Well, #28c3 has come and gone.
I’m not sure how it happened, but after all these years on the
internet, It looks like I’ve somehow become a blogger.
I never really wanted to be a blogger, after all the most exciting
thing about the Internet has always been the ability for users to
interact on neutral turf. Yet, the web, even when it has social
features, is always home-court for somebody or another.
The definitive technology of the Internet to me was always UseNet, a
worldwide distributed discussion system, and this was where I first
began to express and discuss political issues, where the worlds of
political activism and media art intersected with my life as a computer
programmer, and drew me into ideas and projects and communities I would
otherwise have had no connection with.
I didn’t start out thinking about what I was doing as “publishing” so
much as fishing, posting not so much so people would read my texts, but
so people would respond to them. Their responses give me new ideas,
insights, and more leads to better understand these topics I could now
begin to access, byway of the Internet.
UseNet was an ongoing multiparty dialogue.
When people started blogging I couldn’t see the point. Why post
something on just one website, instead of millions of news servers all
around the world? Why force people to use dodgy webforms to leave
comments, instead of slick news reading software? It seems so
retrograde, so hierarchical, privileging one writer as the blog’s
“author” with everyone else reduced to “commentators,” under the
tyrannical moderation of the blogger, meaning that the presence of
opposing views, that made UseNet groups so vibrant, was absent.
A personal website seemed to me no more useful than as an elaborate
.plan file, a kind of online brochure, good for a CV and