867rHXhaI4VHDAcCrIFYrNHOLHe7JivvIfvidrA&h=AT1oFfSNlHxYBjc96uiXCGd--O-7zwDnzWkbCZDHxUieXpvmb0MHK5QdHke_OEsZkh49VIMfrX_Nh6Ial32hl8UxKknGSoUClCOOM3Dgmm1EEKRsp1ba7pxDHRlq0ifcPkI2>
/ Constant (Femke Snelting) + dialogue
12.45 Lunch break
13.45 Presentations: Shailoh Phillips & Pia Louwerens
14.45 Presentation: Dani Ploeger
15.45 Coffee break
16.00 Public discussion: Challenges and Consequences of Critical Making Now
17.00 Drinks

FRIDAY 10 MAY 2019
9.30 Welcome (coffee & tea)
10.00 Introduction on Critical Making:
Lucas Evers (Waag) / Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Het Nieuwe Instituut) /
Marie-José Sondeijker (West Den Haag)
10.30 Presentations: Frans-Willem Korsten / ginger coons
11.30 Coffee break
11.45 Talk: Ramon Amaro
12.15 Presentation: Anja Groten
12.45 Lunch break
13.45 Bookpresentation INC: Letizia Chiappini / Loes Bogers
14.00 Workshop: Hackers & Designers
14.00 Workshop: Ramon Amaro
14.00 Workshop: Thalia Hoffman
14.00 Workshop: Pia Louwerens
16.00 Public discussion + wrap up
17.00 Drinks

More information: www.criticalmaking.nl
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.criticalmaking.nl%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0XZgy1ZRlHpPUNsaPw10NkDbVJ_UdH9x_2yhE04cvlKn_JLyqrH2KPSRU&h=AT1L7QH72Fvk78UQFyS_em3wDh9bn_K2FyLQ6oiP_K9gnzvywKD3RBi9MOrm1Ic_IDuWVMBnMLqNUbAygl0nqEO43U_lYHuSoAmBl0OwpzOaJFV-eSwKa8kr28IDRwU-E5g->

Partners: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts - Leiden University
<https://www.facebook.com/acpaleiden/>, Willem de Kooning Academy
<https://www.facebook.com/WillemdeKooningAcademy/>, Het Nieuwe Instituut
<https://www.facebook.com/HetNieuweInstituut/>, Waag Society
<https://www.facebook.com/waagsociety/>, West
<https://www.facebook.com/westdenhaag/>

The research project ‘Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical
Making’ is part of the Smart Culture - Arts and Culture programme, funded
by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in
collaboration with the Taskforce for Applied Research (NRPO SIA).

This notice reflects only the authors’ views. NWO is not liable for any use
that may be made of the information contained therein.


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What is wrong the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research'?

[Florian Cramer]

With Nienke Terpsma from "Fucking Good Art", I wrote this response to
the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research', a policy document written
by seven European art school umbrella organizations, two accreditation
bodies, a public arts sector organization and the Society for Artistic
Research (SAR). Although the Vienna Declaration will likely become a
future constitution and framework for artistic research in European art
schools - and thus affect the life and work of many people subscribed to
this mailing list -, no public debates of its content seem to have taken
place in the six months after its publication. To get an idea of its
contents
and rhetoric, see the "Found Footage" section below. We thought that it
was time to speak up.

The piece has first been published by/on OPEN!, Platform for Art, Culture
and the Public Domain,
https://www.onlineopen.org/what-is-wrong-with-the-vienna-declaration-on-artistic-research


# What Is Wrong with the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research'?
by Florian Cramer & Nienke Terpsma


## Found Footage

> 'Artistic Research [AR]) is practice-based, practice-led research in
> the arts which has developed rapidly in the last twenty years globally
> and is a key knowledge base for art education in Higher Arts Education
> Institutions (HAEIs).'
>
> 'AR is well suited to inspire creative and innovative developments in
> sectors such as health and wellbeing, the environment and technology,
> thus contributing to fulfilling the HEIs' "third mission". AR must be
> seen as having a unique potential in the development of the "knowledge
> triangle."'
>
> 'Within this frame, AR is aligned in all aspects with the five main
> criteria that constitute Research & Development in the Frascati
> Manual.'
>
> 'HAEIs operate predominately within a research context and have
> a responsibility to conduct AR. It is also common for HAEIs to
> interact with related enterprise Research & Development, and to
> contribute directly to the creation of intellectual property in arts,
> entertainment and media through research practice.'
>
> 'This environment requires funding for: educating the next generation
> of researchers through doctoral programmes; ensuring appropriate
> physical and virtual infrastructures as well as archiving and
> disseminating means; building links with business and enterprise in
> order to stimulate the impact of research.'
>
> 'AR is validated through peer review covering the range of
> disciplinary competences addressed by the work. Quality assurance
> is undertaken by recognised independent, international QA bodies
> and assures the standards described in the European Standards and
> Guidelines (ESG 2015) for Quality Assurance in the European Higher
> Education Area.'
>
> '[T]he establishment of AR as an independent category within the
> Frascati Manual, establishing the opportunity for harvesting research
> data and statistics from the AR field.'

This is not conceptual poetry; these are quotes from the _Vienna
Declaration on Artistic Research_ signed on 20 June 2020 by all
major organisations of European art schools. Of the many things
that rub one the wrong way, two stand out: next to the grotesque
neoliberal-bureaucratic language, art schools' land-grabbing claim to
own and define artistic research. Both, of course, done with the best
intentions to emancipate artistic research.

The _Vienna Declaration_ doesn't mention artists at all; they literally
don't exist in its text.


## From Artistic Research to AR; from Descriptions to Prescriptions

For future art education in Europe, the _Vienna Declaration_ may
become as influential as the _Bologna Declaration_ of 1999 (on whose
basis continental European higher education was reorganised into the
Anglo-American Bachelor and Master system). It dwells on the same shaky
grounds of not actually being a legal text or governmental policy
document. Factually, it is a manifesto for institutionalising artistic
research at European art schools, by intrinsically linking what in most
cases used to be two separate things: artistic research and doctoral
study programmes.[^1] Written in a language that reads like its own
parody, with its abundance of tacky logos reminiscent of spam messages,
the _Vienna Declaration _doesn't pretend any semblance to a manifesto
written by artists in support of artistic research. It is of course
(and, for its intended purpose, needs to be) a bureaucratic policy
document; but beyond that, it is a constructed foundation myth and
institutional power grab.

With the [research project job
openings](https://feinart.org/esr-programs/) associated with it, the
_Vienna Declaration_ reframes artistic research as a top-down practice
where p

Re: What is wrong the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research'?

[Florian Cramer]

s to
> institutional myopia, or the gadfly as it were.
>
> As always of late, I see many parallels to the work and time of Leonardo
> in which the same person would design both military fortifications and
> costumes for wealthy patrons' parties.  Machiavelli clearly took one
> approach to the ethics of "AR," i.e. to use art and science for power
> without regard for morality or "the golden rule."  However, there were
> other more cooperative and trust-based ethics as well during that time,
> many of which hoped to directly counter the Machiavellian system so
> obviously in the ascendant (both then and still now).  One such example is
> Leonardo's, which I believe to have been an evolution into the modern age
> of Dante's poetics of virtue as beauty and truth symbolized by Beatrice.
> Leonardo modernized the guiding ideal of all art and science still further
> as "Esperienza" or Experience, a female personification with many
> attributes in common with Beatrice.
>
> Leonardo expert Martin Kemp of Oxford University wrote in his book *Mona
> Lisa* (2017) that "A full study of Leonardo and poetry would be highly
> rewarding -- and very demanding" (p.143).  Perhaps such a study would fall
> under the rubric of Artistic Research?  In any case, it has quite possibly
> not yet been done.
>
> Full disclosure, I co-lead a research group studying the relationships
> among meditation, neuroscience, and all the arts (including literature).
>
> All best,
>
> Max
>
>
> --
> *From:* nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org 
> on behalf of Florian Cramer 
> *Sent:* Sunday, January 24, 2021 8:48 AM
> *To:* a moderated mailing list for net criticism 
> *Subject:*  What is wrong the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic
> Research'?
>
> With Nienke Terpsma from "Fucking Good Art", I wrote this response to
> the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research', a policy document written
> by seven European art school umbrella organizations, two accreditation
> bodies, a public arts sector organization and the Society for Artistic
> Research (SAR). Although the Vienna Declaration will likely become a
> future constitution and framework for artistic research in European art
> schools - and thus affect the life and work of many people subscribed to
> this mailing list -, no public debates of its content seem to have taken
> place in the six months after its publication. To get an idea of its
> contents
> and rhetoric, see the "Found Footage" section below. We thought that it
> was time to speak up.
>
> The piece has first been published by/on OPEN!, Platform for Art, Culture
> and the Public Domain,
>
> https://www.onlineopen.org/what-is-wrong-with-the-vienna-declaration-on-artistic-research
>
>
> # What Is Wrong with the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research'?
> by Florian Cramer & Nienke Terpsma
>
>
> ## Found Footage
>
> > 'Artistic Research [AR]) is practice-based, practice-led research in
> > the arts which has developed rapidly in the last twenty years globally
> > and is a key knowledge base for art education in Higher Arts Education
> > Institutions (HAEIs).'
> >
> > 'AR is well suited to inspire creative and innovative developments in
> > sectors such as health and wellbeing, the environment and technology,
> > thus contributing to fulfilling the HEIs' "third mission". AR must be
> > seen as having a unique potential in the development of the "knowledge
> > triangle."'
> >
> > 'Within this frame, AR is aligned in all aspects with the five main
> > criteria that constitute Research & Development in the Frascati
> > Manual.'
> >
> > 'HAEIs operate predominately within a research context and have
> > a responsibility to conduct AR. It is also common for HAEIs to
> > interact with related enterprise Research & Development, and to
> > contribute directly to the creation of intellectual property in arts,
> > entertainment and media through research practice.'
> >
> > 'This environment requires funding for: educating the next generation
> > of researchers through doctoral programmes; ensuring appropriate
> > physical and virtual infrastructures as well as archiving and
> > disseminating means; building links with business and enterprise in
> > order to stimulate the impact of research.'
> >
> > 'AR is validated through peer review covering the range of
> > disciplinary competences addressed by the work. Quality assurance
> > is undertaken by recognised indepen

Re: GameStop Never Stops

[Florian Cramer]

GameStop checks all boxes of 'populism' as it has been defined by political
scientists Jan-Werner Müller and Cas Mudde, namely as a revolt of "the good
people" against "the corrupt elites". (I am less sure whether it would also
check the boxes of populism as defined by Laclau/Mouffe).

As you pointed out, Felix, it's "hard to say" what the politics of GameStop
are beyond such a diagnosis. Its orchestration on Reddit involved white
suprematists [
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/31/market-is-rigged-in-favour-of-rich-as-gamestop-fiasco-reveals
], and it is heavily being pushed in right-extremist Telegram channels. One
also shouldn't forget that it's the creation of a speculative bubble like
Bitcoin, albeit a more nihilistic one, and maybe also a (IMHO naive and
misguided) assumption that stock ownership is 'good' capitalism while short
selling is toxic capitalism.

-F


-- 
blog: *https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
*
bio:  http://floriancramer.nl


On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 1:16 PM Felix Stalder  wrote:

>
> I find the GameStop saga endlessly fascinating, on so many levels.
>
> For one, it's a fitting continuation of the year of American discontent,
> that started with #BLM, continued with #StopTheSteal, and reached now
> Wall Street with #Gamestop. Politically, these movements are, of course,
> very different. The first reacting to deep historical, systemic
> injustice and violence, the second bought into a political lie and the
> third one, well, that's hard to say.
>
> But all three express, in their own way, a belief, shared by large
> segments of the population, that "the system" -- the institutions of
> policing, democracy and the financial system -- are fundamental rigged
> against them, and that they have to do something against it, even at
> considerable personal risk. If you followed all three over the year,
> even only superficially, you got a crash course in institutional
> critique on an epic scale.
>
> Here's pretty good segment from hill.tv, a relatively respectable
> Washington outlet, that makes pretty much this argument:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTT4it_f7Jc&feature=youtu.be
>
> In terms of GameStop, I think a good starting point is to assume that
> there are predominantly bad-faith actors involved, that everything
> expressed is part of an agenda, that may, or may not, be in line with
> what is expressed. Additionally, we are in an environment that is fully
> artificial, made up of ultimately arbitrary, but consequential rules. If
> you are a deeply immersed gamer, or belief that we are living in a
> virtual simulation, as people like Musk apparently do, then you are
> right at home.
>
> That doesn't mean that this is not political. It's a lot of things at
> the same time. An insider-game between billionaires, a populist revolt,
> a get-rich-quick-scheme, total market failure, and the free-markets
> fully functioning. It's ultra cynical and naive, deeply individualistic,
> and full of expressions of solidarity. It's deadly serious and hugely
> entertaining. It's all about money and the recognition, after a decade
> of quantitative easing and crypto bubbles, that money is somehow
> meaningless. It expresses itself in spreadsheets and memes, and, no
> doubt, soon also in congressional hearings.
>
> While I don't expect this one event to have immediate, dramatic
> consequences, I expect this to simmer on for a long time and light other
> fires, in unexpected places.
>
>
>
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Re: GameStop Never Stops

[Florian Cramer]

Just to clarify:

On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 6:14 PM Max Herman  wrote:

> I wonder if there is a meaningful distinction between BLM and the
alt-right phenoms recently accelerating.  How do we distinguish between
progressivism and populism?
>
> To my understanding BLM is not necessarily populist per se.

I did not mention BLM, only GameStop, and I did not call BLM populist.

Florian
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Re: GameStop Never Stops

[Florian Cramer]

red to be fascinated by the latest madness that emerges from
> the intersection of a US technology companies running amok, a US society
> which i see struggling with deep political, social, economic problems, and
> the psyche of mostly US citizens, also showing disturbing signs of distress
> and confusion.
>
> Yes, I agree, on an abstract level, it is fascinating to see congress
> members and presidents recruiting flat-earthers, non-voters, q anon shamans
> to carry out a coup, as much it is fascinating to see Musk mobilizing
> anonymous reddit crowds to do meme investments with an app that makes money
> by selling the transaction log to wall street firms, but it is also not
> fascinating, or no more than seeing a sick homeless, drug addict man dying
> alone on the curbside.
>
> Yes, I know, I'm invoking the language of health and sickness, madness and
> normality here, but i cannot escape the feeling, that we are seeing here is
> not an instance of a political/economic revolt, or social mobilization, (or
> as one friend put it, class struggle), but the symptoms of a dysfunctional
> social/economic order, more akin to the institutionally manufactured opioid
> epidemic than to the long history of revolutions. And, I would not call the
> opioid epidemic 'fascinating', the same way I would not call the ADHD
> epidemic fascinating.
>
> I think how we look at such phenomena matters, and, as was the case with
> trump, it is easy to slip into the sports spectator /commentator position:
> there is DRAMA! there are STARS! the stakes are HIGH! ! There are teams
> to CHEER! Maybe. But it is also a deeply, deeply sad thing to watch,
> requires lots of intellectual, emotional labor to engage with, and
> ultimately, there is no catharsis, just the tragedy of the reproduction of
> the causes which produce these symptoms in the first place.
>
> :(
>
> b.-
>
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 7:19 PM Sam Dwyer  wrote:
>
>> Two days ago an otherwise sensible friend, a political organizer,
>> earnestly and then angrily tried to convince me that purchasing stock in
>> Gamestop was somehow striking a blow against capitalism.
>>
>> I was and remain very perplexed at how people could believe such a thing.
>> ONE WEIRD TRICK THAT BANKS HATE is putting money into your brokerage
>> account and purchasing stocks? Surely not. This friend then admitted that
>> people who invested now probably weren't going to make money. "So," I
>> asked, "by investing now, and letting other people take profits, you are
>> supporting a movement? Like a heroes relief fund?" Yes.
>>
>> This is a particularly dumb front in a just war.
>>
>> Given that $GME is presently imploding, with its value down -55% for the
>> day, I hope there won't be too many casualties amongst the revolutionary
>> cadres; sacrificed, as they have been so often in the past, in the service
>> of cynical agendas. At least (to my knowledge) the white supremacists
>> haven't written thinkpieces portraying their participation in a
>> get-rich-quick scheme as virtuous. It is also worth mentioning that there
>> are also no doubt plenty of hedge funds who took the opposite, winning side
>> of Melvin Capitals crowded short trade. But if they are winning, they are
>> being smart and not crowing about it.
>>
>> The Gamestop Saga will flare out as a cultural scrying glass soon, but
>> there are many more, and profoundly consequential implications behind
>> Felix's astute point that this is "*all about money and the recognition,
>> after a decade of quantitative easing and crypto bubbles, that money is
>> somehow **meaningless.*" Part of this sensation may be the emotional
>> experience of inflation, and a changing relationship to money as a
>> substance, as it continues to physically dematerialize. Part of it may also
>> be that Americans have now seen how easy it is for the government to flip a
>> switch and send us a check.
>>
>> This last part seems to be popular.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 8:54 AM Florian Cramer  wrote:
>>
>>> GameStop checks all boxes of 'populism' as it has been defined by
>>> political scientists Jan-Werner Müller and Cas Mudde, namely as a revolt of
>>> "the good people" against "the corrupt elites". (I am less sure whether it
>>> would also check the boxes of populism as defined by Laclau/Mouffe).
>>>
>>> As you pointed out, Felix, it's "hard to say" what the politics of
>>> GameStop are beyond such a diagnosis. Its orchestration on Reddit invo

Re: GameStop Never Stops

[Florian Cramer]

Postscript to Jens Berger's article that I had posted yesterday:

> This leads to the overlooked question: Who did sell the shares to the
hedge
> funds and the hobby speculators during the turmoil? Were it professionals
> like ['Big Short' investor Michael] Burry, [Elon] Musk and the Winkelvoss
> brothers? Or Reddit power users who masterminded the whole coup? The whole
> thing literally smells of market manipulation and one can only hope that
the
> circumstantial evidence will now be investigated.

>
Turns out that one of the big winners is (drumroll): a hedge fund, Senvest
Management,
which made a profit of $700 million from selling Gamestop shares that it
had cheaply
acquired in September to Gamestop/Robinhood players:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-hedge-fund-made-700-million-on-gamestop-11612390687

-F
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Re: GameStop Never Stops

[Florian Cramer]

>
> Finally, why not call BLM populist?
>

BLM probably fits Laclau/Mouffe's definition and notion of populism as
agonistic. But since the movement is reclaiming minority rights, I don't
think it fits Müller's and Mudde's definition of populism as positioning a
majority of "the good people" against a small corrupt elite. Occupy's
slogan of the 99% would be populist according to that definition, the East
German 1989 protest movement with its slogan "We are the people", too, and
QAnon would fit the definition as well, but (in my opinion) not BLM and
other minority activism.

-F
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Re: what does monetary value indicate?

[Florian Cramer]

David Gerard, who wrote the excellent book "Attack of the 50 Foot
Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts" in 2017, just
posted a piece on his blog that provides an IMHO extremely useful primer
and "for dummies" document on Crypto-Art and NFT tokes. (Thanks to Peter
Horneland for sharing it with me.)


NFTs: crypto grifters try to scam artists, again
11th March 2021

 - by David Gerard


Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are the crypto hype for 2021 — since DeFi ran
out of steam in 2020, and Bitcoin’s pumped bubble seems to be deflating.

The scam is to sell NFTs to artists as a get-rich-quick scheme, to make
life-changing money. There’s a *gusher of money* out there! You just create
a token!

And any number of crypto grifters would be *delighted* to assist you. For a
small consideration.

It’s con men with a new variety of magic beans to feed the bubble machine
 —
and artists are their excuse this time.

The NFT grift works like this:

   1. Tell artists there’s a gusher of free money!
   2. They need to buy into crypto to get the gusher of free money.
   3. They become crypto advocates, and make excuses for proof-of-work and
   so on.
   4. A few artists really are making life-changing money from this!
   5. You probably won’t be one of them.

In a nicer, happier world, NFTs would be fun little things you could make
and collect and trade, and it’d be great. It’s a pity this is crypto.
What is an NFT?

An NFT is a crypto-token on a blockchain. The token is virtual — the thing
you own is a cryptographic key to a particular address on the blockchain —
but legally, it’s property that you can buy, own or sell like any other
property.

Most crypto-tokens, such as bitcoins, are “fungible” — *e.g.*, you mostly
don’t care which particular bitcoins you have, only how much Bitcoin you
have.

Non-fungible tokens are a bit different. Each one is unique — and can be
used as an identifier for an individual object.

The NFT can contain a web address, or maybe just a number, that points
somewhere else. *An NFT is just a pointer.*

If the place the NFT points to is a site that claims to sell NFTs that
represent artworks — then you have what’s being called *crypto-art!*

Note that it’s only the token that’s non-fungible — the art it points to is
on a website, under centralised control, and easily changeable.
When I buy an NFT, what do I get?

The art itself is not in the blockchain — the NFT is just a pointer to a
piece of art on a website.

You’re buying the key to a crypto-token. You’re not buying anything else.

An NFT doesn’t convey copyright, usage rights, moral rights, or any other
rights, unless there’s an explicit licence saying so.

It’s like a “Certificate of Authenticity” that’s in Comic Sans, and
misspelt.

At *absolute best*, you’re buying a piece of official merchandise — one
that’s just a number pointing to a website.
Why is an NFT?

NFTs exist so that the crypto grifters can have a new kind of magic bean to
sell for actual money, and pretend they’re not selling magic beans.

The purpose of NFTs is to get you to give your money to crypto grifters.
When the grifter has your money, the NFT has done its job, and none of the
fabulous claims about NFTs need to work or be true past that point.

NFTs are entirely for the benefit of the crypto grifters. The only purpose
the artists serve is as aspiring suckers to pump the concept of crypto —
and, of course, to buy cryptocurrency to pay for “minting” NFTs. Sometimes
the artist gets some crumbs to keep them pumping the concept of crypto.

CryptoKitties, in late 2017, was the first popular NFT. CryptoKitties was
largely fueled by bored holders of ether — the cryptocurrency for Ethereum
— spending their ether, that they had too much of to cash out easily, on
some silly toys that they traded amongst themselves.

Since then, various marketers have tried to push the idea along. People pay
real money for hats in video games, don’t they? Then surely they’ll buy
crypto tokens that allegedly represent their favourite commercial IP!

These
mostly haven’t taken off.

The first real success is NBA Top Shots, where you buy an official
NBA-marketed token that gives you a website trading card of a video
snippet. This has taken off hugely. NBA Top Shots has its own issues, which
I’ll probably deal with in a later post.

DeFi pumpers tried pushing NFTs in October last year,

but
they couldn’t get the idea to stick.

The recent Bitcoin bubble feels like it’s running

Re: what does monetary value indicate?

[Florian Cramer]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 5:49 PM Felix Stalder  wrote:

> I'm sure many have followed the NFT art saga over the last couple of
> months and seen today's headline that somebody just paid $ 69,346,250
> for a NFT on a blockchain, meta-data to claim ownership of the
> "originalcopy" of a digital art work.

Thanks to Amy Castor's article (which you also mentioned/linked to,
https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/),
we now know that the buyer didn't actually pay $69,346,250, but "$60
million in ETH and $9 million in fees, also in ETH" - a significant
difference IMHO. The whole Christie's sale thus boils down to a conversion
of one type of ETH token into another type of ETH token within the
portfolio of a crypto currency investment firm, and using the art market
transaction as means of pumping the value of the latter.

So it seems as if the art market is used as a prop for financial
transactions that would likely be illegal on regulated financial markets.
Ben Lewis' 2009 documentary film "The Great Contemporary Bubble"
investigates the insider trade with Damien Hirst's art, including the
common phenomenon of a few collectors acting as cartels that inflate the
prices of certain artists (which includes galleries who bid on their own
artists in anonymous auctions). It seems as if this phenomenon is repeating
itself, only that the insider trade and price manipulation now is no longer
about the market value of an art work, but about the value of the currency
with which it has been bought.

-F
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Re: Interview with German media theorist Sebastian Giessmann

[Florian Cramer]

   On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 10:50 AM, Geert Lovink  wrote:

   > It a very diverse piece of scholarly work in the tradition of
   > German humanities and media theory. As is often the case with
   > German theory, we start off in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt
   > before moving on to the Greeks.

   A footnote: This isn't per se a question of an individual scholarly
   approach, but can be a hard academic requirement, especially for PhD
   research in German-language and continental European humanities.�
   In the German-language area, media studies are sharply divided between
   social sciences (where they include communication and journalism
   departments) and humanities (where they exist as critical media
   studies). In the social sciences, it is perfectly acceptable to write a
   PhD thesis only on a contemporary subject matter with no larger
   historical perspective, but the thesis will then be expected to be an
   empirical case study and using little or no philosophical and critical
   theory references.

   Humanities media studies rarely exist as departments of their own, but
   are either derived from or part of literature, aesthetics or,
   sometimes, film and theater studies departments. These are
   traditionally understood as historical disciplines; art history still
   bears this understanding in its very name. Since the 1990s, German
   humanities media studies are mostly practiced as cultural
   history/discourse history of information technologies.

   While I'm not familiar with the specific background of Sebastian's
   research, it is a fact in the German-language humanities that a thesis
   can be rejected on the grounds of being "ahistorical". This has nothing
   to do with "German media theory", but with the German-language and
   continental European humanities at large where a discipline like
   Anglo-American cultural studies (that cuts across social science and
   humanities, and is radically oriented towards contemporary culture)
   never became mainstream.

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Re: living under algorithmic governance

[Florian Cramer]

This story has one flaw: Facebook's censors aren't algorithms but
human low wage laborers. The issue isn't principally different from
that of a press distributor/wholesaler deciding not to put an issue of
a newspaper on the newsstands because it contains full-frontal nudity.

This is a good example of how supposed "algorithmic governance" can be
used as a smokescreen for old-fashioned human intervention, likely as
a trick for avoiding liability.

 -F

On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:

>
> "Listen, Mark, this is serious. First you create rules that don’t
> distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs. Then
> you practice these rules without allowing space for good judgement.
> Finally you even censor criticism against and a discussion about the
> decision – and you punish the person who dares to voice criticism.
>



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Re: Hackaton exploring the digital landscape

[Florian Cramer]

   Since about half a decade, these types of events have become typical
   for the Netherlands and its particular flavor of creative industries.
   Initially, "hackathons" had little to do with hacker culture since they
   adopted (or even hijacked) the term hacking in a broadly metaphorical
   sense. Today, the lines have become blurred as Dutch hacker spaces have
   become involved in hackathon culture. Conversely, new kinds of hacker
   spaces have sprung up that are rooted in hackathon culture, design and
   creative industries rather than in hacktivism or old school hacker
   culture.

   This needs to be seen from the larger background of the Dutch creative
   sector struggling to be noticed as socially, politically and
   economically relevant ever since the greater visions of Dutch Design
   collapsed with the financial crisis in 2008 and subsequent arts funding
   budget cuts (which indirectly also affected commercial design, since
   many design bureaus got their most prestigious assignments from arts
   institutions). The rise of technology universities as competitors to
   established arts and design schools, and increasingly claiming the
   terrain of "design" and creative industries for themselves, did the
   rest.

   If you live in the Netherlands, these kind of events have become so
   commonplace that you need a medium like Nettime to remind you of their
   oddity.
   -F

   On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 1:50 PM, Andreas Broeckmann 
<[1]a...@mikro.in-berlin.de> wrote:

 Is it perhaps part of the political problem of our time
 ... that some people actually believe that it is possible to change
 and repair social and political structures that have evolved over
 decades, within just a brief period of time, -- if only the collaborating
 "developers, hackers, artists, designers, psychologists, marketeers"
 have the right ideas and enough Club Mate to, for instance, "Redesign
 the Netherlands in 48 hours"?"
 <...>

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Phillips/Beyer/Coleman: "false assumption that alt-right 'trolling'

[Florian Cramer]

   This collectively authored piece by Whitney Phillips, Jessica Beyer and
   Gabriella Coleman is worth reading and, perhaps, debating:

   
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/trolling-scholars-debunk-the-idea-that-the-alt-rights-trolls-have-magic-powers

   The authors make important points concerning the use of the word
   "trolling" to trivialize racist and sexist campaigns and providing
   (just as, btw., the word "lulz") "bigots [with] an easy way to deflect
   personal responsibility for hateful action".

   The section that begins with the headline "Communities Change",
   however, strikes me as much less differentiated. In it, Phillips, Beyer
   and Coleman argue against

   "the false assumption that alt-right 'trolling' is equally
   interchangeable with 4chan and Anonymous, an assumption that posits
   static, ahistorical framings of both. Making this claim, either
   explicitly or implicitly, obscures the one basic, unifying fact of
   4chan and Anonymous: that they _change_, both in terms of demographics
   and ideologically."

   This argument is, first of all, a red herring. Taking to its logical
   consequence, it would mean that no community could be critically
   analyzed in a historical frame.

   The question is ultimately not one of 'either/or' - respectively
   radical identity versus radical non-identity of 4chan in whatever
   historical phase -, but rather: How could it happen that a community
   transformed this particular way? Which factors preexisted that enabled
   this transformation. The same question have been routinely asked, for
   example, by historians researching the transformation of 1920s Weimar
   Republic Germany into the 1930s Third Reich. Discrediting such a
   perspective with the argument that "communities [or individuals]
   change" would be absurd.

   Phillips, Beyer and Coleman argue that the assertion "that there exists
   a fundamental continuity between the 4chan and Anonymous of today and
   the 4chan and Anonymous of ten years ago is complicated by just how
   much progressive activism has been undertaken by Anonymous since
   2008".

   This once again presents the issue in an over-simplistic way; as if the
   lines between "progressive activism" and "alt-right 'trolling'" could
   be clearly drawn. For example, the Anonymous movement always involved
   vigilante rhetoric and a visual aesthetic that even sympathizers - such
   as my fellow panellists at the Networked Disruption conference at
   Aksioma, Ljubljana in 2015 - characterized as "fascist". Conversely,
   memes such as the pejorative "SJW" (for "social justice warrior")
   pre-existed the present-day "Alt-Right" for years and have been equally
   popular in parts of hacker culture that identify as left-wing.

   The authors of the article actually have the best examples of blurry
   lines and transititions between the two seeming polar opposites of
   "Anonymous" and "Alt-Right". A key figure and source in Gabriella
   Coleman's 2014 book "Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces
   of Anonymous" is the troll/hacker Andrew Auernheimer/weev. In
   2015/2016, he was a key figure in the openly Neonazi part of the
   "Alt-Right", being involved - among others - in the blog The Daily
   Stormer and several other related sites and meme campaigns. His name is
   absent from the article. Wouldn't Coleman's book, too, benefit from a
   critical postscript?

   In any case, I hope that here on this list and in related discourses,
   we're beyond a discursive mode where "net culture", "hacker culture"
   and "communities" are seen as something in need of fundamental defenses
   against fundamental attacks, as if this was a binary issue.

   (There was, btw., a closely related discussion concerning the role of
   pop-, sub- and underground culture in early 1990s Germany Neonazi
   movement. Analyzing the pop cultural fashion of racist arsonists,
   Diedrich Diederichsen wrote an essay "The Kids Are Not Alright" in
   which he reflected on the fact that counter-cultural dissidence wasn't
   necessarily progressive.)

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Re: Phillips/Beyer/Coleman: "false assumption that

[Florian Cramer]

Hello Gabriella,

>   "the false assumption that alt-right 'trolling' is equally
>interchangeable with 4chan and Anonymous, an assumption that posits
>static, ahistorical framings of both. Making this claim, eith
>explicitly or implicitly, obscures the one basic, unifying fact of
>4chan and Anonymous: that they _change_, both in terms of demographics
>and ideologically."
>
>This argument is, first of all, a red herring. Taking to its logical
>consequence, it would mean that no community could be critically
>analyzed in a historical frame.
>
> ** Why? We were precisely insisting on being historical, which for me,
> means both tracing lines of continuity and discontinuity. So while
> subcultural traits/memes act as strong vectors of continuity, which we
> state in the piece, we must also mindful of historical events, which also
> change the course  and imprint of these phenomena.


These are classical questions concerning the historiography of
fascism which also applied to the German Third Reich. Some historians
interpreted as a break with the previous society, communities and
even civilization, others analyzed the continuities that lead from
pre-WWI monarchy through the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, such
as the authoritarian character of early 20th century German society. I
agree that both continuities and ruptures must be taken into account.
Yet the argument that communities change can be too easily misread
as exculpation, and foreclose a critical analysis of particular
traits within a phenomenon/community that helped it to develop in a
certain way, or foster particular branches and subcommunities. Taken
to a vitalist extreme, it would mean that no critical history can be
written because there is no such thing as continuity.


There are too many historical events to list here but a small sampling
might be useful to remember: like the protests against Scientology
that spurred an explicit protest group, Chanology, to form (and much
to the chagrin of the Anonymous band of trolls who at the time were
*so upset* at the earnest protests, they staged one of the worst
raids to date, attacking an epilepsy forum in the hopes they could
irreparably sully the name Anonymous; and frankly am surprised they
did not succeed).

Still, Chanology is also a good example of cyber-libertarian (free
speech) values driving the beginning of Anonymous; an operation under
which both left-wing anarchists and, say, Ron Paul supporters could
join forces. What we seem to witness today is cyber-libertarianism
having mutated into different branches, one which encloses major parts
of the so-called Alt-Right.

>   This once again presents the issue in an over-simplistic way; as if the
>lines between "progressive activism" and "alt-right 'trolling'" could
>be clearly drawn. For example, the Anonymous movement always involved
>vigilante rhetoric and a visual aesthetic that even sympathizers - such
>as my fellow panellists at the Networked Disruption conference at
>Aksioma, Ljubljana in 2015 - characterized as "fascist". Conversely,
>memes such as the pejorative "SJW" (for "social justice warrior")
>pre-existed the present-day "Alt-Right" for years and have been equally
>popular in parts of hacker culture that identify as left-wing.
>
> * I'll grant that the aesthetic could be read that way. And that's an
> interesting discussion to be had about Guy Fawkes and the cultural place of
> V for Vendetta. I can't deny the existence of a few outright fascist
> Anonymous groups. I believe there is a sizable one in Germany, which other
> German Anonymous groups tried to stamp out of existence but failed but this
> seems to again be an issue that can be explained as much by paying
> attention to regional differences (re: Germany) and histories as much as it
> is about "chan culture."


And here's another recent one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3oVktsOffs And this is a
German-language, pro-Russian and pro-right wing populist news site
using the Anonymous moniker: http://www.anonymousnews.ru

I wouldn't even use this as a fundamental argument against the
Anonymous movement. It is the nature, perhaps even structure, of
open-participation, collective identity movements and projects that
they attract and involve opposite extremes. Similar contradictions and
extremes existed in older shared-identity movements such as Neoism
and the Luther Blissett project, the same happened in subcultures
like punk. (Thomas Pynchon beautifully described it for the "Tristero
system" in his 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 which involved leftist
as well as neofascist participants.)


> I've certainly found that anonymous organizing makes some quarters
> of the left deeply uncomfortable (for lack of transparency) but
> the charge that AnonOps was fascist strikes as plain off the mark,
> especially when judged in terms of their actual political operations
> between 2011-2014, many of which were fully hinged

Why I won't support the March for Science

[Florian Cramer]

(This was a social media posting, but I thought that I should share it with
the larger Nettime community. -F)


Why I won't support the 'March for Science':*


1) The central demand of the 'March for Science', "evidence-based
policies and regulations", is toxic and dangerous. It means that
political issues and decisions should only be made on the basis of
scientific evidence. Political claims of social groups would, as a
result, not be considered if they aren't backed up by scientific
proof.

This would not only create an oligarchy of those of who have the
means to fund scientific research for backing up a political demand.
It would conversely mean that social groups would be neglected whose
justified demands are below the radar of science. (For example:
Would empirical sociology in the 1960s, with the methodology of that
time, have backed the claims of the civil rights movement? And more
importantly: Did the civil rights movement NEED scientific evidence in
order to make justified demands?)

And what are the implications for democracy? The people rule, but
only if their demands have been sanctioned, respectively filtered, by
scientists?

2) The concept of "evidence-based science" is currently used as a
weapon against humanities, cultural studies and qualitative social
science. It is, in the country I live and work, a major reason for
academic research funding applications from the arts, humanities
and cultural studies being turned down. In other domains, such
as healthcare, it drives a wedge into the discipline where only
"evidence-based healthcare" gets funded and healthcare research that
uses, for example, psychoanalytical methodology, is considered to be
lacking in research methodology.

With very few exceptions, the humanities do not work with formal
evidence and proof. There is, for good reasons, no "quod erat
demonstrandum" and general formula at the conclusion of an art
historcal, philological, philosophical or cultural-anthropological
research paper, because the observations made in these fields are
not made in science lab settings and hence do not yield repeatable
insights.

Where the humanities do work with formal evidence (such as in the more
hardcore parts of analytic philosophy and, more recently, quantitative
humanities), the insightfulness of the argument - particularly for
anyone outside academia - is often debatable.

3) Just as opposition against Trump creates false solidarity
with neoliberals, opposition against climate change-denying,
creationist etc. politics can create false solidarity with a Popperian
understanding of research and knowledge. (Coincidentally, Popper's
philosophy provided the point of departure for both, scientific
neo-positivism and political-economic neo-liberalism.)


* Footnote for non-native English speakers: 'science' does not refer
to academic research/knowledge/teaching in general, but only to
the 'hard sciences'. The English word is not synonymous with Dutch
'wetenschap', German 'Wissenschaft' or even French 'sciences' (which
includes 'les sciences humaines'); it does not include the humanities
and qualitative social science.





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Re: Why I won't support the March for Science

[Florian Cramer]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Lunenfeld, Peter B.  
wrote:

> or as little sense as anything else. If you feel there remains a
> difference, then writing off the M4S comes off as pointlessly fractious
> at best, and ally-denigrating, wheel-churning self-destruction at worst.

Just to be clear: I am neither against science nor scientists and I
generally sympathize with U.S. scientists protesting their governments.
However, one also has to consider the concrete political demands of the
March for Science. The demand for "evidence-based policies and
regulations" (https://www.marchforscience.com/mission-and-vision/)
is one where I have to draw the line - just as you might draw the line
not joining a rally against racism when it has been organized by
Farrakhan (or a conservative Muslim organization in Europe) with his
political demands.

Most Nettime readers, and even most humanities academics in the U.S.
and elsewhere, might not be familiar with the particular context of the
term "evidence-based". It is not simply a generic descriptor, but the
name of a particular policy movement. This Wikipedia article gives a
good overview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_practice

Let me just quote the last paragraph on evidence-based social programs:
"There are increasing demands for the whole range of social policy and
other decisions and programs run by government and the NGO sector to be
based on sound evidence as to their effectiveness. This has seen an
increased emphasis on the use of a wide range of Evaluation approaches
directed at obtaining evidence about social programs of all types. A
research collaboration called the Campbell Collaboration has been set
up in the social policy area to provide evidence for evidence-based
social policy decision-making. This collaboration follows the approach
pioneered by the Cochrane Collaboration in the health sciences. Using
an evidence-based approach to social policy has a number of advantages
because it has the potential to decrease the tendency to run programs
which are socially acceptable (e.g. drug education in schools) but
which often prove to be ineffective when evaluated] More recently the
Alliance for Useful Evidence has been established to champion the use
of evidence in social policy and practice. It is a UK-wide network that
promotes the use of high quality evidence to inform decisions on
strategy, policy and practice. The agency published a useful practice
guide with Nesta's Innovation Skills Team on the effective use of
research evidence in 2016."

In other words, if anti-scientific populism is one (right-wing) hell,
evidence-based policies and regulations is the other
(neoliberal-technocratic) hell. I only brought up the Netherlands as an
example because it's a country where this hell has taken over
considerable parts of everyday life, not only in academia, but also in
healthcare, social work and policymaking.

One might perhaps consider the demand for "evidence-based policies and
regulations" an badly worded attempt to demand a politics that takes
scientific insight (on climate change, for example) into its
considerations. However, as an academic - and even a scientist in the
continental European meaning of the word -, I do take words seriously,
all the more when they have been written by scientists.

Florian

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Re: Neoliberalism & alt-rght trolls

[Florian Cramer]

It's a yes and no, depending on the definition of neoliberalism you
use. If you define neoliberalism along the lines of Hayek and Mises as
libertarianism light, then yes, there are overlaps, particularly in
cyber libertarianism.

Within the larger current network and discourse of the "Alt-Right",
the cyber libertarian positions of Neo-Reaction ("NRx")/right-wing
accelerationism and Peter Thiel mark these points of intersection.
But also the support of Bitcoin (whose design is based on Hayek's
economics) in larger, hacker culture-sympathetic parts of the
"Alt-Right".

The populist mainstream of the "Alt-Right", however, is
anti-neoliberal; not only because of its resentment against what it
perceives as liberal identity politics, but also because it opposes
free trade capitalism and demands economic nationalism/isolationism.

These contradictions are already breaking the larger "Alt-Right"
network as we're speaking.

Florian

Op 15 mei 2017 9:14 a.m. schreef "Geert Lovink" :

> I would say no. Neo-liberalism comes with politically correct identity
> politics. It does not allow weirdness and ‘freedom of speech’.
> Neo-liberalism is out to claim consensus and cannot argue in public. It
> has to silence the fringe and ignores it in a deep and, until recently,
> effective way. That’s maybe also why alt-right came into being in the
> first place. Neo-liberalism is a hegemonic block, pretty much as Gramsci
> once defined it.
>
> Geert
>
> > On 15 May 2017, at 6:45 am, Robert Tynes  wrote:
> >
> > To what extent are alt-rght trolls a product of neo-liberalism?
> >
> > -nb
>



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Fwd: Neoliberalism & alt-rght trolls

[Florian Cramer]

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 3:30 PM, Gabriella "Biella" Coleman <
enid.cole...@mcgill.ca> wrote:

> I hope people did not actually think I am claiming the right and new
> (and Internet-enabled) manifestations of it don't exist out of the
> United States. That was not my point about the chans/alt-right. And sure
> it can take off and kick off in those parts, though it has not done so
> yet and it's just a bit harder compared to Anonymous which was begging
> for adoption due to its early activist configuration.

It has done so in the Netherlands, with the full package of chan
culture, Pepe memes and a politician of the extreme right rising
in the elections literally wearing Pepe on his shoulder - no, not
Wilders but the still-less-known Thierry Baudet and his new FvD party.
(Coincidentally or not, the leaders of the Dutch Pirate Party defected
to this party in late 2016, as I just recently learned from friends
who are more in the loop.)

-F



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Re: Fwd: Neoliberalism & alt-rght trolls

[Florian Cramer]

According to Ancilla Van der Leest, those board members haven't been
accepted into Baudet's party. However. this doesn't change the overall
picture. It seems to be a good example of cyberlibertarianism and
Internet rights activism (whether in the Pirate Party or in hacker
movements) having attracted people from opposite political camps while
been misperceived as "left-wing" at large.

In Germany, the extreme-right Identitarian movement (Europe's
equivalent of the "Alt-Right") is now at the forefront of activism
against a new anti-hate speech law for social media. It consciously
reenacts the rhetoric and performances used in the "Stasi 2.0"
protests against proposed net filtering legislation in 2009 (back
then, supposedly against child pornography) which gave birth to the
German Pirate Party.

> The results will be enhanced attention for both parties, which will
> help the Forum a little bit — just about enough, I’d say, to steal
> some votes from VNL so that both end at 0 seats and leave Wilders sole
> ruler on the right.

This part of the analysis was incorrect. During the election campaign,
the so-called "Alt-Right" (which first had drummed up support for
Wilders on a "TheWilders" SubReddit modelled after TheDonald) defected
to Baudet and massively promoted him with a meme campaign. Baudet's
party won two seats and is in a good position to eventually take over
the extreme right from a worn-out Wilders, who increasingly sounds
like a broken record.

-F



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Re: Can the Left Meme?

[Florian Cramer]

   Tilman,
   I couldn't agree more - and would suggest to extend this history to the
   memes of the Luddites and even revolutionary pamphlets and caricatures
   in the reformation age. This was a highly successful political meme in
   its time, the early 16th century:
   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ego_sum_Papa.jpg ; just like
   contemporary Internet memes, it relied on mass reproduction technology
   and popularized access to media.

   Even the visual structure of imageboard memes is a 1:1 continuation of
   medieval and Renaissance emblems which consisted of a title (motto)
   printed on top, an image (pictura) in the middle and a subtitle
   (subscriptio) at the bottom. When emblems fell out of fashion in the
   18th century, newspaper caricatures took over their structure. Internet
   images memes are just the last part of this media history.

   Even theories of memetic information and the grotesque as an weapon of
   information warfare is much older than the Internet (and Dawkins'
   genetics). William S. Burroughs' early 1970s essay "The Electronic
   Revolution" (electronically reprinted by UbuWeb here:
   http://www.ubu.com/historical/burroughs/electronic_revolution.pdf)
   is all about memetic warfare. Quote from page 24/25:

   > "So does scrambled word and image. The units are unscrambling
   compulsively, presenting certain words and images to the subject and
   this repetitive presentation is irritating certain bodily and neutral
   areas. The cells so irritated can produce over a period of time the
   biologic virus units. We now have a new virus that can be communicated
   and indeed the subject may be desperate to communicate this thing that
   is bursting inside him. He is heavy with the load. Could this load be
   good and beautiful? Is it possible to create a virus which will
   communicate calm and sweet reasonableness? A virus must parasitise a
   host in order to survive. It uses the cellular material of the host to
   make copies of itself. in most cases this is damaging to the host. The
   virus gains entrance by fraud and maintains itself by force. An
   unwanted guest who makes you sick to look at is never good or
   beautiful. It is moreover a guest who always repeats itself word for
   word take for take."

   In academic cultural theory, Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the medieval
   carnival as a populist spectacle of inversion of ruling codes can be
   seamlessly applied to 4chan's and 8chan's meme culture.

   > Leftists are by defintion attached to some kind of humanist view of
   > the world and hence cannot stoop low enough to create stuff that is
   > attractive to the crowd the enjoys /pol/-type of Memes.

   It didn't always use to be like this. Think of the meme campaigns in
   punk culture - starting with "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols
   and the accompanying visual campaign designed by Jamie Reid, think of
   the anarchist British "Class War" zine and its headline "Another
   Fucking Royal Parasite" atop of a picture of Princess Diana and her
   newborn child, or think of the 1990s London-based "Underground" zine
   (made among others by Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood) which featured
   a tabloid-size image of prime minister John Major with a penis as a his
   nose
   (http://www.paperposts.me/posts/underground-a-free-broadsheet-for-london).

   If such forms are no longer acceptable within the so-called left (a
   term which in the American context problematically conflates the two
   opposites of liberalism and socialism), 'Neoreactionaries' have some
   point when they call it a "cathedral".
   -F

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Musings on what's left of copyleft

[Florian Cramer]

The following piece was commissioned for the book
"Being Public - How Art Creates the Public Domain" (
http://valiz.nl/webshop/en/categorieen/product/120-being-public-how-ar
t-cre= ates-the-public.html) ,a volume containing essays chiefly by
Dutch art researchers on the status quo of art in the public sphere.
I had been asked by the editor to investigate this subject more
specifically in relation to the Internet and digitality. The book, as
such, addresses a traditional arts audience that may be completely
unfamiliar with the subjects I cover, including free software,
copyleft, net.art, UbuWeb etc.

The publication of this volume happens to coincide with (a) my 20th
anniversary of being a user of Debian GNU/Linux and involvement in
one of the first conferences on the interrelations of Free Software
and culture (Wizards of OS in Berlin), (b) the defense of Aymeric
Mansoux's monumental PhD thesis on Free/Libre/Open Source Software and
its complex appropriations and misreadings in the arts, at Goldsmiths
in London.

- Hence, the first half of the essay is an introduction into the
subjects of anti-proprietary models of authorship and distribution,
pointing out that they weren't invented by Free Software copyleft, but
had important precursors in art movements like lettrism and Fluxus.
The second half is a more pensive consideration of where the practical
success of Free/Open Source software has led to (among others,
low-cost infrastructures for Internet monopolists and the crapularity
of throw-away gadgets), and to which degree artists' concepts of
cornucopian gift cultures (from Bataille via the Situationists to
Kenneth Goldsmith and Hito Steyerl) and ecologists' concepts of the
commons aren't fundamentally at odds.


-F




% Does the Tragedy of the Commons Repeat Itself
as a Tragedy of the Public Domain?

% Florian Cramer, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences


Gift Economies
==

‘Potlatch’ is a traditional Native American gift exchange ceremony. In
the twentieth century, the word was adopted for a radical politics and
aesthetics of the public domain. The *Lettrist International*, a group
of poets, artists and political activists that preceded the Situationist
International, published its periodical *Potlatch* free of charge and
free of copyright. From 1954 to 1957, *Potlatch* appeared in Paris and
the Dutch section of the Situationist International published its own
issue of the bulletin in 1959. In an essay included in the Dutch
edition, Guy Debord explained gift exchange as a way in which to
‘reserve and surmount’ the ‘negativity’ of modern arts.[^1] With
‘negativity’, he not only meant aesthetics, but also economics. The
successor to *Potlatch*, the journal *Internationale Situationniste*,
was free of copyright too. This way, Lettrists and Situationists sought
to pre-emptively undermine the collector’s and art market’s value of
their work, at least in theory. In practice, none of the major
participants kept up anti-copyright.[^2]

Around the same time, in the 1960s, Fluxus sought to fundamentally
rethink the economics and public accessibility of art when it focused on
street performances and on its own genuine invention ‘multiples’: the
production of artworks (from artists’ books to small sculptural objects)
in affordable editions. Fluxus’ founder and theorist George Maciunas did
not literally use the terms ‘access’ or ‘accessibility’, yet radically
addressed them on both an institutional and aesthetic level. By moving
contemporary art from museums and galleries to bookshops and streets,
Fluxus sought to give it ‘non-elite status in society’.[^3] This, by
itself, does not differ much from other programmes of bringing art into
the public space, for example as open air sculpture. But Maciunas also
sought to radically change form and language of contemporary art for
this purpose. He wanted art to become ‘Vaudeville-art’ and
‘art-amusement’.[^4] Art should become ‘simple, amusing, concerned with
insignificances, have no commodity or institutional value … obtainable
by all and eventually produced by all’.[^5] This eventually lead to
Fluxus being perceived, like Situationism, as counterculture rather than
as contemporary art in its own time. Today, both are mostly seen as
forerunners of contemporary performative, conceptualist and political
art, although their radical anti-institutional agenda is being
overlooked. Little attention has been paid to political-economic visions
in both movements: a radical public domain without commodities and
private property.

This did not prevent Lettrist, Situationist and Fluxus work from ending
up (or even being produced) as collector’s items wherever this work had
a conventional material form, such as auto- or serigraphs, objects,
installations, performance remnants, photographs or original copies of
*Potlatch*. When the World Wide Web became a mass medium in the
mid-1990s, the first avant-garde and contemporary ar

The alt-right and the death of counterculture

[Florian Cramer]

[Olivier Jutel wrote an extensive review of Angela Nagle's new book "Kill
All Normies - Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the
alt-right" (Zero Books, 2017) for the Australian journal Overland:
https://overland.org.au/2017/07/the-alt-right-and-the-death-
of-counterculture/
It's an essay in its own right; I'm reposting it here with Olivier's kind
permission. An other, less favorable review of the same book can be read
here: https://medium.com/@curple.turnle/i-didnt-like-kill-all-norm
ies-very-much-225c17868d78   -Florian]


The alt-right and the death of counterculture
By Olivier Jutel
6.Jul.17


Angela Nagle has written an indispensable book that allows both the
extremely online- and meme-illiterate to grasp the IRL implications of the
online culture wars. From the rise of Trump as a lulzy agent of base
enjoyment and unrestrained conspiracy, to the collapse of meaning in these
perilously ridiculous times, all are products of an ascendant online
culture which privileges affect and transgression. Nagle navigates a sea of
anime Nazis, gamers, white nationalists, masturbation abstainers and
violent misogynists in mapping the contours of online reaction and fascism.
What is essential and most controversial in her thesis is the symbiosis
between what we can call the ‘Tumblr liberal-left’ and the alt-right. Both
are products of an online cultural vanguardism that has been lauded by
techno-utopians, nominally leftist academics and journalists alike. Nagle
wields a forceful critique of the online left’s aestheticised resistance as
both self-satisfied and lacking the dynamism to undercut the alt-right’s
discourse of modern alienation, however nonsensical. This book is not an
attempt at righteously slam dunking on the basement dwelling nerds of the
alt-right or rehashing the excesses of campus identitarians. Instead it
takes on the ideological deadlocks of the left that have been masked by the
tech-fetishism of late capitalism.

The title ‘Kill All Normies’ embodies the wry humour of this book,
necessary to deal with the risible nature of the alt-right and the
horrifying obscenity, racism and misogyny that fuels the movement. At its
origin, the alt-right amounts to a lament of web 2.0 inclusivity which
ruined the memes and the ‘mean internet’ safe spaces of predominately young
white male misanthropes. At its core, the alt-right is the equivalent of a
new convert to punk complaining that ‘modern music today is so terrible’.
In Gabriella Coleman’s book on 4-Chan and the hacker collective Anonymous,
she extensively profiles the archetype troll Andrew Auernheimer, aka weev.
weev is a truly contemptible figure, an avowed white supremacist and
supporter of Dylan Roof who during the Trump campaign dedicated himself to
‘Operation Pepe’. As with so much of the alt-right, weev is equal parts
laughable and evil, claiming that his weaponisation of Pepe the Frog memes
will incite the coming race war. And despite his undeniable status as an
uber-troll of the alt-right, his interview with Coleman captures a pathetic
grandiosity in trying to impress the fact that he ‘was in the room when the
lulz was first said’. It is so jarringly stupid to think that the renewal
of fascism and white supremacy would be driven by a nerdy subcultural
one-upmanship but this is the genesis of the online culture wars identified
by Nagle.

For Nagle, the rise of the alt-right is not so much about the ideological
currency of reactionary politics but the techno-enthusiastic embrace of
transgression and disruption deracinated from politics. As with many
discussions on the state of the left, Nagle considers the epochal moment of
’68 and the youth-led demands for individual emancipation from hierarchy.
She writes, the alt-right ‘has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan
“It is forbidden to forbid!” than it does with anything most recognize as
part of any traditionalist right.’ Where for fifty years conservatives have
been fighting sexual liberation and ‘liberal cultural excess,’ the
alt-right have formulated a style which is counter-cultural, dynamic, and
thrives, at least temporarily, on its own incoherency. Embodying the best
traditions of conservative hucksterism, Milo has been a key figure in
providing a fascist chic and garnering mainstream media access, elevating
his brand and online provocations into a reactionary culture-jamming. Nagle
observes that Richard Spencer’s ‘spitting disdain about the vulgarity of
the US consumer culture-loving, Big-Mac munching, Bush-voting, pick-up
truck owning pro-war Republican’ could be ripped from a mid-oughts edition
of AdBusters.

The alt-right has latched onto the transgressive and paranoid libertarian
style of culture jammers and hackers, which always sat uncomfortably on the
left, and celebrates the liberation of the individual against ghastly
sheeple and normie culture. In the process they have disrupted the poles of
youth culture, allowing for an easy slippage between gaming, lib-hating

Re: Locating ArtScience

[Florian Cramer]

Hello Eric, Brian,

Historically - as fas as I do overlook the subject matter -,
ArtScience is rooted in the collaboration of artists and (hard)
scientists in research labs as described in Douglas Kahn's and Hannah
Higgins' book "Mainframe Experimentalism" and, from a very critical
political perspective, in Lutz Dammbeck's feature documentary "The
Net". In the 1970s, it often involved artists with backgrounds
in 1960s experimental and intermedia arts (such as Fluxus artist
Alison Knowles and filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek), and was modeled after
earlier collaborations between electronic music composers (such as
Lejaren Hiller and Dick Raaijmakers) and scientists in university and
corporate research labs. In most cases, ArtScience meant/means that
contemporary artists chose to affiliate themselves with science and
technology research instead of the humanities and cultural studies
as the traditional academic counterparts of the arts. Perhaps the
"Leonardo" journal, which has been published since the 1960s, is
hitherto the best manifestation and documentation of the ArtScience
discourse and field. (On top of that, "Leonardo's" name suggests a
larger history of ArtScience that encompasses Renaissance neoplatonist
and classical Pythagorean discourses that thought of mathematics,
sciences, musical and visual aesthetics as one integrated whole.)

Just as 'contemporary art' (as a discourse and field with close
affiliations to the humanities and cultural studies/critical theory)
has tended to be late and/or superficial (such as in much of the
trendier Post-Internet art) in grasping and engaging with the social
and cultural impact of new technologies, ArtScience conversely runs
the risk to end up as affirmative techno spectacle (or just some court
jester experimentation in research labs without actual contributions
to the core research).

While I do know and appreciate the ArtScience study program in The
Hague - and even collaborate with some of its graduates -, I wonder
whether the field of ArtScience as a whole can be extended towards
the critical ecological discourse and engagement that you propose.
Factually, that discourse does not only require the intersection of
art and science (again, in the Anglo-American meaning of science
vs. humanities), but one of art, science, humanities and politics.
It would require to rid itself from those techno-positivists in
the larger ArtScience community seen who literally advocate that
art practice should become lab work and creative technology R&D in
institutes of technology because the relevant stuff (such as robotics,
artificial intelligence and sensor technology) is being developed
there. (I could drop many names, also from the Netherlands, but leave
them out for the sake of politeness.)

Along with colleagues, I've found the concept and discourse of
Critical Making much clearer as an attempt of fusing the arts,
design, technological hacking with critical humanities and social
engagement. (On this topic, an interview with Garnet Hertz has just
been published: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD43kCvI1wY) One
of the questions for us = is to which extent Critical Making can
be extended into a larger discourse including the contemporary art
field. Other proposals are on the table, such as "environmental
humanities" (whose name unfortunately doesn't include the arts) and
"creative ecologies". Within the environmental humanities, T.J.
Demos' book "Against the Anthropocene" conversely points out how
the original notion of the anthropocene itself is contaminated with
techno positivism. I would agree that the crises we're facing are
insufficiently addressed by the mere combination of the two discourses
of art and science, and that we need concepts that are both more
specific and more inclusive.

Just my 10 cents.

Florian



On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 1:36 AM, Eric Kluitenberg  wrote:

> Thanks so much Brian,
>
> Very relevant critique. Without wanting to get stuck on a term, I was
> using the word ‘field’ partly because there is a field of practice that
> refers to itself as ArtScience (with a growing number of initiatives,
> organisations, museums even), towards which I wanted to take a position /
> open it up for scrutiny and discussion. Also, this text is written from
> within the program in The Hague to stimulate critical debate there, and is
> possibly a bit too much written from an ‘internal’ perspective, which is
> why it is good to post it here and get responses from outside that
> inner-circle.


<...>


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Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Florian Cramer]

> The *goal* of the Bitcoin proof of concept was 'an electronic payment
> system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two
> willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a
> trusted third party.' So when the author of this avid-reader essay
> complains 'but Visa... but FDIC... but NASDAQ,' one reasonable response is:
> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The point of Bitcoin wasn't to succeed to the degree that it
> has, or in the way that it has.


Hi Ted,

If that had been Bitcoin's only goal, then it would have sufficed to create
a crypographic peer-to-peer payment system based on/supporting existing
currencies and their exchange rates.

Things got politically murky with the introduction of Bitcoin as its own
currency based on Hayek's and Mises' economic theory, i.e. with built-in
deflation and absence of political control except through owners.

-F

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Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Florian Cramer]

On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 7:12 PM, Morlock Elloi 
wrote:

But I want to get back to Bitcoin as a random mindless technology that
> found its receptors in the society, and use proof by negation: Bitcoin has
> three key components: asymmetric crypto (for signatures), Merkle tree (for
> chains) and virtual machine that executes code. Asymmetric crypto uses
> modular arithmetic in the finite field, Merkle tree uses one-way hash
> functions. Which of these technologies/inventions or combinations thereof
> start to present the moral failure? Should we blame Whit Diffie, Ralph
> Merkle or Von Neumann and their respective societies? Where do you draw the
> line, and how is that line not arbitrary?
>

You left out the most important design decision: to cap the number of
Bitcoins in circulation, therefore building deflation into the currency.
And that decision has nothing to do with crypto, science or technology, but
is purely political and based on a cyberlibertarian reading of "Austrian
economics".

- I'm phrasing it this way (instead of writing "based on Hayek") after
having read the fascinating blog article "Was Friedrich von Hayek a
Nihilist?" ("War Friedrich von Hayek ein Nihilist?") in Frankfurter
Allgemeine, a politically conservative, pro-free market newspaper. Written
by its financial markets editor, the article suggests by implication that a
lot of the Hayekianism in AnCap and cyberlibertarian subcultures is based
on a narrow reading of Hayek's earliest positions - positions that Hayek
himself later renounced: most of all, that interest rates shouldn't be
lowered (=money shouldn't be inflated) in times of economic crisis.
According to the article, Hayek had been - as a young economist -
overambitious with his model. Refuted by academic peers, he later accepted
that "deflation is no good" and shifted his work from financial market
theory to social theory.

Hayek is quoted in the article, in English, with the following statement:
"I probably ought to add a word of explanation: I have to admit that I took
a different attitude forty years ago, at the beginning of the Great
Depression. At that time I believed that a process of deflation of some
short duration might break the rigidity of wages which I thought was
incompatible with a functioning economy. Perhaps I should have even then
understood that this possibility no longer existed. . . . I would no longer
maintain, as I did in the early ‘30s, that for this reason, and for this
reason only, a short period of deflation might be desirable.“

Frankfurter Allgemeine's editor concludes his article with the sentence:
"The phenomenon that economists base their political recommendations on
their own world view, even when theoretical insights of the economic
sciences contradict them, may not have died out in our times".

http://blogs.faz.net/fazit/2017/12/27/war-friedrich-von-hayek-ein-nihilist-9489/#1.5359731

-F
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Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Florian Cramer]

It's not either-or (technology and political agency), but both-and. The two
things aren't cleanly separable. And this isn't any new or revolutionary
insight, but exactly what McLuhan meant with "the medium is the message"
and Wiener with the "human use of human beings" (or Lenin with his equation
"communism = soviet power + electricity", for that matter), and what newer
philosophies have rebranded as "apparatus".

I thought that we no longer needed to discuss this on Nettime, of all
places. Hacker culture, too, has been aware of it since its beginnings, as
any annual Chaos Computer Club congress demonstrates. (Btw., the motto of
the ongoing 34C3, "Tuwat" ['Dosomething'], references the legendary
Tunix/Tuwat conferences that took place in West Berlin in 1978 and 1981 and
not involved early hackers like Wau Holland, but also Michel Foucault.)

-F

On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 10:51 PM, Morlock Elloi 
wrote:

> Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that Bitcoin
> creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics" (neither of
> which I think is probable - looks like a parallel construction), and chose
> a hard limit instead of exponential backoff or any other of dozen possible
> strategies. Let's also assume that there were no other (dozens) of
> competing ideas which simply could not get any traction at the time (and
> this is a patently false assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was therefore
> not a random event, it was intentional dark design having roots in nearly
> hundred year old ideology, and there were no alternatives to it.
>
> Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just
> continued to use it until it was too late.
>
> What does this mean?
>
> It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the
> ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary
> people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see
> through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going to get
> fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutely nothing one can do about it
> (bitching notwithstanding.) All Dr. Evil has to do is carefully design a
> shiny object, and cretins will unconditionally descend on it. Easier than
> organizing rallies.
>
> It's a worldview that goes exactly nowhere. It doesn't even have afterlife.
>
> Try coding instead.
>
>
> You left out the most important design decision: to cap the number of
>> Bitcoins in circulation, therefore building deflation into the currency.
>> And that decision has nothing to do with crypto, science or technology,
>> but is purely political and based on a cyberlibertarian reading of
>> "Austrian economics".
>>
>
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Re: social media critique: next steps?

[Florian Cramer]

One could argue that today's mainstream social media critique has finally
caught up with the critical media theory of 10-15 years ago. The major
arguments have already been made in, among others, Wendy Chun's "Control
and Freedom" from 2005. Today's social media critique is a simplified,
moralizing version of that earlier theory, much like Neil Postman's
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" was a simplified, moralizing, popularized
version of McLuhan's 1960s theory of electronic mass media.

Still, I see the need for a renewed critical social media critique; one
that shifts its focus from the politics of algorithms to what I'd propose
to call the condition of civil disengagement. No matter the algorithms and
no matter whether we use mainstream or alternative social media (such as
diaspora, Mastodon or Nettime), social media's ubiquity and unavoidability
have created a toxic and often dangerous environment for any kind of
personal engagement. Anyone who is involved in social or political
activism, or even just blogging (as the current case of German blogger
Richard Gutjahr shows - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZiwRk1yLQ), faces
severe personal risks, among others through trolling, doxxing and
cybermobbing. "Gamergate" set a precedent that has become the standard.
Most existing, available criminal justice systems have proven to provide
inadequate protection. (Both Zoe Quinn's and Gutjahr's cases are textbook
example; on Gutjahr, see his [German] writeup:
http://www.gutjahr.biz/2018/01/hatespeech/).

It means that no Chinese "social credit" algorithm is necessary to
discourage social engagement or political resistance. It is not even a
question of "better" algorithms - whether "better" algorithmic governance
within existing social networks or through the creation of
"different"/alternative social networks -, since the issue will remain,
being one of an 'apparatus' or an 'actor network' transcending binary
distinctions of machinic and human agency. (The question whether a troll is
a human or a bot, isn't very relevant.)

Articulation of positions [including artist's positions outside self-chosen
safe spaces] is rapidly becoming a privilege of those who can afford their
defense.

-F



On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 11:18 AM, Alex Foti  wrote:

> so should facebook pay us basic income? i think some ft editorialist
> argued as much. but that would mean putting fb on a utility-like pedestal.
> i m no media theorist and so forgive me for intruding, but i wonder how the
> latest tweak to the fb algorithm (less news, more cousins) will affect
> participation to a platform which is only relevant for people that are
> millennial or older. as a creator of a movement medium in 2010 which listed
> news and events from and about social centers, i couldn't fail to notice
> how users and organizers migrated there to communicate events - today most
> of the traffic to MilanoX comes from facebook on mobile and this applies to
> anything the autonomist left communicates in milano. so we can't really
> afford to leave fb right now. However social media fatigue is apparent in
> its most enthusiastic users: teens. Instagram is no longer growing and
> Snapchat's failure to remain relevant shows that once you turn 15 you have
> something better to do with your life than snapping. They seem to
> understand that it generates social anxiety and superficial communication.
> i guess we should create a social medium that really addresses the needs of
> teens for self-emancipation from authority and conformism. times could be
> ripe for smartly political social media. i also wonder whether mass live
> streaming will become a thing in europe after it did in china.
>
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 9:36 AM, olivier auber 
> wrote:
>
>> Before leaving Facebook, here's the bill.
>> USD 350,000,000,000,000
>> Three hundred Fifty Thousand Billion Dollar
>>
>> Open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
>>
>> Hi Mark!
>>
>> Best wishes and congratulations on your good resolutions 2018!
>>
>> 1) you tell us you have realized that "with the rise of a small number of
>> big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their
>> citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather
>> than decentralizes it."
>>
>> Only a belief? Isn't it a little real? And you're here for something,
>> aren't you?
>>
>> On top of that, you tell us that you are "interested to go deeper and
>> study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies (of
>> decentralization)"
>>
>> It's cool ! You should know that others have been working on
>> decentralization for a long time - already long before Facebook was created
>> - to create the conditions for a more equitable and healthy society. If
>> your awareness is real, you can probably help us. We lack developers!
>>
>> 2) You also seem to have understood that your algorithms made people
>> crazy by flooding them with sponsored posts and fake news. You say:
>> "strengthening our relation

Re: Mechanical Turkish

[Florian Cramer]

Thanks for sharing this. None of the issues described in this write-up can
be blamed on the corporate ownership of the currently popular social media.
If people used Open Source, community-owned and community-run social media
instead (like, for example, Mastodon or diaspora), there would be the same
problems or worse.

This means that ownership and participation is no longer the central issue.
Consequently, the media activism that began in the 1960s/70s - from the
free radio and television to the tactical media movements to the advocacy
of self-organized/autonomous networks - doesn't have answers to these
questions.

-F

On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 10:55 PM, Morlock Elloi 
wrote:

> TL;DR: Fb extracts ethical decisions from its digital precariat humanness
> deposits at the rate of one decision every 22 seconds (that's 0.045
> decisions/sec.)
>
>
> (from https://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/46820/
> Three-months-in-hell )
>
>
> Germany has become one of Facebook's most important hubs for content
> moderation - also fueled by a controversial new law that requires social
> media companies to effectively remove hate speech and violence. In Berlin
> and Essen more than 1000 people work as Facebook Content Moderators, most
> of them employed by the outsourcing company Arvato, a subsidiary of
> Bertelsmann, one of Germany's most powerful companies. Yet the work and the
> rules of content moderation is done in secrecy. In a year-long
> investigation, our reporters Hannes Grassegger and Till Krause spoke to
> dozens of current and former content moderators working for Facebook in
> Germany and have written several award-winning reports (»Inside Facebook«)
> that made the working conditions and deletion rules (»The secret rules of
> Facebook«) of Facebook public. Recently they have been contacted by Burcu
> Gültekin Punsmann, a former employee who, for the first time, gives a
> personal account of her work as a content moderator. We have slightly
> shortened and edited her piece for clarity.
>
> ---
>
> As a new comer to Berlin in July 2017, I found myself in a job in content
> moderation at Arvato. Curiosity has a been a main driver. I accepted the
> very unappealing job offer and entered into a world I haven't suspected the
> existence of. I was recruited as an outsourced reviewer and became one of
> the thousands of Facebook Community Operations team members around the
> world working in some 40 languages. Berlin, draining well-educated
> multilingual cheap labor from all over the world, has recently developed,
> as I would learn, as new center for Facebook content moderation, as the
> German government toughened the legislation against hate speech.
>
> I quit the job after a three-month period. I feel the need today to take
> time to reflect on this very intense professional and personal experience.
> This is mainly an exercise of self-reflection and learning. I consider it
> as well as a way to dissociate myself from the very violent content I have
> been handling on a daily basis. I wish through my account to add
> transparency and to contribute to discussions on content moderation
> practices. I don't intend to violate the employee non-disclosure agreement
> I signed. I will not dig into the polices developed by Facebook. Through my
> relatively short work experience, I learned that these policies are
> constantly re-evaluated, highly dynamic and reactive. I couldn't perceive
> well enough, from my vintage point, the factors that impact on these sets
> of policies.
>
> I enjoyed the training and induction period. I was happy to be in a very
> international context, I was accustomed to in my previous roles in
> international development. The difference here was that everyone was a
> migrant, mostly young, with very diverse backgrounds. This eclecticism has
> definitively attracted me. The paradox of being behind high walls of
> confidentiality while working for a social media platform, which connects
> people and the world, made the job unique and certainly aroused my
> curiosity.
>
> Facebook and most of the social media platforms have a users/community
> based regulation system: no one is scrutinizing the content before it is
> uploaded. Users have the possibility to report the posts they found
> inappropriate on the platform. The content moderator is basically handling
> these reports, called tickets. With more than 2 billion users worldwide,
> the amount of content generated on Facebook is massive. As far as I know,
> some 6.5 million reports are generated in average every week. The work
> never stops, it continues seven days a week with almost no interruption.
>
> I have difficulties in conceptualizing the role I acted in. Was I acting
> as a censor and restricting the freedom of speech? I don't think that I
> acted exactly in this role. I respected the freedom to offend and to make
> use of the most creative forms of expression. Working in the Turkish
> market, I handled a lot of reports that re

Re: How do we govern ourselves? (was: Mechanical Turkish)

[Florian Cramer]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 2:27 AM, Brian Holmes 
  wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 10:18 PM, Blake Stimson 
wrote:
>
>>  My premise is that the question "how do we govern ourselves? ... with
which
>>  institutions, under which rules, backed by which constraints?" that
Brian
>>  raises can never be asked from the outsider standpoint of institutional

>>  critique but instead can only be asked immanently. This means first and

>>  foremost taking on responsibility in the way that Brian's “grey beard”
mea
>>  culpa wisely and graciously invites.
>>
>> In kindred spirit and in search of specific causes for our failure to

>> effectively the institutional question, I referred him to a recent piece
of
>> mine [http://www.abladeofgrass.org/fertile-ground/art-social-death/] that
>> tries to think through how a broadly defined cultural left has been
>> prevented from asking institutional questions less by the Kochs et al
and
>> more by its own relationship to race.
>
>
> Blake, I'm glad you took up this thread, and I'm also curious what Florian
> thinks, since he started the ball rolling.

My great apologies for replying so late - I've been under the hood with
work and staying off Nettime for a while. I am probably not the right
person to have any good answer to this question. These are recurring,
structural dilemmas between institutional and self-organized politics. (In
my own work life, I have always been involved in both.) The pitfall of any
form of self-organization is that it typically relies on an assumed, but
never codified political and/or ethical consensus. That consensus can often
turn out to be a fiction or delusion, for example, when in a media activist
project, participants turn out to be on the extreme political right, but
could go along unnoticed because of a fake, shared anti-establishment
politics; or when in a contemporary arts project, people side with or end
up on reactionary positions because they defend the "freedom of art"
against "political correctness". It can also be the opposite, not
tolerating a well-founded conservative position from the extreme left,
which I haven't experienced for quite some time though.

Often, these questions and conflicts are much better addressed and
regulated in public institutions or, as a rule of thumb, larger and better
established institutions. There are sound policies in place that tell where
to draw the line and how to deal with conflict in general, and how to
develop policies.

If we speak of institutional critique, it struck me - for example - how
here in Rotterdam, an internationally established, institutional, white
cube contemporary art space like Witte de With was much more critical and
radical than most alternative and self-organized artist-run spaces in
rethinking its own position in a predominantly non-white city. (This
rethinking will lead to WdW changing its name.)

Blake wrote in his essay, quoting Occupy co-initiator Micah White, that
"protest politics, movement politics, network politics, the politics of
color revolutions, color revolts and 'rehumanizing us as a people,' [...]
have gradually but no less surely forgotten a fundamental fact: that
politics is about taking control of governments and then governing."
Personally, I've drawn the same conclusion and became active in a political
party (the Dutch intersectional civil rights party BIJ1, formerly Artikel
1). A major motivation was that I no longer wanted to stand by and tolerate
the discursive hegemony of the extreme right.

Florian
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Re: The untenable technophobia of the Left

[Florian Cramer]

Which naive cyberlibertarian has written up this childish nonsense?

work". As it happens, a PRIVATE WhatsApp chat got leaked in which some
> policemen wrote
> that they wanted to kill black people and also Madrid's mayor. Not to be
> outdone, Madrid’s
> mayor, Manuela Carmena, champion of the nation's Left and the new hope of
> its inflexible
> institutionalised representatives (Podemos), declared that she will sue
> the policemen for
> hate crime.
>

Fortunately she does. Criminal intent and conspiracy isn't protected by
free speech. If other people ever uttered the intent to kill you (whether
or not in a private conversation), you would be glad if you have the legal
means of suing them.

-F

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Re: Reflections on Florian Cramer & Angela Nagle, discussion

[Florian Cramer]

Hello Kristoffer, David,

Actually, I had tried (but may have failed) in my own contribution to the
debate not to make any firm distinction between "subculture" and culture at
large. This is why I had pulled in the "high-brow" examples of Simon
Strauss and Götz Kubitschek, the examples of fascist modernism, or that of
Peter Sotos whose recognition spans underground music/publishing and
institutionally recognized contemporary art. The same is true for Laibach;
however it wasn't my intention at all to frame them as right-wingers. It's
just a historical fact that their highly ironic music and visuals, just
like those of the band DAF/Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, were
misunderstood, in the 1980s and early 1990s, as pro-fascist by the many
neonazis who went to their concerts.

It is conversely true for the American "Alt-Right" that it doesn't only
manifest as populist meme culture, but has made major efforts to present
itself as an intellectual discourse, for example in the publications of
"American Renaissance", in Richard Spencer's websites that emulate academic
journals and hijack the language of cultural theory (demanding "safe spaces
for white Americans" and the like) and of course in the recent popularity
surge for Jordan Peterson (someone Angela Nagle and I addressed on the
transmediale panel, too).

If my memory doesn't fail me too badly, then both Angela Nagle and me tried
to focus more on the subject matter of transgression. Transgression isn't
exclusive to what is conventionally called "subculture" at all, but a
leitmotif in modernist and contemporary arts, in social, political, sexual
and media activism, to name only the most prominent areas. What both of us
tried to reconstruct is how transgression has never been an exclusive
property of the political left, but has been propagated and practiced on
both extremes of the political spectrum, or - better said - in discourses
whose politics were, often intentionally, ambivalent. Here, we both
referred to Sade as a forerunner (whose ambivalence of enlightenment and
its other had already been analyzed in Adorno's and Horkheimer's "Dialectic
of Enlightenment).

Kristoffer wrote:

>  But this doesn't make them harmless of course, and actually creates a
public sphere even more prone to manipulation through those who can indeed
legitimise certain views over others as well as a scribing power to a form
of quantified affect, where opinions with more followers, more data etc
increasingly looks like valid knowledge.

This is precisely the deadlock - where the only two philosophical
alternatives are either Popperian or analytic philosophy rationalism, where
an argument is only valid when it is logically consistent, or
post-Nietzschean/post-Heideggerian/Sloterdijk-ian affect and "Stimmung".
Politically, this translates into the binary alternative of liberalism (in
the original European meaning of the word, i.e. in the sense of Adam Smith,
Popper and their successors) and populism/fascism.

Florian

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 7:39 PM, Kristoffer Gansing 
wrote:

> David Garcia wrote:
> >  A questioner towards the end of the discussion asked if Cramer and
> Nagle could talk more about affect and affective politics.. more about the
> emergence of movements and how sub-cultural energies today mobilised. Which
> the questioner added is  ?also a question of power that is able to
> legitimise these subcultural sentiments in ways that enable them to enter
> into the political mainstream.. I?d like you to address the strategies,
> sentiments within subcultural politics. It was a very good point but sadly
> it arose to close to the end.. Perhaps we can take up this challenge here?
>
> Thanks to David for taking the time to transcribe and comment on this
> dense discussion. Together with Daphne Dragona, I was responsible for
> organising this and felt that the atmosphere during the event was one of
> great attention and sense of urgency in terms of the audience wanting to
> have more of a say. Due to time constraints and two very talkative
> speakers, this didn't happen as much as it should have but it's nice to see
> the discussion continuing here. Since I was the one asking the question
> David mentions at the end, I can't but to help to step in and elaborate on
> this further. While I agree that one should not ascribe intrinsically
> progressive values to subcultures, I think it is important to situate the
> rise of the academic study and idealisation of subcultures in a historical
> context. Adorno and Horkheimer in all glory but what the British culture
> studies approach did was to take pop culture seriously as a thrust against
> the idealisation of high culture. One might say that th
>  is was snobbish academic appropriation of popular and working class
> cultural movements - but today the impact of this can also be seen in how
> academia has become more accessible to many, where being in a subculture
> and researching it at the same time might even be a viable option

Re: Unlocking Proprietorial Systems for Artistic Practice | By Marc Garrett.

[Florian Cramer]

>
> And yet ... by nearly every agreed-upon measure, the "cultural,
> political and economic systems in place" have contributed to what can be
> called--with equal understatement--a significant reduction in global
> poverty rates. A 74% reduction since 1990 by some estimates.
>

Let me guess - your source is Hans Rosling?

Here's a different take on the matter:
http://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/a-confused-statistician/

Florian
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Re: Quick Review..

[Florian Cramer]

Thanks, David - as I said in the discussion in Berlin, Stewart and I ended
up
in a weird place where we practically taught the "Alt-Right" its own
history.
One shouldn't read too much into its grasp of Gramsci though. This is what
Milo
Yiannopolous wrote about him in the original manuscript of his book
'Dangerous' (that Simon & Schuster ended up not publishing):

And so, in the 1920s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci decided that the
time had come for a new form of revolution -- one based on culture, not
class. According to Gramsci, the reason why the proletariat had failed to
rise up was because old, conservative ideas like loyalty to one's country,
family values, and religion held too much sway in working-class communities.
If that sounds familiar to Obama's comment about guns and religion, that's
because it should. His line of thinking, as we shall see, is directly
descended from the ideological tradition of Gramsci. Gramsci argued that as
a
precursor to revolution, the old traditions of the west -- or the 'cultural
hegemony,' as he called it -- would have to be systematically broken down.
To
do so, Gramsci argued that "proletarian" intellectuals should seek to
challenge the dominance of traditionalism in education and the media, and
create a new revolutionary culture. Gramsci's ideas would prove phenomenally
influential. If you've ever wondered why forced to take diversity or gender
studies courses at university, or why your professors all seem to hate
western civilization ... Well ' ..new you knew who to blame Gramsci.

(Because of the lawsuit, the manuscript is publicly available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjc0n5dll244o2w/Milo%20Y%20book%20with%20edits.pdf?dl=0
)
-F
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Re: Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Florian Cramer]

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

-F


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Re: (no subject)

[Florian Cramer]

The problem with all debates of "identity politics" is that there is no
clear definition of it, not even by Mark Lilla who popularized the term in
2016. (Lilla, by the way, doesn't even speak of or for the "left", but of
two types of  "liberalism", one that he supports and one that he rejects.)
"Identity politics" is a textbook strawman argument which any decent
analytic philosopher should be able to tear into pieces with propositional
logic. What's more, the term has become a reactionary meme now that
political movements, such as "Aufstehen" in Germany, are being founded on
the premise of reinvigorating the left by ridding it from "identity
politics". This is where the strawman becomes a red herring.

All this is mostly based on the fiction that the working class defected to
the extreme right after established left-wing politics no longer
represented it. It's a fiction because, at least in Europe, research has
clearly shown that most voters for the extreme right come from the middle
class and vote for these parties because of shared core values (in short,
an understanding of the rule of law as law and order, and an understanding
of democracy as the execution of the will of the people who represent the
majority population), not policies.

If Lilla and others were more consequential, they would have to
historically denounce the political left as "identity politics" as such.
One could call the French Revolution "identity politics" of the bourgeois
(versus the aristocracy), the 19th century workers' movement "identity
politics" of the working class (which an old-school Jacobin might have
rejected precisely on the grounds that the republic had declared everyone
to be equal), the feminist movement "identity politics" of women, the black
civil rights movement "identity politics" of African Americans, the gay
pride movement "identity politics" of queers etc.etc.. In the end, those
who deplore "identity politics" express a nostalgia for a simple, binary
past that never existed. Worse, they patronize groups of people to which
they neither belong, nor are in touch with.

Maybe there could be a more precise notion of "identity politics" in the
sense of political choices purely made on the basis of one's group identity
instead of one's political interests. Examples could include trade union
members who voted for Clinton, Blair and Schröder in the 1990s out of token
loyality to "their" party, or the blind support of openly destructive and
malicious politics on the basis of ethnic loyality in areas with ethnic
conflicts. In my hometown Rotterdam, for example, a right-wing populist
party has been the strongest political force for one and a half decade
simply on the basis of white ethnic voter loyalty (in a city whose majority
population is now non-white), never mind the fact that this party is
chasing its own voters out of the city by aggressively gentrifying
traditional neighborhoods. Did Lilla and his epigones ever call this
"identity politics"?

-F






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

[Florian Cramer]

Hello Carsten,

You wrote:

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

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

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

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

I don't buy the argument that RedHat has a $30 billion company value just
because of its services.

-F





>
>
>
>
> And Red Hat's value is not as much the free software it has used as its
> knowledge and infrastructure - which has arguably not been built by
> unpaid volunteers.
>
> In general, I'd say, top-professional FOSS tools are not built by
> amateurs or volunteers - though maybe by people who like to make them
> and who also can get paid by consulting or doing other works related to
> that.
>
> But as I said, it's not the licensing regime, but the exploitative
> nature of capitalist companies, that's the problem. Going proprietary
> wouldn't help a bit. Creating cooperatives that shared the income
> without any need for "bosses" or "owners" would be a safer bet.
>
> Best
>
> Carsten
>
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Re: apropos of nothing

[Florian Cramer]

Alexander Bard is a typical example of a "Querfront" activist, and a member
of this right-wing party:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Coalition

-F

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On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 12:30 AM Willem van Weelden 
wrote:

> dear angela,
> relax dear.
> it is ok.
> noone is recruiting anyone here.
> chill.
> best,
> w
>
>
> > On 03 Nov 2018, at 23:04, Angela Mitropoulos <
> angela.mitropou...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > What is Nettime's policy on whether or not it should give fascists a
> platform from which to recruit?
> >
> > Angela
> >
> >
> >
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Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy

[Florian Cramer]

That pamphlet is another piece of male fantasies and cyberlibertarian porn
that might very well come from the Alt-Right. (Note the invocations of
"fight clubs", "indigenous families" etc.)

-F


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On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 5:10 PM Ian Alan Paul  wrote:

> I thought some on the list interested in infrastructural / ecological
> politics might find this of interest:
>
> Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy
> (online: https://inhabit.global/ , español: https://es.inhabit.global/ ,
> français: https://fr.inhabit.global/ )
>
> There are two paths: The end of the world or the beginning of the next.
>
> The End of The World:
>
> It’s over.
>
> Bow your head and phone scroll through the apocalypse.
>
> Watch as Silicon Valley replaces everything with robots. New
> fundamentalist deathcults make ISIS look like child’s play. The authorities
> release a geolocation app to real-time snitch on immigrants and political
> dissent while metafascists crowdfund the next concentration camps.
> Government services fail. Politicians turn to more draconian measures and
> the left continues to bark without teeth. Meanwhile glaciers melt,
> wildfires rage, Hurricane Whatever drowns another city. Ancient plagues
> reemerge from thawing permafrost. Endless work as the rich benefit from
> ruin. Finally, knowing we did nothing, we perish, sharing our tomb with all
> life on the planet.
>
> The Beginning of The Next:
>
> Take a breath, and get ready for a new world.
>
> A multiplicity of people, spaces, and infrastructures lay the ground where
> powerful, autonomous territories take shape. Everything for everyone. Land
> is given over to common use. Technology is cracked open–everything a tool,
> anything a weapon. Autonomous supply lines break the economic strangle
> hold. Mesh networks provide real-time communication connecting those who
> sense that a different life must be built. While governments fail, the
> autonomous territories thrive with a new sense that to be free, we must be
> bound to this earth and life on it. Enclaves of techno-feudalism are
> plundered for their resources. We confront the dwindling forces of
> counter-revolution with the option: to hell or utopia?–either answer
> satisfies us. Finally, we reach the edge–we feel the danger of freedom, the
> embrace of living together, the miraculous and the unknown–and know: this
> is life.
>
> Our time is tumultuous and potent.
>
> Upheaval, polarization, politics as bankrupt as the financial markets–yet
> under crisis lies possibility. This epoch forces us to consider how each of
> us forms a kernel of potential, how individuals can follow their wildest
> inclinations to gather with others who feel the call. People learn lost
> skills and warriors return fire to the world. Farmers and gardeners
> experiment with organic agriculture while makers and hackers reconfigure
> machines. Models escape the vacant limelight and break bread with Kurdish
> radicals and military veterans taking a stand for communal life. Those with
> no use for politics find each other at a dinner table in Zuccotti park,
> Oscar Grant Plaza, or Tahrir Square, and the barista who can barely feed
> himself alone learns to cook for a thousand together. A retired welder and
> a web designer learn they are neighbors at an airport occupation and commit
> to read The Art of War together. An Instagram star whose anxiety usually
> confines them to their apartment meets a battle-scarred elder in Ferguson,
> where they are baptized in tear gas and collective strength, and begin to
> feel the weight lifted from their soul. People everywhere, living through
> the greatest isolation, rise together and find new modes of life. But when
> these kernels grow to the surface, they are stomped out in a frenzy of
> banality and fear. Openings are forcefully shuttered by riot police,
> private security forces, and public relation firms. Or worse, by the lonely
> ones–politically right or left–who have nothing to gain but another like on
> their crappy Twitter. All this while smug politicians and CEOs hover. The
> revolutionary character of our epoch cannot be denied, but we’ve yet to
> overcome the hurdle between us and freedom.
>
> We come from somewhere broken, yet we stand.
>
> Our epoch’s nihilism is topological. Everywhere is without foundation. We
> search for the organizational power to repair the world, and find only
> institutions full of weakness and cynicism. Well-meaning activists get
> digested through the spineless body of conventional politics, leaving
> depressed militants or mini-politicians. Those who speak out against abuse
> end up bearing witness to sad games of power playing out on social media.
> Movements erupt and then implode, devoured internally by parasites. Cities
> become unlivable as waters rise and governments scramble to maintai

Re: Was cultural Marxism the leading force behind the new world order

[Florian Cramer]

The extreme right is just not educated enough to properly spot its enemies.
Parts of Adorno's theory, for example, could be easily hijacked for
conservative and right-wing ends: his resistance against mass culture,
early writings against jazz music, fondness of Spengler and cultural
pessimism, even his larger issue of commodification resistance (which is a
left-wing as well as a right-wing topic), to name only a few. Much of
Adorno's philosophy was in line with the reservations and resentments of
the German "Bildungsbürgertum" (the English translation "educated middle
class" doesn't really cut it, because the German word describes a
particular social milieu that grew out of Lutheran-protestant values,
anti-materialism, academic education and fondness of canonic high culture).
Those resentments found their way into both left-wing and right-wing
thinking, including thinkers who crossed those lines (such as Peter
Sloterdijk).

If the political right and its protagonists would be better educated and
not argue on the level of college freshmen when it comes to cultural
theory, they would know that they shouldn't blame Adorno, Foucault and
Derrida, with the latter being even more easily interpretable as
revisionists and anti-progressives than Adorno. (Which is what parts of
so-called "German media theory" actually did in the 1980s and 1990s.) The
right-wingers should better refocus their attention to British Cultural
Studies which actually happen to be "Cultural Marxism" with no strings
attached. I'm almost afraid to drop the names of Stuart Hall and the
Birmingham School here (not to even mention Marxist post-colonialists such
as Gayatri Spivak), since they could be the "Alt-Right"'s perfect enemy and
scapegoat; much more so than Adorno and the Frankfurt School...

-F


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On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 10:47 PM Flick Harrison 
wrote:

> I always thought Cultural Marxism was a fine term and it doesn't hit me as
> a right-biased word in itself, though it gets used since its origin that
> way.  I mean the first law teacher I had in University was a
> Marxist-Feminist, who completely believed this radical notion that righties
> hate: there's a superstructure that constructs the social narrative, and
> the social narrative is the source for all concepts of right, wrong, law,
> etc, which are not absolutes but socially determined; and that as we live
> in a patriarchy, the narrative is all about what men need, want, love and
> desire.  Thus the patriarchal power structure and the narrative reinforce
> and reproduce one another.
>
> The objective of the Marxist-Feminist is seizing the means of production
> of this narrative (culturally, in the workplace, in the control of capital
> whether for industry or communications, in politics, in the home etc).
>
> Now if you extrapolate to include intersectional politics, you get
> Cultural Marxism, or maybe Identity Marxism.  What's not to like about this
> term?  What's incompatible with our ideals?
>
> By using the word Marxist you're already implying socialism and
> internationalism, it would be hard to be a Marxist-Feminist who isn't a
> radical socialist too.
>
> So for all the awfulness of Anders Breivik, this nomenclature dispute
> isn't the angle from which I'd critique him.  The problem is his (perhaps
> mental-health or socially-conditioned) fear of the other, leading to
> violent outburst.  The problem is his fear of dialogue and engagement.  The
> problem is the amplifying echo-chamber of violent, unhinged narcissists
> with nothing but contempt for any difference of opinion, where bad-faith
> actors team up with honest ignoramuses and budding lunatics.
>
> Now a term I really suspect is the bogeyman term "Anarcho-Capitalism:"
> this seems to be almost an alt-right Trojan Horse, meant to lure beginner
> Left thinkers of the "Bernie-or-Trump" variety. To me Libertarian
> Capitalism seems like a term that more readily describes people like Trump,
> Paul Ryan, Margaret Thatcher, Andrew Scheer, Sarkozy etc.  "Capital is born
> free, yet everywhere it is in chains!" Oh crap, there's Rousseau again, but
> I swear I know nothing about him.
>
> By using "Anarcho-" that way, it sounds to me like an attempt to muddy our
> image of the villains:  "Anarchism" evokes the left, whereas the most
> radical white supremacist kleptocrats are more likely Libertarian.  Why try
> to make Anarchism sound bad by tying it to Capitalism??  Because the
> alt-right talking points assert that "globalism" and "identity politics"
> and "socialism" are something that "elites" do, i.e. the big bad
> "oligarchs."  Lump these elites (Hillary! Oprah! Michelle Obama!) together
> with capitalists ((Soros!)) and you get "Anarcho-Capitalists??"
>
> Libertarian Capitalism, on the other hand, gets away scot-free because
> Crypto nerds think libert

Re: Against Andrea Nagle's rightwing-masquerading-as-left tract on "open borders"

[Florian Cramer]

> Although not directly related to technology per se I found it related to
our current discussions on the polis and inclusion, as well as a
> continuing commentary on how the online right operates deftly in
ostensibly leftist spaces.

This is completely related to our previous discussion of 'identity
politics'.

What we're currently witnessing is a rift between a neo-traditionalist
socialist political left and an intersectional political left. The former
wants to re-focus all political struggle on (traditional) class struggle
and the restoration of the welfare state, arguing that the latter can only
work as a national state with a restrictive border and immigration regime.
This camp dismisses intersectional positions as "liberal". The German
"Aufstehen" movement of Sarah Wagenknecht and theater maker Bernd Stegemann
belongs into this category, the Dutch political thinker Ewald Engelen and
the Dutch Socialist Party. (I'm sure there are more examples, these are
only the ones I'm most familiar with.)

Movements like Bernie Sanders' and Jeremy Corbyn's seemingly attempt to
reconcile both positions, but clearly focus their agenda on traditionalist
class struggle (with Corbyn taking an unclear position towards Brexit). I
see Angela in the traditionalist-socialist camp, too. That doesn't make her
part of the "online right".

-F
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Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques

[Florian Cramer]

>
>
> - Government propaganda and censorship around lockdown and vaccination
>
[...]

> - The role of mass and social media in anti- or pro-lockdown or vaccine
> propaganda, political polarization and forms of media virality (eg. via
> covid-19 memes)
>
[...]

> - Mandatory vaccine rollouts as assaults to the feminist appeal to bodily
> autonomy
>
[...]

> - Ethical considerations regarding mass experimentation, moral shaming and
> lateral citizen surveillance
>
[...]

> - Teleological and theological narratives of science as salvation (eg. via
> vaccinations)


All beautiful examples of a "Querfront" discourse where extreme right
positions are packaged  in left-wing rhetoric. Not a single point, however,
on minorities and vulnerable people and communities endangered by
anti-vaccer egoism, and neo-Darwinist politics - for example in the UK,
Sweden and the Netherlands, of "herd immunity" through survival of the
fittest.

You should invite Dutch experts Willem Engel and Thierry Baudet as keynote
speakers.

-F
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Re: CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques

[Florian Cramer]

>
> I feel there exists a distinct and problematic form of boundary policing
> from what identifies as 'the left' today, resulting in any critique of
> lockdowns and provax sentiment starting from left-wing values being too
> easily dismissed as 'right-wing.' A better critique of class in relation to
> all this is especially sorely missing. Hence my retort of 'knee-jerk.'
>

The word "provax" itself is a propaganda framing, similar to framing
evolution as 'just a theory' next to 'intelligent design', and a complete
giveaway of your ideology; just as your list of research questions was, in
its sum, rhetorical.

Any critical discussion ends here.

-F




>
> Cheers, Ingrid.
>
> Get Outlook for Android <https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
> --
> *From:* Ana Teixeira Pinto 
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 20, 2022 2:00:52 PM
> *To:* Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) 
> *Cc:* nettim...@kein.org 
> *Subject:* Re:  CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics:
> left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques
>
> I would not call Florian's response a knee-jerk reaction, and also find it
> difficult to sketch out an anti-racist position without addressing vaccine
> equity, or the adjacency of anti-vaccine rhetoric to narratives of reverse
> colonialism entailing the subjugation of white people; not to mention their
> rabid antisemitism. I would not foreclose a left-wing critique of
> government policy but would agree with Florian that its dangerous to couch
> far-right sentiment in left wing discourse.
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 1:06 PM Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) 
> wrote:
>
> Your knee-jerk response is an excellent example of elitist and
> false-oppositional ‘left’ thinking that has completely fallen for the
> government and big-pharma propaganda, and forgets to think critically about
> power structures, knowing very well that right-wing and left-wing, while
> also entertaining huge differences, are not pure opposites. Baudet would be
> proud of you; he can rake in the spoils.
>
> Cheers, Ingrid.
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Florian Cramer 
> *Sent:* Thursday, 20 January 2022 13:00
> *To:* Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) 
> *Cc:* nettim...@kein.org
> *Subject:* Re:  CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics:
> left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques
>
>
>
>
> - Government propaganda and censorship around lockdown and vaccination
>
> [...]
>
> - The role of mass and social media in anti- or pro-lockdown or vaccine
> propaganda, political polarization and forms of media virality (eg. via
> covid-19 memes)
>
> [...]
>
> - Mandatory vaccine rollouts as assaults to the feminist appeal to bodily
> autonomy
>
> [...]
>
> - Ethical considerations regarding mass experimentation, moral shaming and
> lateral citizen surveillance
>
> [...]
>
> - Teleological and theological narratives of science as salvation (eg. via
> vaccinations)
>
>
>
> All beautiful examples of a "Querfront" discourse where extreme right
> positions are packaged  in left-wing rhetoric. Not a single point, however,
> on minorities and vulnerable people and communities endangered by
> anti-vaccer egoism, and neo-Darwinist politics - for example in the UK,
> Sweden and the Netherlands, of "herd immunity" through survival of the
> fittest.
>
>
>
> You should invite Dutch experts Willem Engel and Thierry Baudet as keynote
> speakers.
>
>
>
> -F
>
>
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Re: Dodomenta, Diary from Kassel

[Florian Cramer]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 02:17 Jo van der Spek M2M  wrote:

It was the absence of the lumbung artists in the venues that struck me,
>

A footnote to this: This absence was largely caused by the fact that the
documenta organization had only obtained 90 days visitor visa for the
participating non-EU artists while documenta lasts 100 days. As far as I
know, even members of ruangrupa were affected and couldn't stay for the
whole period of the event.

Ruangrupa's initial idea to shorten the running time of documenta fifteen
as a means of working around the visa issue was turned down by documenta's
organization.

It is one of the many examples of how documenta failed to be a good host
for the participating artists. Obviously, documenta is an exhibition event
that was neither used, nor equipped, to host artists who would not just
come for building up installations/art pieces, but stay for the whole event
and run it in the manner of a festival rather than an exhibition.

Collectives like Jatiwangi art Factory (from Indonesia) came to Germany in
two shifts of two groups of people to work around the visa limitation, but
at the closing weekend, only one person was left and supported by a
volunteer group from Kassel's art school and my own school in Rotterdam.

Before that, the group lived with about 15 people - among them little
children - for 3 months in a former factory office building with no shower,
a single toilet and sink, and a small kitchen with 4 electrical platters.
Those conditions wouldn't have been tolerated in any asylum seeker shelter.
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The medium is not the message (lecture to students)

[Florian Cramer]

[This September, the media department of the Universiteit van
Amsterdam invited me to give the graduation speech for its Masters
students of New Media. I had been asked to address the future of new
media studies in my lecture, which was a difficult task since I had
never studied or taught new media studies. I hope that I'm not boring
Nettime by posting the manuscript here. -Florian]

# The Medium is Not the Message #
## On the future of new media studies ##

Dear graduates,

Let me make a wild guess: Perhaps it has become more difficult for you to
say what media are - and what media studies are - than a few years ago
when you began to study them. A paradox of "media" is that, in our time,
they seem to be everywhere at first glance yet nowhere when it comes to
critical study. Every person on the street would agree that our everyday
life is permeated by electronic media, the Internet, mobile phones,
electronic gadgets. Everyone is aware of their economic impact. Even
the link between these communication technologies to cultural and social
movements is not esoteric anymore, in the year after WikiLeaks and two
days after the Pirate Party won nine percent at the state elections in
Berlin. If we look at university media studies, however, we see that only
few departments exist and that of those few, most are journalism or film
studies departments at their core. You could even philosophically debunk
and dismiss the notion of "media" itself, with its legacy of 19th century
physics and outmoded concept of the ether. What exactly is a medium,
as something supposedly in between a sender and a receiver, if senders
and receivers are nowadays routinely included in the concept of "media"?

If you have faced these issues in your studies, you experienced first
hand that the notion of media is not set in stone, but under a constant
semantic shift. The implication of this is quite positive: Since "media"
are always something in the making, and even something contested, you
can (and inevitably have to be) their makers, and help giving them the
meaning you find important. The best thing that can be said of media
studies is that they carry less idealist baggage than the historically
more established humanities. In their best manifestations, media studies
have blurred or even removed the boundaries between theory and practice.
This is even true for the so-called media theory. Benjamin, McLuhan,
Enzensberger, Baudrillard, Haraway, Kittler, Manovich, Hayles - if we
drop some text book names of more or less canonical media theoreticians,
we see that their works are bastards: speculative, controversial, fringe
and of rather dubious reputation within the larger humanities, even
within media studies themselves. None of them even had media study
degrees like you have. As far as I know, most of your professors here
don't have them either. (Neither do I have any such degree, by the
way.)

Media studies are full of such paradoxes. Perhaps the most famous
one is the sentence that institutionalized media studies, McLuhan's
"the medium is the message". If you look at it closely, then this
statement is a performative contradiction much like the liar's paradox:
It uses the medium of language (or of print, here we already get into the
intricacies of properly identifying a medium) to formulate a message that
transcends that medium. Or, in other words: if the medium is the message,
then the sentence that "the medium is the message" is an exception to
that statement.

McLuhan's historical pretext for this Zen-like and often misunderstood
statement were the modern arts of the 20th century. In abstract painting,
painting no longer depicts something else, but is pure painting, so the
medium is the message. The same is true for sound poetry and for a text
that was McLuhan's major inspiration, James Joyce's novel "Finnegans
Wake" whose language is above all about language. But this ultimately
means that in McLuhan's media theory, the underlying message were not
mass media but the modern arts.

I see an upside and downside to this theory. The problematic side is how
l'art pour l'art got transformed into a paradigm of communication media:
we watch TV in order to watch TV (not news, sports, drama). The "global
village" that McLuhan proclaimed had, in my reading, nothing to do with
today's Internet and community media activism, it was even the opposite
- the kind of community created by people around the globe sitting
in front of TV and watching the Apollo moon landing. It was a deeply
conservative vision of new media. Just at this time, we witness how,
in the Netherlands and elsewhere, the sector of new media arts is being
scrapped and redefined as "creative industries". The same is happening in
higher education. Those who deplore this should however not forget that
this is just what McLuhan did in the 1960s: He was the theoretician and
paid counseling guru of the creative industries of his time. He taught
its executives how to learn from the modern arts. 

Re: Occupy Wall Street and the Left

[Florian Cramer]

Jodi wrote:

> as well as the ongoing threats to Social Security, Medicare, and
> Medicaid)?because people are mobilized as the 99%, the attack on
> capitalism takes different forms, forms loosely associated with the
> ideological span of the contemporary left.
> 1.  Progressive/left-liberal Democrat:  constitutional reform,
> legislative goals (abolish corporate personhood; money out of politics);
> locate problem in political process.
> 2.  Left Keynesian: jobs for all demand, tax the rich; locate problem in
> the economy
> 3.  Anarchists?see the state as well as hierarchical and centralized
> power as the primary problem (capitalism depends on the state); solution
> is to constitute alternative practices, alongside or outside the
> mainstream; a politics of refusal and creative production; any attempt to
> seize the state will just reproduce the structures of power and patterns
> of behavior in which we are caught.
> 4.  Communists/ revolutionary socialists?see the economy as the primary
> problem (state as instrument of class power); goal is over-throwing
> capitalism and establishing communism.

When I visited Occupy Wall Street this fall, a non-trivial number of the
occupiers I spoke to - including its Open Source media spokesman whom Chris
Csikszentmihalyi had invited to his class at the New School - were Ron Paul
supporters, followers of the Zeitgeist movement or even La Rouchians. While
the movement is anti-capitalist, I don't think that it is left-wing as a
whole.

Florian

-- 
blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl


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Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?

[Florian Cramer]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 2:21 PM, Mark Andrejevic  wrote:

> So, according to Michael's numbers, to live up to its valuation, Facebook 
> will need to quintuple its profits fast -- without alienating users. That 
> will likely be challenging, especially at a time when its aggressive tactics 
> have drawn a lot more attention to its legally suspect strategies (at least 
> according to some recent court decisions).  His estimate tracks with others 
> I've seen claiming that Facebook will need to double its profits each year 
> for the next couple of years. A lot of people (or a few people with a lot of 
> money) are going to have to believe targeted advertising is worth the price 
> for that to happen.

These are very interesting calculations. But their bottom-line could
be that seeking to increase its profits is actually not Facebook's
priority. The real concern for the management and current investors of
Facebook could be how much it will raise with the IPO, and how much
time will be left for divesting into other assets. Facebook is in a
comfortable situation because of its market share and the lack of
alternatives for investments on the American stock market after
classic manufacturing industries, real estate and the financial
industry have all become non-options, with the tech industry remaining
the strongest part of the economy, and Facebook being the only major
tech company to go public and offer investment opportunity.

Facebook's IPO is a programmed success regardless the burden of profit
that it has to make in the future. The only question concerns the
relation of 'smart' and 'stupid' money buying the stocks. But it
smells a lot like a Ponzi scheme - the 'new economy' all over again -
where those owning the company now can't lose, regardless actual
business numbers.

Florian




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Maldivian artists occupy the National Art Gallery

[Florian Cramer]

[In the West, there has been almost no public attention to the coup
d'etat in the Maldives, only four years after the first election of a
democratic government - and consequently no attention to the current
activism in the country. Please help spread the message and awareness.
-F]

Maldivian artists occupy the National Art Gallery
20 March 2012, Male', Maldives

42 days since the coup d'état, six years after the inauguration of the
country's first National Art Gallery tonight it was teeming with
silently protesting young local artists. Walking around with placards
depicting the recent gruesome police violence, the silent protestors
formed a mobile exhibition parallel to the official opening ceremony
of Breathing Atolls: Japan-Maldives Contemporary Art Exhibition. This
is the first art gallery opening since a military coup backed by the
former dictatorship brought down the first ever democratically elected
government. Afzal Shafiu and Ali Nishan the only two local artists
that were featured in the Breathing Atolls exhibition and the majority
of the visitors unanimously joined in with the demonstrating artists
in supporting their message:

"NO FREEDOM! NO EXPRESSION! Maldivian Artists suppressed under
illegitimate government protests for the freedom to express. Freedom
of Expression is a fundamental right, yet, a space for creative and
artistic flourishing has been denied to us violently and brutally by
this Police State. The continuing abuse of fundamental rights and
freedom must stop!"

Tonight, for the first time ever there was heavy police presence (in
riot gear) at the art gallery and surrounding compound attempting to
disperse the demonstrating artists and at times denying them entry
into the gallery. These artists demonstrated silently calling for an
end to police brutality and restoration of order through immediate
elections. International artists may not be aware of the current
relapse into repressive situation in the Maldives.

Since the coup violent crackdowns have begun, imposing an atmosphere
of fear and repression. Members of the general public including
political activists continue to be terrorized by the police and
defense forces on the street. Fear and repression by security forces,
as well as seeing old faces of dictator Gayyoom's regime back in power
marks a return to darker days of authoritarian rule that Maldivians
thought they had overcome during the last three years. These
developments treated to undo the huge gains made by the Maldives in
strengthening its infant democracy with daily onslaught of violence
unleashed upon citizens and violations of fundamental rights and
freedom.

It is also noteworthy to mention that the Minister of Tourism, Foreign
Minister and the newly installed head of National Centre of Art, Ali
Waheed (coup president Dr.Waheed's brother) were escorted by police
personnel while viewing the artwork on display. On the other hand coup
president Dr.Waheed's younger brother Naushad Waheed (an artist
currently residing in the UK) is a vocal opponent condemning the coup
and calling his brother to step down.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17353230)

Meanwhile just a few blocks away police were attacking and arresting
people peacefully protesting outside coup defense minister's residence
calling for an end to the ongoing state sponsored terrorism against
Maldivians. And a couple of hours earlier riot police brutally
dispersed a crowd gathered near the Justice Square protesting against
the coup.

Artists and artistic expression were systematically suppressed during
the dictatorship and art was never considered a medium for political
expression. It was simply commodified and sold as souvenirs for
tourists. But the young courageous artists tonight took one giant step
for all the artists in the nation.

for more information please visit: mvdemocracy.com


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Re: The insult of the 1 percent: "Art-history majors"

[Florian Cramer]

It's the old semantic paradox that calling something "complex" is either a
means of reducing complexity, or of clouding simple facts. But by itself,
the word "complex" means nothing. It deserves a top entry in a postmodern
dictionary of received ideas yet to be written.

-F

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 2:18 AM, Dean, Jodi  wrote:

> Thank you, Brian. I agree with much of what you've written below,
> especially:
>
> It is the neutrality of intellectuals, the
> propensity to take refuge in an abstracted vision of "complexity," and
> the willingness to be on the take but not on the give, that has, in
> part, led to this pass.
 <...>

-- 
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finger fcra...@pleintekst.nl


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Re: Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12

[Florian Cramer]

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 10:21 PM,  wrote:

> Do they know that you really can't "control" anyone on Facebook and that
> the *primary* "sales" activity that happens is NEGATIVE (i.e. people
> telling each other what *not* to buy) -- you betcha.

Yes; and the big four Internet corporations (Google, Amazon, Apple,
Facebook) play the same negative game on a larger scale within the media
and creative industries: shrinking them while securing the diminished
business for themselves. Compared to the creative industries of the
1960s-1990s - advertising agencies, TV networks and major record labels for
example -, businesses like Google's AdWords, YouTube or Apple's iTunes run
on a minimal internal workforce, give almost no jobs to external creative
industry workers, and have relatively small total cashflows and profits.

In the last decade, the classical creative industries have already shrunk
about 50% if I believe what insiders have told me about employment and
project budgets in their respective work fields such as design,
architecture and advertising. If we project the media consumption habits of
today's teenagers and young adults onto the future, then it's not
far-fetched to expect that one day, YouTube (or its future equivalent) will
have replaced network TV, Google Ads (or maybe Facebook ads if the company
plays it smart) will have a near-monopoly on publishing media advertising
and iTunes will have replaced the recording industry, even those monopolies
amount to much less than they would have had in the 1960s or 1980s.
'Content' production may largely become outsourced into crowdfunded
self-organization, potentially turning the old activist dream of
self-organized media into a precarious nightmare. Creative industries may
shrink to a fraction of today's size because of economic streamlining
effects. Just compare the labor required to design a magazine ad or make a
tv commercial to that of making a Google ad, or the design work required
for a paper book versus the largely automated XML document engineering of
an e-book, or, on the consumer's side, the obsolescence of having hundreds
of newspapers that mostly print the same news. (Which is why the Internet
has killed news as a salable commodity.)

This development could be rationalized as genuine industrialization and
cutting overhead of an industry that never truly worked like one. If the
big Internet four (which might consist of partly different companies in the
future) seize the biggest piece of that shrunk cake, it will still be
profitable enough for them, and it will make sense for them to focus on
'negative activity' within the creative industries, in the same way the car
industry destroyed railway and public transport systems in 20th century
America. So the economic question for Facebook is not what new business it
can make, but which established creative industries it can kill off in
order to live on a profitable-enough fraction of what they used to make.

Florian


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Re: Fwd: The .art TLD again: E-Flux are soliciting support for their bid

[Florian Cramer]

> Beginning in 1999 as an informal mailing list, e-flux is an artist-run
> organization that has grown tremendously over the past ten years,


What is the legal form of e-flux? The information above, and on
the 'about' page of e-flux.com, is remarkably vague. There is no
indication that e-flux is a non-profit organization. Quite on the
contrary, it seems to be run as a for-profit business, charging high
rates for mailing list announcements. It is in many ways the opposite
of a mailing lists like this one.

That e-flux wants to expand its business activities to domain
brokerage is logical, and by itself nothing wrong or obscene. But
this shouldn't be dressed up wand clouded with words like "network",
"community of people who make, study, present, and love art" and
"artist-run organization".

-F


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Re: The .art TLD again: E-Flux are soliciting support for their bid.

[Florian Cramer]

> This seems to me to be a rather blatant power grab on the part of the
> E-Flux crew. The E-Flux service (which may or may not be non-profit)

A postscript to that: In ICANN's domain application database, e-flux
is listed as an LLC (Limited Liability Company) with Anton Vidokle
as "Founder and CEO".

-F




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Re: Collectors, artists and lawyers. Fear of litigation is hobbling the art market

[Florian Cramer]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Brian Holmes
 wrote:

> Typically there is a large boom in the art market after stocks
> or other financial assets go bust. This one has been historic
> and game-changing, due to the entry on the art market of the new
> millionaires and billionaires created by neoliberal globalization
> and the credit bubble. Most people think it's funny and why not
> let their money slosh around for a while, but from another angle,
> as public institutions go under, what we're seeing is the rank
> corruption of aesthetic activity which under better circumstances
> might have transformed perception and opened up new solidarities.


I recommend watching the 2009 BBC documentary "Art Safari - The Great
Contemporary Art Bubble" by Ben Lewis (http://artsafari.tv/?p=24).
It's a brilliant and thorough piece of investigative journalism that
focuses on Damien Hirst, the Gagosian gallery, Sotheby's and the new
millionaires and billionaires you mention. Lewis shows in meticulous
detail how the market is rigged, among others by gallery owners
anonymously bidding on their own artists during auctions, and by fluff
sales among small insider groups of art collectors that artificially
keep up inflated market prices in order to lure in newcomer buyers
who actually pay those prices. Finally, Lewis points out how this is
not just a game of "billionaires scamming other billionaires" (to
quote the film), but inflicts great collateral damage on public art
collections, and how all of these practices are illegal in other parts
of the economy.

-F




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Re: Olivier Auber: Network symetry and net neutrality

[Florian Cramer]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Patrice Riemens  wrote:



> Networks symmetry and Net Neutrality
> by OlivierAuber
>
>
[...]


> However, there are also symmetrical protocols on the Internet.
> One may think about peer-to-peer protocols such as the ones used
> over mesh networks, but more fundamentally, the general model
> of it is called "Multicast", defined as a part of IPv6, which
> allows "all-to-all" relationships without the intervention of any
> particular center, if it is the Internet in its entirety.


To my knowledge, the opposite is correct. Multicast
one-to-many transmission of network packets, effectively the
same as broadcasting. It's the opposite of peer-to-peer.
(Here is a technical paper on that difference:
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~rmartin/teaching/fall08/cs552/position-pape
rs/004-01.pdf )

> themselves so far. We understand why: the multicast protocol greatly
> saves bandwidth by allowing a transmitter who wants to send a video
> to a million receivers simultaneously, to emit it only once,


Indeed. But this only works for classical broadcast-style streaming
of audio, video or other real-time data. It fails for anything that
is on-demand, and any media player with pause/forward/backward
buttons (except when those streams get buffered/pre-downloaded on the
receiver's end).


> This is usualy how, we, simple users, receive the bullshits of the
> TV channels at home,


To my knowledge, IP multicast doesn't technically work yet because
most Internet routers don't support it. If there's only one router
between sender and receiver who blocks multicast packets, transmission
will fail.


> but you may have noticed that you can't emit anything that way,
> because for us, the net is artificially made asymetric!


I think that the author is confused.


> Remember what Van Jacobson, another internet guru, asserted in
> 1995 : "How to kill the internet? Easy! Just invent the web !"
> Unfortunately, this is more and more relevant! By not making these
> symmetrical protocols available, many network players are condemned
> to play a game where they lose every time (and users too).


I am completely losing it here. IP multicast didn't exist when the web
was invented - so what exactly was the web supposed to kill?

> be dry today outside from dominant silos, would revive! Finally the
> Peer-to-peer spirit developed by the pioneers of the Internet could
> finally reach adulthood and show its full utility. Thank you.
>

I think that the author is utterly confused.

Florian




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Re: Olivier Auber: Network symetry and net neutrality

[Florian Cramer]

Van Jacobson, one of the main promoters of Multicast has written in

> 1995: "How to kill the internet? Easy! Just invent the web !"
> ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/talks/vj-webflame.pdf

This reflects the web of the 1990s which for the most part consisted of
static data. The problem of caching, back in those times, was solved
through http proxies which every ISP provided and most people used to speed
up their dial-up web access. Today, nobody uses http proxies for those
purposes any more. In a time where most information on the Internet is
dynamically generated, this issue  has become obsolete. Multicast may, as
you imply, have benefits in some p2p distribution scenarios like bittorrent
- but only if the same data is shared/simultaneously downloaded on a
massive scale. It wouldn't make a difference to the torrent download of a
Stan Brakhage film from an obscure film lover's community tracker with
maybe two seeds and three peers.

In the end, it would be mostly big broadcasting stations profiting from IP
multicasting because they would have to pay much less for bandwidth - while
those packets would still generate the same transmission load on the rest
of the Internet and thus outsource costs to the user's ISPs. It would be
great for giants like Google because it would cut their bandwidth costs
when millions of people simultaneously watch Gangnam Style or a live stream
from the Oscar ceremony on YouTube. I still fail to see your political
argument.


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Re: Bitcoin, the end of the Taboo on Money

[Florian Cramer]

Jaromil (& Nettime),

What I fail to understand is why you consider this a political gain
(to quote your paper):

"The Bitcoin dream is the autonomy of content producers, to
exchange their production freely, without aggregations, without
intermediaries."

This is hardcore libertarianism, since it means the abolishment of
taxes as a source of funding public services - and making sure that
financial transactions can never be taxed.

-F






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Re: Bitcoin, the end of the Taboo on Money.

[Florian Cramer]

Jaromil (& Nettime),

What I fail to understand is why you consider this a political gain
(to quote your paper):

"The Bitcoin dream is the autonomy of content producers, to
exchange their production freely, without aggregations, without
intermediaries."

This is hardcore libertarianism, since it means the abolishment of
taxes as a source of funding public services - and making sure that
financial transactions can never be taxed.

-F







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Re: Bitcoin, the end of the Taboo on Money

[Florian Cramer]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:

> If you believe the latter, then I think one of the difficulties lies
> in how to fight "the state" (say, through promoting bitcoin) without
> falling onto the trap of promoting the market as the alternative form
> of marco-coordination (which is what US-type libertarians advocate).

Reading up on bitcoin, it turns that its design is intentionally based on
"Austrian economics", i.e. Hayek's economic theories. This is why the
artificial scarcity - the limitation of bitcoining mining to 21 million -
is built into the currency as a feature [
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply].

Michel Bauwens' P2P Foundation has a comprehensive and balanced page on
this and other aspects of bitcoin: http://p2pfoundation.net/Bitcoin

To quote Bauwens himself, from that page:

"The great achievement of Bitcoin is that we have the very first "socially
sovereign" digital currency, independent of government and corporation,
that is workable, technically "peer to peer", and that it creates the
enthusiasm of the hacker community, which almost certainly means it will be
adapted and used later by more people. So, in this way, this is a tipping
point. However, the Bitcoin design may also have some serious flaws. First
of all, the way it is mined privileges the technical community itself as it
can have access to networks of botnets to generate coins, in a way most
people can't. Secondly it is a 'scarcity' based currency, subject to
hoarding and wealth accumulation (only 21m bitcoins will be created,
insuring a constant growth in value), that does not really change what is
'wrong' with the current currency system. As many so-called 'peer to peer'
technologies (such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, etc..) it may increase
wider participation and 'distribution' but without necessarily changing the
dysfunctional neoliberal functioning of the market. Nevertheless, what it
really shows is that socially sovereign currencies are viable, and could be
created as a tool of the countereconomy, though this may require a
different ruleset for its functioning. so that true 'social' peer to peer
values can be integrated in the design of future 'post-Bitcoin' currencies."

(I couldn't agree more.)

Florian


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Re: Bitcoin, the end of the Taboo on Money

[Florian Cramer]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:

> If you believe the latter, then I think one of the difficulties lies
> in how to fight "the state" (say, through promoting bitcoin) without
> falling onto the trap of promoting the market as the alternative form
> of marco-coordination (which is what US-type libertarians advocate).

Reading up on bitcoin, it turns that its design is intentionally based on
"Austrian economics", i.e. Hayek's economic theories. This is why the
artificial scarcity - the limitation of bitcoining mining to 21 million -
is built into the currency as a feature [
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply].

Michel Bauwens' P2P Foundation has a comprehensive and balanced page on
this and other aspects of bitcoin: http://p2pfoundation.net/Bitcoin

To quote Bauwens himself, from that page:

"The great achievement of Bitcoin is that we have the very first "socially
sovereign" digital currency, independent of government and corporation,
that is workable, technically "peer to peer", and that it creates the
enthusiasm of the hacker community, which almost certainly means it will be
adapted and used later by more people. So, in this way, this is a tipping
point. However, the Bitcoin design may also have some serious flaws. First
of all, the way it is mined privileges the technical community itself as it
can have access to networks of botnets to generate coins, in a way most
people can't. Secondly it is a 'scarcity' based currency, subject to
hoarding and wealth accumulation (only 21m bitcoins will be created,
insuring a constant growth in value), that does not really change what is
'wrong' with the current currency system. As many so-called 'peer to peer'
technologies (such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, etc..) it may increase
wider participation and 'distribution' but without necessarily changing the
dysfunctional neoliberal functioning of the market. Nevertheless, what it
really shows is that socially sovereign currencies are viable, and could be
created as a tool of the countereconomy, though this may require a
different ruleset for its functioning. so that true 'social' peer to peer
values can be integrated in the design of future 'post-Bitcoin' currencies."

(I couldn't agree more.)

Florian


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Re: What if a work of net.art sold for $34 million?

[Florian Cramer]

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Edward Shanken wrote:

> What would the world be like if Roy Ascott's "La Plissure du Texte" (1983)
> sold at auction for $34.2 million instead of Gerhard RIchter's ?Abstraktes
> Bild?? In what sort of world (and artworld) would that be possible?

This question is above all an economic one, as your wording implies. The
answer must therefore be economic as well: Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes
Bild is (a) an object that can be conveniently traded as a commodity and
(b), on top of that, a unique object and an autograph. Since Roy Ascott's
work is neither of them really, it does not have the same collector's value
- aside from issues of art historical canonization.

But to spin this question further: Roy Ascott's work may still have a
decent art market value compared to other, earlier artistic collaborative
writing projects that didn't qualify as media art but were more ephemera:
for example, the letters of Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance [sic]
School of the 1960s/1970s. You still find Johnson's 1965 artist book "The
Paper Snake" for $100-$120 on abebooks. Or the "Anecdoted Topography of
Chance" by Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Dieter Rot, Robert Filliou and
Roland Topor, collaboratively written between 1962 and 1968 and, in my
humble opinion, more interesting than "Plissure du Texte", but neither with
any significant art market value, nor to be found in any history of media
art - because it just didn't involve electronics?!

And ultimately, one may ask oneself why other networked experimental
writing projects - for example those conducted by the Oulipo in the 1960s
and 1970s - don't have any art market value at all, simply because they
fall into the category of "literature" and not "contemporary art".

Conversely, one could call Lawrence Weiner a mediocre concrete poet who was
clever enough to market his work as conceptual art instead of concrete
poetry - so that his serigraphs sell for $700 and his autographs for up to
$50,000.

Etc.

-F


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Thomas Pynchon new novel on NYC and the 2001 dotcom bubble

[Florian Cramer]

"Bleeding Edge" will be released on 17th september. I can't wait to read it.

The publisher's blurb:

"Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the
dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a
ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO,
Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as
much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but
there?s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what?s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the
Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists.
She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back,
which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow
her own code of ethics?carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack
into people?s bank accounts?without having too much guilt about any of it.
Otherwise, just your average working mom?two boys in elementary school, an
off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-exhusband Horst, life as normal
as it ever gets in the neighborhood?till Maxine starts looking into the
finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO,
whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown.
She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco
motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler?s aftershave, a
neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob
and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of
whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas
Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance
of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar
time but galactically remote from where we?ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine
have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back
together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will
accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?"

http://thepenguinpress.com/book/bleeding-edge/


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Re: Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE)

[Florian Cramer]

One aspect doesn't seem to have been addressed here yet: that the
Panopticon may be an outmoded metaphor because of its sole emphasis on
visuality. Twelve years ago, in 2001, the exhibition "ctrl_space" at ZKM
Karlsruhe drew deserved criticism after its curators had departed from the
notion of the panopticon and narrowed down the show to visual surveillance:
primarily, cctv cameras and video installation work. This was at a time
when Telepolis and other media had extensively covered Echelon, the NSA
communications surveillance program that preceded PRISM [
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/6/6929/1.html]. The ZKM curators apparently
couldn't deal with Echelon because it wasn't visual and thus not easily
translatable into an exhibition, and because it didn't fit Foucault's and
Deleuze's canonical cultural studies theories of surveillance as smoothly.

In 2013, we're watching this history repeat itself as a farce. Many people
(myself included) are flabbergasted by the lack of mass-scale protest
against the government programs disclosed by Snowden. It seems as if two
limiting factors are at work simultaneously: Seasoned media activists and
critics didn't learn anything fundamentally new from Snowden except that
their earlier assumptions are now confirmed and can no longer be dismissed
as paranoia. For others, the news simply seemed to be too abstract and
intangible, much like the news reporting on financial derivatives schemes
and billion dollar bank bailouts in the past. There are no emotionalizing
images, no icons, figuratively speaking: no My Lai photographs.

Teaching a mixed group of third year Bachelor-level students of
informatics, media technology and media design, I learned that even most of
them did not know or understand systems like PRISM, commercial mining of
personal data and big data operations.

Criticism is unlikely to become effective unless (a) it sharpens up its
analysis beyond staid cultural studies paradigms and metaphors, and (b),
seemingly in contradiction to (a), creates a powerful visual language to
raise awareness of the issue. For the time being, I'd seriously recommend
people watching the 1998 Will Smith blockbuster "Enemy of the State" (and
its Coen brothers parody "Burn after Reading"), for the lack of anything
better. A popular activist philosopher like Zizek could be criticized for
reinforcing visual fetishisms and resulting blindness through the way his
own lecturing is so much based on iconic popular cultural images; on the
other hand, this might be the route to go.


-F


On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Al Matthews  wrote:

> Hello list. On Tor,
>
> >The US was slow to realize (or did they know this from the beginning?)
>
> Surely the latter
 <...>


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Re: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency

[Florian Cramer]

Another way of looking at Bitcoin is to consider it an unintended privacy
nightmare in the making. Bitcoin is based on the concept that money is
stored in anonymized accounts ("wallets") whose transactions are publicly
viewable; that is, all Bitcoin transactions ever made by anyone,
permanently archived. Supposed that Bitcoin becomes an everyday means of
payment, including for supermarket bills, public transport tickets, rents,
salaries etc., it would not require very much ingenuity or computational
power to analyze all transactions associated to one Bitcoin wallet and,
from the frequencies, quantities and network of its transactions, deduce
the identity of its owner with practical certainty.

For a law enforcement agency or any other third party, it would most likely
suffice to know somebody's recurring bill, preferably via continually
changing amounts of money charged every month (such as a phone or
electricity bill), in order to get full insight into an individual's
wallet, her or his everyday money spending, activities, itineraries, social
relations etc.

This is even much worse than credit or debit cards whose transaction
records at least aren't fully out in the public, and which still can be
circumvented by paying cash.

-F


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Re: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency

[Florian Cramer]

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 9:02 AM, Antti J?rvinen  wrote:

> While I understand that individual humans need to enjoy greater
> privacy than commercial or government entities (that, to my opinion,
> should not expect any privacy regarding their monetary- or other
> issues) this thing that everybody has copy of everybodys wallet
> relieves big and small companies and any other money-handling
> organizations, including the (now almost obsolete) banks, from
> producing yearly financial statements. Talk about transparency, man.


The devil is in the subordinate clause starting with "while" that hints at
the collateral damage of the utopia you sketch. The question is whether
transparency is a value per se. (I would argue: no, it's only a tool for
achieving other goals such as ethical conduct and social responsibility.)
Taken as a value per se, with no prisoners taken, it easily amounts to a
totalitarian nightmare.

Florian


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Re: Fwd: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency

[Florian Cramer]

On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 2:02 AM, Douglas La Rocca wrote:
>
>
> There's a distinction between wallets and addresses. Addresses are
> traceable and can be analyzed in that manner. Wallets are collections of
> addresses which need not ever be publicly associated.
>
> Far from being *worse *than tracing credit/debit cards, because a user can
> constantly "shift" identities (frequently used addresses, say), Bitcoin
> actually makes it possible to avoid the privacy problem.


Point taken, but the structural problem remains: That the currency is
_intrinsically_ coupled to accounts - accounts out in the open, on top of
that - and means of payment. Anonymous payment will always require the
complex deflection/circumvention devices you describe. If it's not default
behavior (like in cash), anonymity/privacy boils down to an afterthought
and a usability hassle. If Bitcoin becomes a popular means of payment, its
users would be as unlikely to constantly make and shift new addresses as
they are unlikely to shift E-Mail addresses and login identities on Web
services right now.

(I also have my doubts that shifting identities really solves the problem
of reverse identification through computational analytics as it only adds
one layer of obfuscation. Live in a small remote village, for example, and
these means won't help because the one person buying The New York Times in
the local market will always be identifiable no matter what Bitcoin address
s/he'll use for payment. You could argue that there's no anonymity of
transactions in a village anyway, but it becomes quite a different story if
all those transactions become world-readable on the Internet.)

-F

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Re: a petition by Writers Against Mass Surveillance

[Florian Cramer]

This petition made lots of waves in Germany but seems to have remained
unnoticed elsewhere despite the many international writers who signed it.
In Germany and France, such public interventions are a post-WWII tradition.
They go back to Sartre's concept of "litterature engag??" which the 'Gruppe
47' circle of West-German novelists and poets picked up soon after it had
been coined. Historical precursors are the public inventions of writers
like Zola.

The notion of writers as public figures and moral authorities seems to be
rather typical for countries under authoritarian rule, as well as
post-fascist and post-Stalinist societies. The petition echoes this because
it is mostly written as an appeal to authorities ("STATES AND
CORPORATIONS", "UNITED NATIONS", "GOVERNMENTS") and even addresses
"CITIZENS" in the third person, thus implying some separate space for the
writers (who thus speak, as neither authorities nor citizens, from a bird's
eye view).

Likewise, the wording of the petition remains stuck in old-fashioned and
often problematic humanism. The statement that the "basic pillar of
democracy is the inviolable integrity of the individual" is a literal
translation of a passage from the German constitution ("Die W?rde des
Menschen ist unantastbar"), thus projecting a particular notion of
democracy with priorities that many political thinkers and activists might
not share, onto the rest of the world. The statement that "a society under
surveillance is no longer a democracy" is technically correct but also
naively suggests that society has been democratic before.

>From a media critical point of view, the statement that "democratic rights
must apply in virtual as in real space" is telling, because it shows that
the authors of the petition still think in 1980s/1990s media theory
categories of the "virtual" and the "real" in a world where technological
development (with software control of almost all devices including
Stuxnet-infected nuclear plants) have rendered this distinction moot if not
dangerously naive. The problem is: the people working at the NSA understand
this, the writers apparently don't.

-F


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Anonymous movement in decline?

[Florian Cramer]

In a short but interesting article, he German newspaper Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung observes a decline of the Anonymous movement just in a
time where more and more of Snowden's material is being disclosed (
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/anonymous-im-niedergang-die-maskerade-ist-vorbei-12733658.html)
. Writer Sebastian D?rfler notes that "time is overdue for a sign of life
from the group that views itself as the protector of the free Internet and
epitomized digital activism: 'Anonymous'. Where are the hacker attacks and
digital protest campaigns of the white masks with the big grin? While the
Guy Fawkes mask from the film 'V for Vendetta' has become a symbol of
global protest, not much is to be heard from 'Anonymous' in their digital
home territory" [my translation, FC].

D?rfler argues that the Anonymous movement "understands itself as a
counter-public, but always relies on mass media attention". In the case of
the Snowden disclosures, it had lost its lead to the classical mass media
(like The Guardian) and other civil rights groups.

I'd suggest another explanation: Anonymous never consisted of skilled
hackers. As an inclusive popular cultural movement, that also wasn't its
point. Its concept of anonymity originated in registration-free Internet
communities like 4chan, not in darknets or the cypherpunk community - and
in that sense, it was technologically naive.

After the Snowden disclosures, every Anonymous activist has likely realized
that she or he is, in fact, not anonymous at all. Everyone ever involved in
the movement could easily be (or has already been) identified through
Internet surveillance data. This could be the simple reason why Anonymous
has become more visible as stickers, graffiti and as masks worn on street
rallies than in the Internet. Since the Internet might have become a too
risky medium to play "Anonymous" for most of the people involved, Anonymous
might have become a post-digital phenomenon.

-F


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Re: Anonymous movement in decline?

[Florian Cramer]

Felix,

I agree that the article follows the typical journalistic hype cycle. But I
wouldn't have linked it here if I hadn't thought that it had some kernel of
truth. If one compares to Anonymous to the punk movement, then Anonymous
may be as dead or non-dead as punk has been declared dead (but still
remained alive in some or the other form) since the late 1970s.

What is true, IMHO, is that Anonymous lately has become more visible as
graffiti in urban space than on the Internet. It no longer seems to be
intrinsically linked to imageboard meme culture (which has moved from 4chan
to more mainstream media like Reddit), and it's actionism is no longer
Internet-centric; or at least the "operation" conducted by Anonymous online
have lost mass and traction. In this context, the FAZ article rightfully
refers to Anonymous' "Operation NSA" as a failure. The swarm may have
become more an icon.

Florian



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Re: Ippolita Collective: In the Facebook Aquarium (part One, #2.2)

[Florian Cramer]

> 'Mediatic euphoria' is never a good thing, because it is based on the
> implicit idea of technological determinism, a belief that is itself
> solidly grounded in the Enlightenment tradition.


I dare to disagree. Technological determinism, as far as represented in
late 20th century media theory and media philosophy, has been clearly
grounded in anti-enlightenment and anti-humanist traditions of thinking. In
the prominent case of Friedrich Kittler (drawing on Heidegger, whose
philosophy of technology drew on C.F. J?nger), it even could be argued that
his strand of media theory and technological determinism was first of all a
polemical construct created to voice radical opposition against
enlightenment schools of thought, Frankfurt School critical theory (whose
dialectics of enlightenment at least recognized one positive 50% in
enlightenment philosophy) and post-marxist cultural studies.

What is really at the core of the issue: whether technology is a cultural
construct for which there can be political intervention (a view that would
unite enlightenment thinkers and even those critical cultural studies
people who see the enlightenment tradition as a tool of capitalist and
Western hegemony), or whether technology is an a priori, with culture and
politics as its products, and intervention as a hopeless form of naive
humanism.

Florian


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Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world

[Florian Cramer]

Published yesterday by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
http://www.faz.net/frankfurter-allgemeine-zeitung/enzensbergers-regeln-fuer-die-digitale-welt-wehrt-euch-12826195.html

Written by the same Enzensberger who wrote "Constituents of a Theory of the
Media" (first published in German as "Baukasten zu einer Theorie der
Medien" in Kursbuch, 20, 1970, first published in English in the New Left
Review, no. 64, 1970, reprinted in 2003 in the The New Media Reader).

This is an unauthorized, quick translation.


Defend Yourselves!

For those who aren't nerds, hackers or cryptographers and have better
things to do than keep up with the pitfalls of digitalization every hour,
there are ten simple rules to resist exploitation and surveillance:

1
If you own a mobile phone, throw it away. You had a life before this
device, and the human race will continue to exist after its disappearance.
One should avoid the superstitious worship that it enjoys. Neither those
devices nor their users are any smart, but only those who plug them to us
in order to accumulate boundless riches and control ordinary people.

2
Whoever offers something for free is suspicious. One should categorically
refuse anything that passes itself off as a bargain, bonus or freebie. It's
always a lie. The dupes pay with their privacy, their data and often enough
with their money.

3
Online banking is a blessing, but only for secret services and criminals.

4
Governments and industries want to abolish cash. They would like to get rid
of a legal tender that anyone can redeem. Coins and bills are annoying for
banks, traders, security and fiscal authorities. Plastic cards are not only
cheaper to produce. Our watchdogs prefer them because they allow tracing of
any transaction. Therefore, we all should avoid credit, debit and loyalty
cards. These permanent companions are bothersome and dangerous.

5
The madness of networking every object of daily use - from toothbrush to
TV, from car to refrigerator - via the Internet, can only be met with total
boycott. Their manufacturers don't give a single thought to privacy. They
have a only one vulnerable body part, their bank account. Only bankruptcy
will teach them.

6
The same applies to politicians. They ignore any objection to their actions
and omissions. They are submissive to the financial markets and don't dare
to go against the activities of secret services. But they have a vested
interest to be reelected. As long as the right to vote still exists, one
should deny anyone the vote who tolerates digital expropriation instead of
taking action against it.

7
E-Mail is nice, fast and free. So watch out! If you have a confidential
message or don't want to be surveilled, take a postcard and pencil.
Handwriting is hard to read for machines. Nobody suspects important
information on a 45 cent picture postcard. You don't have to resort to a
dead drop like in old-fashioned spy novels.

8
Avoid obtaining goods and services via Internet. Vendors like Amazon, Ebay
and so on store all data and molest their customers with advertising spam.
Anonymous shopping is better. Acceptable exceptions can be made for
individual sites that one knows well.

9
Just like network television, the big Internet corporations are primarily
financed by advertising. This way, they steal their customers' time and
attention. Someone who ceaseless yells at you and molests you deserves
punishment. It's recommendable to stay away from everything marketed this
way, and switch off, once and for all, the stations terrorizing you with
advertising. This should not only be done for hygienic reasons. As we know,
particularly the American mega corporations collaborate closely with secret
services to spy out and control, if possible, any human activity.

10
Networks like Facebook call themselves "social" despite their eagerness to
treat their customers in the utmost anti-social ways. Whoever wants to have
friends like this, is a hopeless case. Those who are unfortunate enough to
be part of such a company, should try to take flight as fast as possible.
This is not so easy. An octopus won't consent to letting his prey escape.

* * *

These simple measures can't solve the political problem that society is
faced with. Given the passiveness and servility of the parties ruling this
country [the coalition of Christian and Social Democrats in Germany], it's
remarkable enough if one notable politician speaks up. His name is Martin
Schulz, and he's not only president of the European Parliament but even a
Social Democrat. Until now, neither he nor his party objected to the
rampant security and control mania in any remarkable way. All respective
violations, no matter whether foreign imports or domestic products of
German workmanship, have been given the nod. Storing data, intercepting,
appeasing - the standard procedure.

The sleep of reason will continue to the day when a majority of this
country's citizens will experience firsthand what has been done to them.
Perhaps, they wi

Re: Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world

[Florian Cramer]

on why art students
prefer designing posters to designing websites is due to a fiction of
agency - in this case, an illusion of more control over the medium.
Likewise, 'digital' cultures are driven by similar illusions of free will
and individual empowerment. The Quantified Self movement, for example, is
based on a fiction of agency over one's own body. The entire concept of
DIY, whether non-digital, digital or post-digital, is based on the fiction
of agency implied by the very notion of the self-made.

Each of these fictions of agency represents one extreme in how individuals
relate to the techno-political and economic realities of our time: either
over-identification with systems, or rejection of these same systems. Each
of these extremes is, in its own way, symptomatic of a _systems crisis_ ???
not a crisis of this or that system, but rather a crisis of the very
paradigm of 'system', as defined by General Systems Theory, itself an
offshoot of cybernetics. A term such as "post-Snowden" describes only one
(important) aspect of a bigger picture:[^8] a crisis of the cybernetic
notion of 'system' which neither 'digital' nor 'post-digital' ??? two terms
ultimately rooted in systems theory ??? are able to leave behind, or even
adequately describe.


## Works cited

Andrews, Ian. "Post-digital Aesthetics and the return to Modernism." (2000)
Web. December 2013 <http://www.ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html>

Cascone, Kim. "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in
Contemporary Computer Music." _Computer Music Journal_, 24.4 (2000): 12-18.
Print.

Cox, Geoff. "Prehistories of the Post-digital: some old problems with
post-anything." (2013) Web. December 2013 <
http://post-digital.projects.cavi.dk/?p=578>

Cramer, Florian. "Post-Digital Aesthetics." _Jeu de Paume le magazine_, May
2013. Web. December 2013 <
http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/05/florian-cramer-post-digital-aesthetics/
>

Cramer, Florian. "Post-Digital Writing." _electronic book review_, December
2012. Web. December 2013 <
http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/postal>

Eggers, Dave. _The Circle._ New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. _Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital
Age_. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print.

Goodman, Nelson. _Languages of Art_, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket, 1976.
Print.

Gurstein, Michael. "So What Do We Do Now? Living in a Post-Snowden World",
January 2014. Web. January 2014 <
http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/so-what-do-we-do-now-living-in-a-post-snowden-world/
>

Hermlin, C.D.. "I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything." _The
Awl_, 18 September 2013. Web. December 2013 <
http://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-was-a-hated-hipster-meme-and-then-it-got-worse
>

Kittler, Friedrich. "There Is No Software." _Stanford Literature Review_ 9
(1992): 81-90. Print.

Klok, Timo. "4chan and Imageboards", _post.pic_. Ed. Research Group
Communication in a Digital Age. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de
Kooning Academy Rotterdam University, 2010: 16-19. Print.

Manovich, Lev. 'Generation Flash.' (2002). Web. December 2013 <
http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc>

Manovich, Lev. _The Language of New Media_. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002.
Print.

Negroponte, Nicholas. _Beyond Digital_. _Wired_ 6.12 (1998). Web. December
2013 <http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html>

Pynchon, Thomas. _Bleeding Edge._ London: Penguin, 2013. Print.

Van Meer, Aldje. "I would rather design a poster than a website." _Willem
de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University_, 2012-2013. Web. December 2013 <
http://www.iwouldratherdesignaposterthanawebsite.nl>, <
http://crosslab.wdka.hro.nl/ioi/C010_folder.pdf>



[^1]: (Van Meer); also discussed later in this text.

[^2]: Even the piano (if considered a medium) is digital only to the degree
that its keys implement abstractions of its analog-continuous strings.

[^3]: (Cramer, _Post-Digital Writing_), (Cramer, _Post-Digital
Aesthetics_).

[^4]: In a project on Open Source culture organised by Aymeric Mansoux with
Bachelor-level students from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, it
turned out that many students believed that website user account
registration was a general feature and requirement of the Internet.

[^5]: It's debatable to which degree this reflects the influence of
non-Western, particularly Japanese (popular) culture on contemporary
Western visual culture, especially in the field of illustration ??? which
accounts for an important share of contemporary zine making. This influence
is even more obvious in digital meme and imageboard culture.

 [^6]: For example (and six years prior to the typewriter hipster meme),
Linda Hilfling's contribution to the exhibition MAKEDO at V2_, Rotterdam,
June 29-30, 2007.

[^7]: (Hermlin) writes: "Someone with the user handle 'S2011' summed up the
thoughts of the hive mind in 7 words: 'Get the fuck out of my city.'
Illmatic707 chimed in: I have never wanted to fist fight someone so badly
in my entire life."

[^8]: A term frequently used at the Chaos Computer Club's 30th Chaos
Communication Congress in Hamburg, December 2013, and also very recently by
(Gurstein).

(With cordial thanks to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Nishant Shah, Geoff Cox,
S??ren Pold, Stefan Heidenreich and Andreas Broeckmann for their critical
feedback, and to Aldje van Meer for her empirical research.)


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Re: Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world

[Florian Cramer]

While I'd like to chime in with Andreas' fact check of Enzensberger's
ten rules:

> For those who aren't nerds, hackers or cryptographers and have
> better things to do than keep up with the pitfalls of digitalization
> every hour, there are ten simple rules to resist exploitation and
> surveillance:

Unlike Andreas, I think that Enzensberger is right and that critical
media activist culture delivered the proof in the pudding when it came
up with the format and name of "Crypto Parties". The implication is,
indeed, that you need to become at least a low-skilled cryptographer
who knows what PGP, SSL and TOR mean and how they are used.

In Rotterdam, on a CryptoParty last Friday at WORM, we just learned
again how difficult it is for contemporary Internet users to even
grasp the concept of a local mail client (like Thunderbird) as opposed
to Web Mail - and that does not even include complex stuff like
PGP encryption and key management. But using Web Mail means, by
definition, that others can read and data mine your correspondence.
And let's not even go into gory details like keeping up with software
vulnerabilities (like the SSL bug in Apple's operating systems or the
very similar GNU-TLS bug from last week). It's fair to say that all
the computer and Internet communication systems we currently use are
fundamentally insecure, and that there are likely only a handful of
systems in the world into which a skilled third party could not break
into to intercept the data stored on or sent from them.

> 1
> If you own a mobile phone, throw it away.

>From a hacker perspective, this is sound advice. Apart from a very
few fringe, mostly not-yet-existing mobile phone operating systems
(such as Phil Zimmerman's Black Phone), all of the existing mobile
phones leak your data. Even a most simple stripped-down mobile phone
constantly broadcasts your location. The technology to intercept calls
and data transfers has become trivially simple (as Danja Vasiliev
and Julian Oliver demonstrated on this year's transmediale festival
in Berlin). Another issue is that smartphones are multi-sensor
devices that broadcast megabytes of data (such as bodily movement via
accelerometers) with their users being aware of it.

> 2
> Whoever offers something for free is suspicious. One should categorically
> refuse anything that passes itself off as a bargain, bonus or freebie.  It's
> always a lie.

I agree with Andreas, but a problem remains that this advice can
involuntarily backfire against ethical free services offered by
non-profits (from free WiFi access at a public library to Open Source
software).

> 3
> Online banking is a blessing, but only for secret services and criminals.

Here, Enzensberger's advice is naive, because banking in these times is
online anyway. If people go to a bank counter instead of homebanking, the
transaction will travel over the same networks (and most likely, the bank
employee will use the same online banking web interface). It also ignores
the data retention and customer tracking built into the international
banking system via, for example, the SWIFT accord between the EU and the
USA.

> 4
> Governments and industries want to abolish cash. They would like to get rid
> of a legal tender that anyone can redeem.

This is indeed an important point, and has become a reality in countries
like Sweden. Contrary to common belief and letting aside all other issues
of this payment system, Bitcoin is not a solution for this problem because
all Bitcoin transaction records are publicly visible (as discussed here on
Nettime previously - no need to open this can of worms again). So far, cash
is the only truly anonymous, hard-to-trace payment method.

> 5
> The madness of networking every object of daily use - from toothbrush to
> TV, from car to refrigerator - via the Internet, can only be met with total
> boycott.

The recent news about "smart TVs" spying on its viewers (
https://securityledger.com/2013/11/fix-from-lg-ends-involuntary-smartt
v-snooping-but-privacy-questions-remain/) indeed confirm this - and
the news that "smart refrigerators" are now running spam botnets (
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/is-your-refrigerator-really-pa
rt-of-a-massive-spam-sending-botnet/ ). This is one example of the
term "post-digital" making sense - that in many cases, it's better
that devices are offline than online.

> 6
> The same applies to politicians. They ignore any objection to their actions
> and omissions. They are submissive to the financial markets and don't dare
> to go against the activities of secret services.

No point in arguing with that. Most likely, most of them are in the pockets
of the secret services that have collected compromising information on them.

> 7
> E-Mail is nice, fast and free. So watch out! If you have a confidential
> message or don't want to be surveilled, take a postcard and pencil.

This advice is technologically naive. It's known that the NSA and other
secret services have systematically sca

Re: Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Florian Cramer]

This is likely the beginning of a social class and status symbol
reversal for electronic technology and digital devices. It's
foreseeable that affordable healthcare, transport, insurance policies,
pension plans, will only be available to those who subscribe to
behavioral tracking and control via mobile sensor devices, and have
themselves monitored for compliant lifestyles. And whatever will be
left of welfare cheques and unemployment severance pay, will only be
paid on the condition of behavioral tracking as well.

As Enzensberger's "Rules for the Digital World" suggest - somewhat
unintentionally -, freedom of electronic devices will be a privilege
of the wealthy. In the near future, to be upper class will no longer
mean that you carry the latest electronic gadget, but that you can
afford the luxury surcharge for a life without tracking devices.

-F


On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 6:04 PM, Keith Sanborn  wrote:

> It wd be interesting to make public how that figures into actuarial tables.




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Re: Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Florian Cramer]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Alexander Bard 
 wrote:

> What it is not taking into perspective is the fact that the Internet itself
> fosters a new parallel class system of a netocracy versus a consumtariat.

A netocracy would be the class that controls the infrastructure and
policymaking of the Internet - and, by implication, the economic and
political systems connected or depending on it.

> But that is of course because the members of Nettime themselves are all
> netocrats

According to the definition above, not.

> For example, you can no longer ignore the fact that there is an enormous
> difference in power between somebody with 400,000 Twitter followers and
> those with merely 10.

This is what not-so-critical media studies and "Web 2.0" marketing want to
make us believe. The actual difference is between the users of Twitter and
the owners of the Twitter platform making their money from mining and
selling their users' data [
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/01/twitter-data-idUSL2E8DTEK420120301],
and those who made their money on Twitter's IPO and $40 billion
capitalization [
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-26/twitter-now-has-larger-market-capitalization-80-all-sp-500-companies
].

In that light, the perceived power difference between Twitter posters and
Twitter followers is, for the most part, a smokescreen for the real power
politics and economics at work. It couldn't be better illustrated than with
a cartoon by Geek & Poke that later became an Internet meme. It's attacking
Facebook but applies just as well to Twitter:
http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/files/2013/07/facebook-and-you.jpg
[Pig 1: "Isn't it great? We have to pay nothing for the barn."
Pig 2: "Yeah! And even the food is free"
Punchline: "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're
the product being sold."]

>From the point of view of business management, media like Twitter only have
consumers, no matter what their user interface nomenclature (of "tweeters"
and "followers") might say. Those with the user interface status of
producers are just the hardcore consumers providing the most valuable data
for mining and resale.

Twitter, by the way, is a striking example of how a corporate web site has
been able to position (or market) itself as network infrastructure - as if
it were an Internet protocol like E-Mail or IRC. People who didn't use the
Internet before the year 2000 are unlikely to even know the difference
between a proprietary web service and an open Internet protocol anymore.
The whole history of the Internet since (the marketing term) "Web 2.0" is
one of public Internet protocols and services such as FTP, IRC and Usenet
newsgroups being replaced by privately-owned proprietary web services. In
this course, even the World Wide Web as one of those public protocols and
services mutated from a decentralized electronic publishing system (based
on http and HTML) to something lower level and more generic, a protocol
(http) and user interface API (HTML+CSS+Javascript) for proprietary
services replacing public services. It's the history of privatization of
other public infrastructures (such as the electricity grid, waterworks,
energy supply and transport) having repeated itself.

Not that the division between a bourgeosie (those with money) and workers
> (those without) in a Marxist sense no longer exists, just that the new
> division in attention arther than capital complicates things further.
>

Sorry if I sound rude - but: In which world are you living? Or I'd better
say: in which world do the media theoreticians and marketers live who have
been making such claims?

If there's any sense to the various "post-"prefixes such as post-digital,
post-media, post-Internet, then for sure in the break with the idea that
there are new form of virtual assets and capital - like "attention" - that
supersede the capital of old economies with its power base in the control
of natural (and other physical) resources, industrial means of production
and control over services.

Bests,
Florian


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Re: Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Florian Cramer]

Alexander,

> I can sense that we disagree already - and probably have to agree to
> disagree - but let me just state that "netocracy" is already well defined
> in internt social theory and needs no confusing redefinition from you nor
> anybody else.

If Wikipedia can be believed, then the "internet social theory" that has
"well defined"  "netocracy" is your own writing, based on a previous
coinage of the term in "Wired". I just dare to disagree with your concept
because it's based on an idealist notion of power.

Florian


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Re: Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Florian Cramer]

Hello Alexander,

As for the meaning of the concept "netocracy" we could of course also speak
> of a "digerati" (to me though that term sounds like banal marketing speech)
> but why not of the "net aristocracy" Tyler Cowen portrays in his 2013
> dystopian bestseller "Average Is Over"?

Then we're stuck with a linguistic problem from the very beginning since
the suffix "-cracy" doesn't necessarily relate to aristocracy, but
generally signifies rule or power; like in the words "democracy" (rule of
the people) and "meritocracy" (rule of those who gained merit). "Netocracy"
can either mean "rule of the net" or "rule over the (Inter)net". Seems that
I misread your initial statement as one about who has the rule over the
Internet . Apologies for the misunderstanding.

The 'netocracy' seems to be a rather speculative notion of class. I don't
want to sound dismissive in any way, but it's hard to discuss such concepts
if they're based on simplifications and generalization. (Thinking of
classes as binary categories is the kind of generalization that also taints
Marxism - at least before the advent of post-marxism.)

His "net aristocracy" is the
> forthcoming 15% superclass of the United States ruling over the 85%
> underclass of consumtarians following the full onslaught of digital
> technologies and production processes over the next two decades.

See above. These are scenarios based on techno prophecies, rather the kind
of stuff 'futurists' like Ray Kurzweil write, only that this is obviously
written from a more critical point of view. It's hard to discuss the
validity of these kinds of scenarios in general. As speculative claims,
they're difficult to reasonably deal with on a list that focuses on the
present realities of Internet culture.

> The "net
> aristocracy" is driven both by attentionalist information flows and
> capitalist money flows and is perhaps the interim hybrid we should look out
> for first.

If you look at how stock markets work - from high frequency trading to the
economy of venture capital investment before IPOs, then it's often the
opposite of attentionalism that creates economic power: insider knowledge
and privileged access to markets. The same is true, for example, for
natural resource markets (oil, gas, metals, food). I'm not claiming that
the exact opposite of what you say is true, but that reality is more
complicated.

> Cowen finds its roots not only in Silicon Valley but also at
> locations like Williamsburg, places which lack the financial muscle of
> Silicon Valley but are already rich in attentionalist power.

With Williamsburg thrown in, this makes no sense to me except as an extreme
riff on the late 1990s/early 2000s meme of the "attention economy", and an
unbroken belief in material economies being superseded by information
economy.

> My point, again, is to try to see the picture in a slightly more complex
> manner, than classic Marxist analysis would take us, as to actually hit it
> right. Power is more than money these days,

Neither me, nor anybody else here that I'm aware of has claimed that power
is money. You seem to imply that power, these days, is post-materialist and
discursive; so that old elites are being replaced by new elites consisting
of digitally networked opinion leaders. In that scenario, someone like Ray
Kurzweil (to stick to the above example) would be more powerful than the
extreme opposite of an anti-attention seeker such as, let's say, an
ex-Soviet oligarch, a member of the Saud family or the U.S. Secretary of
Defense.

I would follow you to the point that Kurzweil is influential, and
ultimately powerful, as the guiding spirit of Google's 'Singularity
University', with the handwriting of his ideas being visible in Google
Glass and the company's recent acquisitions of robot and drone technology.
It's a similar kind of power that Rasputin had on the Russian Czarist
family, the Church of Scientology over some parts of Hollywood, or - to
choose less weird examples - Hegel on the 19th century Prussian state and
Leo Strauss on the American neo-cons. These examples also demonstrate
limitations of this model (because the influence worked never one way and
the opinion leaders were not the ones in executive power), and, as others
have remarked here before, some question marks behind the idea that the
Internet would create a fundamentally new state of affairs. (I.e. would
Hegel have been the most powerful person in the 19th century if he had had
Twitter?)

Another problem: The economy at large is neither just the Internet nor a
pure information economy. Even the Internet itself, with its consumption of
hardware and energy isn't. A world inhabited by seven and soon ten billion
people will continue (and likely even increase) to focus the largest part
of its economy on natural resources and manufacturing. These parts of the
economy are and will not simply be driven by the "attentionalist power" of
a "netocracy".

Aside from that, there is a problem of recursion - namel

Re: Philosophy of the Internet of Things

[Florian Cramer]

Hello Rob,

There seem to be a few problematic assumptions in the text:

> The Internet of Things (IoT) is an umbrella term used to describe a next
> step in the evolution of the Internet. While the first phase of the web can
> be thought of as a combination of an internet of hyper-text documents and
> an internet of applications (think blogs, online email, social sites,
> etc.), one of the next steps is an Internet of augmented ?smart? objects ?
> or ?things? ? being accessible to human beings and each other over network
> connections. This is the internet of Things.

This paragraph is mixing up the World Wide Web (http) with the Internet
(TCP/IP and UDP). The Internet as such is nothing but a global open
standard and infrastructure for networking computers with each other.

When the term "Internet of Things" was coined in the late 1990s, there was
still a strong divide between a "computer" and other sorts of electronic
devices. Nowadays, many if not most electronic devices (from phones to
cameras to traffic sensors)  are factually Internet-enabled micro
computers.

This is, on the one hand, a proof that the 1990s Internet of Things
prediction was correct. On the other hand, one could argue that the term
has become obsolete because "computers" take the shape of all kinds of
expected and unexpected things. If one can no longer differentiate between
an "Internet of computers" and an "Internet of devices", then the question
is what "Internet of Things" can still meaningfully signify.

Another question is that of future scenarios:

> Underpinning the development of the Internet of Things is the ever
> increasing proliferation of networked devices in everyday usage. Such
> devices include laptops, smart phones, fridges, smart meters, RFIDs, etc.
> The number of devices in common usage is set to increase worldwide from the
> current level of 4.5 billion to 50 billion by 2050 and may even include
> human implants.

Isn't that, still, a view of the future as it has been imagined in the
1990s and 2000s? For sure, an expansion of Internet-connected devices
underway especially in industrial applications. On the other hand, aren't
events such as the disclosures about NSA's Prism program or the recent
Heartbleed OpenSSL security nightmare indicative of a trend against blind
Internet-ification of all kinds of devices and technologies?

To name an example: I learned that the Dutch levee system is nowadays
consisting of a network of Internet-controlled sensors and pumps. The
sensor broadcast their measuring data via an encrypted VPN connection to a
nation-wide data center which in turn sends back control instructions to
the pumps. If this VPN had been run on OpenSSL (and it's quite possible
that it is), anyone could have hacked it and literally flooded the country.

These risks have been known for a long time, but now even non-experts -
including policymakers and industry CEOs - are likely to understand them.
The logical conclusion is to not expose critical infrastructures to the
Internet by hardware design. The same is true for industrial
infrastructures, both for the sake of operational security and safety from
industrial espionage.

The question is whether this will eventually lead to correction of
optimistic Internet of Things predictions.

> For as computational devices become ever more central to how we relate to
> and interface with each other,

That is really the question. Will the growth of computational technologies
remain to be primitive quantitative growth, or will it turn into a
qualitative growth where computerization and Internetworking of devices,
and areas of life, will be carefully evaluated for each case and
application?

A good example, again from the Netherlands, how computer experts can
soundly turn against computerization as such was Rop Gonggrijp's campaign
against voting machines. Its radical philosophical implications - that
computers, with today's computer architecture, are by definition machines
whose information isn't manipulation-proof and thus can never be trusted -
still doesn't seem to have sunk in.

> The design and deployment of the Internet of Things is thus not simply a
> matter of software/hardware architecture but also of politics; ethics;
> belief; citizenship; and social and civic relations.

Indeed! -

Bests,
Florian


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Shoshana Zuboff: Dark Google

[Florian Cramer]

Published today in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

"We witness the rise of a new absolute power. Google transfers its radical
politics from cyberspace to reality. It will earn its money by knowing,
manipulating, controlling the reality and cutting it into the tiniest
pieces."

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshanna-zuboff-dark-google-12916679.html?printPagedArticle=true


Quotes from the article:

"During the second half of the twentieth century, more education and
> complex social experience produced a new kind of individual. No longer
> content to conform to the mass, more people sought their own unique paths
> to self-determination. [...]

The arrival of the Internet provided a new way forward. [...] This was a
> new 'networked public sphere,' as legal scholar Yochai Benkler called it.
> [...]
> The whole topography of cyberspace then began to morph as Google and
> Facebook shifted away from the ethos of the public web, while carefully
> retaining its rhetoric. They began to develop a new logic of operations in
> what had until then been a blank area. The new zone didn???t  resemble the
> bricks and mortar world of commerce, but neither did it follow the norms of
> the open web. This confused and distracted users. In fact, the firms were
> developing a wholly new business logic that incorporated elements of the
> conventional logic of corporate capitalism ??? especially its adversarialism
> toward end consumers ??? along with elements from the new Internet world ???
> especially its intimacy. The outcome was the elaboration of  a new
> commercial logic based on hidden surveillance. Most people did not
> understand that they and their friends were being tracked, parsed, and
> mined without their knowledge or consent."


So far, these are no new insights for Nettimers. But Zuboff adds two
interesting ideas:

(1) According to her, it's a mistake to think of Internet capitalism having
destroyed privacy, but privacy has just been transferred. It shifted from
individuals to Google and the NSA who "assert a right to privacy with
respect to their surveillance tactics and then exercise their choice to
keep those tactics secret". Zuboff characterizes, from what seems to be a
liberal viewpoint, as a new form of absolutism. Alternatively, it could be
described as a 21st century form of cognitive capitalism that follows the
post-democratic/post-1990 success formula of oligarchical capitalism.

(2) Zuboff quotes Karl Polanyi's model of three "fictional commodities" on
which industrial capitalism is based: the reinvention of human life as
labor, the reinvention of nature as real estate and the reinvention of
purchasing power as money. For Zuboff, Google adds a "fourth fictional
commodity" that is "emerging as a dominant characteristic of market
dynamics in the 21st century": "'Reality' is about to undergo the same kind
of fictional transformation and be reborn as 'behavior.'  This includes the
behavior of  creatures, their bodies, and their things. It includes actual
behavior and data about behavior."

-F


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Re: tensions within the bay area elites

[Florian Cramer]

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 5:36 PM, Hans de Zwart  wrote:

> Just look at the graph displaying Google's DC lobbying investment and
> you will instantly realise that Google is not the same Google that it
> was a decade ago.

To chime in here: If Facebook qualifies as "scary", then Google does even
more so. Lately, the company has been aggressively ventured into
military-industrial territory with its recent investments into robotics,
artificial intelligence, augmented reality and drone technology.

On top of that, or rather: in sync with it, its top management believes in
technological "Singularity" (about which Wikipedia remarks that the
"flashback character in Ken MacLeod's 1998 novel The Cassini Division
dismissively refers to the singularity as 'the Rapture for nerds'). Ray
Kurzweil, chief "Singularity" evangelist, has been working as Google's
director of engineering since 2012. Google is co-founder and main sponsor
of his "Singularity University" (
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html?pagewanted=all :
"For those who haven't noticed, the Valley's most-celebrated company -
Google - works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking
power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans. Larry
Page, Google's other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in
2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in
donations. Some of Google's earliest employees are, thanks to personal
donations of $100,000 each, among the university's 'founding circle.'").

Google's most recent projects straightforwardly follow the "Singularity"
script. Most of them are bundled under "Google [x]", "a semi-secret
facility run by Google dedicated to making major technological
advancements" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X). Examples:

- Through quick and aggressive company acquisitions, Google has become one
of the main players in contemporary robotics. The company has put Andy
Rubin, architect and former chief developer of the Android operating
system, in charge of its robotics program. Its most recent and most
spectacular acquisition has been Boston Dynamics, a company at the cutting
edge of military robotics and notorious for products like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ
(The Guardian has more information on that acquisition:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/17/google-boston-dynamics-robots-atlas-bigdog-cheetah)

- Linked to its robotics research is Google's project to develop driverless
cars. The company is beyond the prototyping stage and currently runs
test-drives of autonomous cars throughout the U.S.. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car)

- Google has also begun to invest into drone technology and bought up the
drone manufacturer Titan Aerospace:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/14/technology/innovation/google-titan-drone/ .
Google strongly competes with Facebook in this area.

- Google's acquisition of 'smart meter' company Nest (
http://www.theclimategroup.org/what-we-do/news-and-blogs/google-buys-smart-meter-start-up-nest/)
and development of a "Google Contact Lens" equipped with wireless chips (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contact_Lens) are further indications
that the company is leaving behind its search engine roots.

On the likely upside: All this sounds as if the company, with the billions
it can burn on experimental projects and its attempt to find new areas of
business, is going through some retro- or neo-1990s cyber phase. It's quite
possible that these efforts will eventually fall flat on their face. Public
resistance against Google Glass, even in a tech-friendly country like the
U.S., and the protest actions against Google employees in San Francisco
seem to indicate changing times.

-F


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Re: a free letter to cultural institutions

[Florian Cramer]

I disagree with this letter since I am working for a small cultural venue
(WORM in Rotterdam) myself and see a discrepancy between good intentions
and not-so-good practical consequences.

First of all: the release of work as free culture (according to the
standards of freedomdefined.org or the FSF Free Software Definition) should
be intrinsically motivated and a decision of those who created the work. It
should not something forced upon by an institution/venue which would then
use its institutional power to force upon modalities of distribution - i.e.
you can't play/exhibit/work here if your work isn't released under a free
license. It is not upon an institution to dictate ways of distribution
outside that institution. If, for example, a punk band would decide that it
is not releasing its recordings under a free license - for which it might
have sound political arguments -, it would, under your model, be banned
from all punk venues to perform. This would boil down to the creation and
enforcement of purity laws, the typical knee-jerk reflex of the radical
left and trap into which it is running into again and again.

To clarify: At WORM, we have fostered, (co-)hosted and co-instigated a
whole range of free culture projects, such as the Hotglue and now SuperGlue
web site creation system, the Libre Graphics Research Unit, the Free?!
conference last fall, a number of Crypto Parties; our office computers run
on GNU/Linux and our streaming server streams Ogg Vorbis.

But we also don't think that it is forbidden if an underground band sells
its self-made small edition LP after a concert with no whatsoever free
license because it can't live from the kind of artists' fees we pay.

Florian



On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 11:17 PM, ozgur k.  wrote:

> a free letter to cultural institutions,
>
> please do not fund/exhibit/distribute/promote any non-free cultural
> works.(see freedomdefined.org for the definition of free cultural
> works)
>
> please approach your audience as peers and give them the freedom to
> build on what you make them experience.
 <...>


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Re: a free letter to cultural institutions

[Florian Cramer]

>
> I'd be very interested to hear why a punk band wouldn't want to release
> music under a free license.
>

For example, because it doesn't want - for political reasons - its music to
end up on Spotify, Google or similar corporate services, against which free
licenses provide no means of intervention. Or because it wants to retain a
means of preventing that work is being politically misappropriated. For
example, if the punk band were the Dead Kennedys, and it would have
released "California Uber Alles" under a truly free license, it would have
no means to intervene if a Neonazi band performed the same song with no
irony intended.

The punk band example is relatively harmless. For software developers, any
kind of free license (free according to the criteria of FSF and Debian,
respectively Open Source according to the OSI criteria) gives no whatsoever
means to prevent that the software/the code is used for military purposes,
by secret services like the NSA (whose infrastructure is running on free
software to a large degree), or for the clouds of Facebook, Google &c., for
racial profiling and, in the most extreme case, genocide logistics. The
problem is that all these applications fall within the "freedom" of free
software, the right to use software "for any purpose", which ultimately
means freedom as in free market. There are many people in the hacker
community, such as Felix von Leitner from Chaos Computer Club (also
developer of dietlibc), who are now thinking critically about this aspect.

>
> > -, it would, under your model, be banned from all punk venues to
> > perform.
>
> Good.
>

That would fit hardcore punk and straight edge culture with their close
cultural and historical affinities to puritanism.

> This is a classic example of the kind of scarce, auratic merchandise
> that freely licensed non-scarce digital media and live performances
> can drive sales of (or see their costs offset by).
>
> The license on it can't make it any less desirable to anyone who isn't
> at the gig than it already is.
>
> It can however give it more of the iconoclastic attitude that will make
> it desirable to punks.

Your reaction exactly illustrates the problem: if "free culture" has boiled
down to licensing, it's merely a legal bureaucracy with little political
meaning. The very act of releasing something on small edition vinyl is a
statement that runs contrary to free culture as politics. As radical free
culture activists, the band would have to release its album as mp3s or oggs
and make them downloadable on their website, on an open wifi hotspot at the
concert venue, or on a terminal where people could copy the files on their
USB sticks.

In that sense, a site like Ubuweb is - in my opinion - closer to a free
culture spirit and politics (because it consists of work born out of
radical aesthetics of collage, appropriation, disruption and interrogation
of traditional musical, visual and textual forms) than most works that
nowadays bear a Creative Commons sticker.

-F


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Re: a free letter to cultural institutions

[Florian Cramer]

Hello jaromil,

> First and foremost there is a confusion between the terms "art"
> and "culture", which is created already in Ozgur's open letter and
> oddly whipped up by Aymeric. Art production is quite different from
> cultural production.


This is mined territory as there are no whatsoever consensus
definitions of either term. "Culture" has a much broader meaning in
the humanities and cultural studies, but is (as cultural studies
scholar Raymond Williams already wrote in the 1970s) colloquially used
as a synonym for "the arts".

Within Western institutional bureaucracies, these terms work as class
distinctions: "culture" is the most broad and least selective term,
encompassing everything from carnival in the streets to a white cube art
biennial, "the arts" is more specific to music, literature, film, theater,
performance, visual art and tends to exclude forms of popular culture
outside those terms (such as the street carnival), "art" in the singular
form is often used as a synonym of highbrow visual art.

> Lets focus for instance on art *production* (as in the complex
> relationships on which the condition for production of art stands).


I would even agree that for highbrow (fine) art institutions financed
by public money, a "free culture" provision as proposed in the
manifesto would be a good challenge and political reality check. It
would infinitely more honest as critical politics than the several
decades of superficially critical discourse in a journal like
"October" which have questioned everything but the institutions of art
themselves.

The issue, however, is that the manifesto is not directed to highbrow
art institutions, but much more generally at cultural institutions
of any kind. And it would be the places that are most sympathetic to
free culture (like WORM in Rotterdam, among many others) where such
a policy could in the end do more harm than good, because of all the
reasons mentioned.


> To me "free art" just represents the refusal of it as a whole,
> rather than an educated proposal for a new system. In this regards
> "free art" is really a punk attitude (fluxus?) and I'm entertained
> to read you choosing the weakest metaphore for your arguments to
> fly. I guess it was intended.
>

No, I was choosing the strongest metaphor because I'm much more
interested in defending punk or Fluxus than a highbrow fine artist
like, say, Liam Gillick. For me, the utility of a device like copyleft
is measured by the cultural practices it will either foster or
obstruct, not the other way around.

> Not only they cannot impose anything on artists even if they want,
> but they are predated by profit-making lobbies for the increasingly
> degraded labour they can offer. In such a scenario an artist
> within the 99% (which includes most students anyway) is better off
> circulating her/his works on PirateBay and on street walls: it
> will give way more chances to enter the miracle of reward for art
> production. All this because, as they function today, institutions
> are there only for the established 1% and as much as they try to
> open up new offers for their audience and respect the subjectivity
> of new artists, they will just create more demand for the 1% and
> de-subjectivate new artists into their own institutional decadence.

The problem is that you are constructing an abstract example to prove
a moral high ground, but reality is different. If you look for example
at the free software projects that are being developed within the
Libre Graphics network, then you see that a lot of them depend on
public cultural funding, and that these funding has often raised by
sympathizing cultural institutions (like Constant in Brussels, for
example).

Another problem with free software development is namely economical
and financial. In the 1970s to the early 1990s, it took place
almost exclusively at public universities: University of California
at Berkeley for BSD, the MIT for GNU, the University of Helsinki
for the beginnings of Linux, etc. Since the 1990s, along with the
spirit of neoliberalization (that also forced public universities
to commercialize and proprietarize its research), most free
software development has taken place in the dotcom and IT industry:
companies like IBM, Google and Red Hat. If one looks at free
software development economics, then it either works as a charity,
programmed in the free time of people who have other IT jobs, or as
part of development of base software stacks (kernels, database and
network servers) that run other, typically proprietary applications
(such as the Google search engine, "cloud" storage, Intranets and
enterprise applications etc.). Dmitry covered this in a paper as (I'm
paraphrasing) niches in the industry where infrastructural technology
is being developed that is shared across competitors and thus exempt
from direct commercialization.

These two factors, "charity" and "infrastructural IT" development,
point to the issues that free software development face

Re: More Crisis in the Information Society

[Florian Cramer]

Your posting on the crisis of the information society struck me as a useful
summary of a current state of affairs. There seem to be obvious conclusions
to be drawn from this which, apparently, nobody dares to clearly state:

(a) The Internet - i.e. anything traveling over TCP/IP and routed via DNS -
cannot be trusted for any form of truly private or classified information.
It needs to be seen as one, global, public billboard - yet with varied
privileges of access that non-corporate and non-governmental users are in
not control of. The fact that all information received through this network
is, as you write, potentially tampered, is the second issue on top of the
privacy issue.

However, these restrictions still imply that the Internet can serve such
good purposes as running UbuWeb (to refer to Kenny Goldsmith's article on
this list) or Nettime.

Crypto activism does not solve these two issues despite its good
intentions. Too many core technologies such as OpenSSL, TrueCrypt,
PGP-E-Mail (with its lack of meta data encryption), TOR, ... have turned
out to be flawed or compromised. They all can do more harm than good for
one's privacy if one isn't a highly skilled computer user using
non-mainstream operating systems like Tails.

Offline communication still remains a simple alternative for dealing with
these restrictions. A good example is Henry Warwick's "Radical Tactics of
the Offline Library"
(
http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/no-07-radical-tactics-of-the-offline-library-henry-warwick/
).

(b) These two above issues lead to the logical conclusion that no critical
infrastructure should ever rely on Internet communication. That includes
all mainstream scenarios of the Internet of Things, Smart Cities and most
other technologies marketed with a "smart" prefix, drones, robotics and
autonomous cars. To give one example: If I correctly interpret information
I received from a colleague of mine, a researcher in water management, then
it is already possible to flood the Netherlands through computer hacking
because its current systems of levees and watergates is controlled via a
local sensors in the levees connected to a data center that controls the
pumps based on the real time sensor data; all these data connections run
over the Internet via a VPN. If technology development blindly proceeds
with such "smart technologies", we'll be able to study Philip K. Dick
novels and "Terminator" movies as predictive scenarios - and write
screenplays for war movies where countries get attacked by someone hacking
and crashing all Google cars.

(c) The San Francisco billboard likely epitomizes the end of an
"information society" and media bubble period roughly between 1998 and
2008. In that time, the classical media and information economy, and their
jobs, were still in swing while the industries that were about to replace
them first came in as additional players working on venture capital. The
temporary coexistence of these two economies created an inflated market. I
remember how in the late 1990s, newspapers such as Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung suddenly boomed and expanded (employing some Nettimers as writers,
btw.) because dotcoms massively placed their ads in them. In retrospect,
this could be described as the media eating itself. The same must have
historically happened in other industries, for example in transportation,
when railroads where built while coachmen were still in business. In both
cases, the economic growth model - and investment stimulus - for the new
industry is the prospect of taking over the market with a fraction of the
previous costs and resources, basically replacing comparatively
inefficient, local and regional players with a few global players.

In the media and information sector, the business model for the new players
(Google, Apple, Facebook) has not only been centralization, but also the
fact that they are media companies that no longer employ "content"
creators. This conversely means that thee economic exchange value of media
creation, in the classic sense of editorial or artistic/audiovisual/design
work, is sinking to unforeseen lows. For regional commercial video
producers in Europe, to take an example with which I'm familiar, hourly
rates are the same as for repairman only in the best case; in most cases,
they are lower, and don't reflect investment into equipment. Another
example: according to market research, the average pre-tax income of
commercial photographers in the Netherlands is about $20,000/year. If this
is indicative of any larger trend in media jobs, then it means that nothing
is more obsolete than the notion of the "creative class", but that the bulk
of "information society" and media jobs have become working class
employment or worse.

-F



On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 6:20 PM, michael gurstein 
wrote:

>
> Pando.com: New San Francisco billboard warns workers they'll be replaced
> by iPads
> if they demand a fair wage
>
>
> http://tinyurl.com/mn2xzzn
>


#  distributed via 

Re: More Crisis in the Information Society

[Florian Cramer]

Hello David,

> And ask whether the generally low pay and insecure conditions for
> practitioners of what have become known as the creative economy really
> is such a new phenomenon?
>
> Are the average earnings enjoyed/endured by commercial photographers
> (and designers/illustrators/animators/writers) that Florian identifies
> as $20,000/year really that much worse than average earnings for these
> sectors during other historical periods?

I should have been more concrete in my posting. The $20,000/year figure
came from a market research study on Dutch professional photographers - in
other words, a demography where photographers who identify themselves as
visual artists are a small minority, and the bulk of the profession is
represent by photojournalists, commercial portrait and wedding
photographers and the like. The same study also said that the $20,000
figure represents an income loss of 20% in comparison to statistics
gathered three years earlier.

Colleagues working in advertising tell me that today's production budgets
for commercials have more than halved in comparison to the "golden age" in
the 80s and 90s. In graphic design, hardly any of the big bureaus still
exist anymore, and freelancers working at home have taken their place.

Aside from anecdotal evidence, my colleague Paul Rutten has compiled hard
figures and statistics for the creative industries in the Netherlands that
clearly show shrinkage [https://hro.app.box.com/s/gz6vf5hkn99ndsta2psz]
along with the rest of the economy since 2008. (For the U.S., the Salon.com
article "The Creative Class is a Lie" drew similar conclusions in 2011:
"The dream of a laptop-powered 'knowledge class' is dead. The media is
melting. Blame the economy - and the Web",
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/.) Intuitively,
this makes sense, but it sharply contradicts the run-of-the-mill rhetoric
that the creative industries are the area of biggest growth within the
overall economy.

> I guess what I am saying is that the arts (including the commercial
> sector) have always been riskier than most and the rewards of a life
> of expressive creative engagement has always had to be balanced
> against  greater risk and sacrifice.

I wouldn't argue with that!

> We may aspire to change this reality but is it really a new set of
> conditions ?

What seems to have changed is the fully commercial sector of the arts.
Large parts of it have economically collapsed and therefore no longer
provide alternative income opportunities. In other words, wedding
photography no longer pays the bills for experimental photographers,
copywriting no longer the bills of starving writers, etc.etc.

-F


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Re: More Crisis in the Information Society

[Florian Cramer]

Hello David,

> And ask whether the generally low pay and insecure conditions for
> practitioners of what have become known as the creative economy really
> is such a new phenomenon?
>
> Are the average earnings enjoyed/endured by commercial photographers
> (and designers/illustrators/animators/writers) that Florian identifies
> as $20,000/year really that much worse than average earnings for these
> sectors during other historical periods?

I should have been more concrete in my posting. The $20,000/year figure
came from a market research study on Dutch professional photographers - in
other words, a demography where photographers who identify themselves as
visual artists are a small minority, and the bulk of the profession is
represent by photojournalists, commercial portrait and wedding
photographers and the like. The same study also said that the $20,000
figure represents an income loss of 20% in comparison to statistics
gathered three years earlier.

Colleagues working in advertising tell me that today's production budgets
for commercials have more than halved in comparison to the "golden age" in
the 80s and 90s. In graphic design, hardly any of the big bureaus still
exist anymore, and freelancers working at home have taken their place.

Aside from anecdotal evidence, my colleague Paul Rutten has compiled hard
figures and statistics for the creative industries in the Netherlands that
clearly show shrinkage [https://hro.app.box.com/s/gz6vf5hkn99ndsta2psz]
along with the rest of the economy since 2008. (For the U.S., the Salon.com
article "The Creative Class is a Lie" drew similar conclusions in 2011:
"The dream of a laptop-powered 'knowledge class' is dead. The media is
melting. Blame the economy - and the Web",
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/.) Intuitively,
this makes sense, but it sharply contradicts the run-of-the-mill rhetoric
that the creative industries are the area of biggest growth within the
overall economy.

> I guess what I am saying is that the arts (including the commercial
> sector) have always been riskier than most and the rewards of a life
> of expressive creative engagement has always had to be balanced
> against  greater risk and sacrifice.

I wouldn't argue with that!

> We may aspire to change this reality but is it really a new set of
> conditions ?

What seems to have changed is the fully commercial sector of the arts.
Large parts of it have economically collapsed and therefore no longer
provide alternative income opportunities. In other words, wedding
photography no longer pays the bills for experimental photographers,
copywriting no longer the bills of starving writers, etc.etc.

-F


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Re: More Crisis in the Information Society

[Florian Cramer]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 8:46 PM, t byfield  wrote:

> Felix is absolutely right that this is all at root political -- and not
just politicized, in the way noted above, but political in the sharply
defined sense of people's will and ability to recognize where they stand in
structural terms and to act effectively on that understanding.

The problem is that such an argument can also be used to kill off
discussion or engagement; the problem is political-economical, so it needs
to be solved through some larger political action. This paints a rather
simplistic picture of politics (and economics) that ignores micropolitics,
and it also paints a reductive picture of the arts (including the messy
in-between-disciplines such as media art/design/studies/technology) because
it implies that their very practice cannot be political. - With that, I do
not just mean political in a descriptive or reflective sense, but also in a
constructive and experimental sense. All avant-garde arts movements that
deserved their name, from Russian futurism to present-day afrofuturism,
have been political in that sense.

> In 'digital' fields, this ambiguity or ambivalence is completely concrete
in ways that were exemplified by the recent ruckus over the Facebook
'manipulation' study. From a certain, very idealized standpoint, the FB
study shocks the conscience, violates important ethical norms and probably
many laws as well, and so on. At the same time, I think many people working
in these fields are utterly befuddled by the ruckus, because that woolly
combination of study and intervention is the *point* of design; and from
that parochial perspective, the academics who are upset by it seem like the
village green preservation society, hopelessly naive nostalgists. Worse,
that nostalgia prevents them from seeing as clearly as they should the ways
in which the FB study exemplifies a profound shift in universities, where
declining public funding and prestige is forcing them to seek out
alternative sources of funding and prestige.

I only see an issue of critical media literacy. The same experiment could
have been conducted, just with different triggers and measuring methods, 30
years ago using network TV as a medium instead of Facebook. There would
hardly have been the same outcry because it was common wisdom that TV
manipulates its viewers. Today, this outcry only speaks of complete
naiveness, even of educated people, towards media like Facebook.

> That shift from public to private sources of funding is another area
where regional differences will express themselves *very* clearly.

Again, I fail to see a fundamental difference. And the field of media
studies always has been tainted. To quote the introductory paragraph of the
1969 Playboy interview with McLuhan: "His free-for-all theorizing has
attracted the attention of top executives at General Motors (who paid him a
handsome fee to inform them that automobiles were a thing of the past),
Bell Telephone (to whom he explained that they didn???t really understand the
function of the telephone) and a leading package-design house (which was
told that packages will soon be obsolete). Anteing up $5000, another huge
corporation asked him to predict ??? via closed-circuit television ??? what
their own products will be used for in the future; and Canada???s turned-on
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau engages him in monthly bull sessions designed
to improve his television image." [
http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/]


> The political, economic, and cultural traditions that have shaped higher
education -- again, in part, as a mediator -- as a *national* phenomenon.
Historical experiences in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany have
varied dramatically in the postwar period, to say nothing of the countries
I mentioned above that we haven't heard from. So I think it doesn't make
much sense to spend time on particular national studies about the economic
prospects of any given 'creative' practice -- in particular, *photography*,
as though it were a useful historical constant or reference on any level.

Ted, this is a plainly ridiculous statement if you only think of the
cultural and media history of photography, and to which degree it has
shaped critical thinking on media from Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes.
And photography ranks, next to fashion, as one of the most globalized and
internationalized 'creative industries'. The $2000 average sales figure of
Dutch photographers also reflects global star photographers like (Dutch
nationals) Anton Corbijn and Rineke Dijkstra. And, last not least,
photography is one of the main selling points for smartphones these days.
If you compare the stated decline of the average wage of photographers to
the $715 million Facebook paid for Instagram - a company with only 13
employees - then photography is just a powerful example for contemporary
shifts in media and economy.

If we look at the larger picture, we see a major (and I w

Re: Frank Chimero: Refragmentation

[Florian Cramer]

The argument that insufficient protocol semantics lead to "walled
gardens"...:


>The lack of an  tag led to Pinterest. No method to connect
>people created Facebook. RSS's confusing interfaces contributed to
>Twitter's success. Any guargantuan web company's core value is a
>response to limitations of the protocol (connection), markup spec
>(description), or browsers (interface). Without proper connective
>tissue, consolidation becomes necessary to address these unmet needs.
>That, of course, leads to too much power in too few places. The door
>opens to potential exploitation, invasive surveillance, and a fragility
>that undermines the entire ethos of the internet.

... has been for years by computer scientist and W3C member Steven
Pemberton.

However, it's not realistic to think that richer markups or protocols would
solve these problems because they don't solve the "issue" of identification
and trust between users. Facebook, Ebay, etc. do not only manifest
third-layer protocol extensions (if one consider TCP/IP the first and http
the second layer of the web), but they are also identity and trust brokers.
At a conference in Amsterdam, Pemberton gave the example of semantic web
tags that could obsolete Ebay, simply because they would give users
sufficiently precise and searchable tags for marking up their own private
sales offer on their personal homepage. But nothing would ensure that the
tags wouldn't be used as spam, and that the seller identities weren't
fraudulent.

RSS is a case in point. The interface is neither confusing, nor really hard
to use for people who just want to follow and read feeds. But the reason
for Twitter's success is the social filtering which RSS doesn't offer. And
the social filtering function, in turn, relies on Twitter's function as an
identity broker. Conversely, the lack of an  tag did _not_ lead to
Pinterest because Pinterest is being used by people who cannot, or do not
want to, write HTML. It is the old problem in computer and information
science that solutions are being thought up from their back-end, not their
front-end, and often, usable front-ends cannot be developed because they
weren't considered in the back-end's design. (Case in point: XML is,
theoretically, the working and tested solution for any kind of document
processing; but not so in practice because there is, 17 years after its
invention, not a single user-friendly universal text program for editing
XML.)

-F


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Re: Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War

[Florian Cramer]

   On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 11:27 PM, olia lialina  wrote:

 and the morning after UX, when people (formerly known as users)
 beiing fooled into invisible computing paradigm, find out that
 computers are there but the only think they can do with them is to
 take out the battery

   Even that is overly optimistic. Nowadays, you can't even remove (or
   swap) the battery of most mobile devices.
   -F


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Re: Fwd: Global and Networked Solidarity with the Occupied

[Florian Cramer]

   On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 2:00 PM, Ãrsan Åenalp <[1]orsan1...@gmail.com>
   wrote:

   > Netherlands, the sinking last welfare state,

   This must be, like so many contemporary perceptions of the Netherlands,
   based on outdated facts and nostalgic misconceptions. According
   to [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state, The Netherlands
   don't even rank in the top ten of welfare states in the world, with
   social expenditures scoring in between those of Portugal and Greece.
   -F


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Re: Lori Emerson: What's Wrong With the Internet and How We

[Florian Cramer]

   On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 3:11 PM, t byfield 
   wrote:

 Via RISKS 
 
 Â  Â loriemerson
 Â  Â July 23, 2015
 What's Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It: Interview With
 Internet Pioneer John Day

   It seems as if a more apt title for this interview would be "What's
   Wrong With TCP/IP and How We Can Fix It", since the Internet is now
   much more than its lowest protocol layer. - That said, one should make
   all "net neutrality" activists take note of Day's excellent critique of
   this concept.Â
   -F


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Re: Lori Emerson: What's Wrong With the Internet and How

[Florian Cramer]

   On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 9:28 PM, <[1]morlockel...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 The Internet *is* it's lowest protocol layers.

   No, it isn't, since it is neither immaterial nor a perpetuum mobile,
   but runs on hardware and electricity.
   -F

<...>

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Re: gentrification of hacking

[Florian Cramer]

   When Stephen Levy wrote "Hackers" in 1984, his description of hacker
   culture and his write-up of the hacker ethic were, to a considerable
   part, based on Richard Stallman. Already in that year, Levy called
   Stallman the "last of the true hackers". Stallman created the GNU
   Project in the same year out of frustration of what had become - or how
   little had remained - of the original M.I.T. hacker culture. Even the
   GNU Project itself involves "gentrification" in the sense that
   development of some of its subprojects (such as the GNU C Compiler, the
   GNU C Library and the GNOME desktop) has become largely corporate. GNU
   intentionally never imposed prohibitions on commercial and particular
   political/military uses of software licensed under its terms. This
   position continues to be criticized by other hackers, for example by
   Felix von Leitner from Chaos Computer Club.
   All this suggests that the "gentrification of hacking" is not a new
   phenomenon, but that it has been a part of hacker culture since its
   early days.
   -F

   On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 7:57 PM, John Hopkins
   <[1]jhopk...@neoscenes.net> wrote:

 Biella --
 some musings on your note:
 <...>


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Re: VW

[Florian Cramer]

 I'd be curious to hear from people who have a more proximate sense
 of how this is playing out in Germany, and how the government seems
 like it'll respond.

   The implication for "our" field are much more immediate than one would
   expect, given that the Centre of Digital Cultures of Leuphana
   University Lüneburg has been funded from a grant by Volkswagen
   Stiftung (Volkswagen Endowment) a few years ago. Look at who's working
   there - a who's who of European media studies including many Nettimers:
   http://cdc.leuphana.com/people/
   -F


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Re: VW

[Florian Cramer]

 It'll be very interesting indeed to hear what the stars of ~German
 media theory have to say about this. Maybe about as much as most US
 academics have to say about their role in imposing indentured
 servitude on subsequent generations...

   The German state of Lower Saxony owns more than 20% of Volkswagen
   stock, a legacy from the Third Reich when the company was founded on
   Hitler's order and owned by the NSDAP's labor organization. The
   Volkswagen Endowment, whose sole purpose is the funding of academic
   research, was created with the money that Lower Saxony and the federal
   government of Germany made when 80% of the company went public after
   WWII. As far as I know, all profits that the state of Lower Saxony
   makes from its remaining 20% share go into the endowment. And, Leuphana
   is a state university of Lower Saxony. - Whatever one may object to
   these close ties between state and industry (described as "state
   monopoly capitalism" by some Marxists), it also has some social
   advantages when companies are partially owned by the public and their
   profits go into financing public research and tuition-less public
   education.

   There are other aspects in German media theory, cultural studies and
   humanities academia that I find by far more objectionable. For example,
   how the more or less biggest names of German media theory and cultural
   studies - Friedrich Kittler, Peter Sloterdijk, Horst Bredekamp, Hans
   Belting - got in bed with Germany's yellow press tycoon Hubert Burda
   (owner of Hubert Burda Media, publisher of among others "Bunte",
   "Focus", "Super-Illu", the German "Playboy" and minority shareholder of
   German tv station RTL2) for Burda's conferences and publications on the
   "iconic turn", as documented on the website
   http://www.iconicturn.de. (The website itself is run by the Hubert
   Burda Foundation.) For those who can read German:
   http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/kultur/article10863152/Bilder-rasc
   heln-nicht.html . Quick translation of the second paragraph:Â
   "Bazon Brock isn't Hubert Burda's only dialogue partner and
   intellectual friend. Peter Sloterdijk, Friedrich Kittler, Horst
   Bredekamp, Wolfgang Ullrich, Hans Belting are also part of the circle;
   top-notch art historians and cultural analysts, and reliable
   contributors to academic criticism. In Karlsruhe, where Burda's book
   was presented, they all sat in a half circle, an honorable club of men.
   It was quite touching how politely they all demonstrated their respect
   for the author. Wolfgang Ullrich, wonderfully insubordinate younger
   generation art historian, called his colleague, the Ph.D. art historian
   Hubert Burda, an 'embedded scientist' who had managed to infiltrate the
   business world for espionage work. Horst Bredekamp, wonderfully
   down-to-the-earth mid-career art historian, showed a reproduction of a
   'Hörzu' (German 'TV Guide') double page to praise its structured view
   on the world of television."Â

   - Regarding jaromil's objection that firmware (especially of critical
   technical devices) should be Open Source: yes, but this won't be
   enough. Volkswagen could have released its firmware in 2005 as Free
   Software/Open Source with the manipulation code cleverly obfuscated,
   speculating on the fact that the release would have remained relatively
   low profile (as opposed to popular Open Source software like, for
   example, Apache or the Linux kernel, which passes hundreds of critical
   eyes every day). For sure, the odds of discovery would still have been
   better then. But what's really needed are mandatory independent code
   audits for firmware - similar to the approval procedures for medical
   drugs. If such policies were in place, they also would have huge
   implications for the so-called "Internet of Things".

   -F



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Re: VW

[Florian Cramer]

 Dear Florian, if this is your biggest concern, than you should at
 least mention that a large section of so called âcritical net
 culturesâ in Europe has been close to Burda Foundation since a long
 time: [1]http://www.akademie3000.de/content/mitglieder/start.htm
 <[2]http://www.akademie3000.de/content/mitglieder/start.htm>. Now to
 pick at individual persons, who are considered to be German media
 theory (btw, an ascription mainly coming from the
 US/Canadian-discourse) is, begging your pardon, rather poor.

   No, it is not poor at all if these are the particular people who have
   collaborated with Hubert Burda on a book and gave his writing their
   academic blessings. That's quite some different from just taking
   funding from a private foundation.
   Â

 @Centre for Digital Culture, Leuphana University: as one of the
 addressed, let me say that the Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL),
 which is the only (!) entity within the Centre for Digital Cultures
 at Leuphana University that is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation
 (through a program called âNiedersaechsisches Vorabâ),

   If you carefully read my points here on Nettime, then it shouldn't have
   escaped you that I defended this funding (against Ted) and actually
   consider it a good case of repurposing company profits for public
   research and education.
   Florian



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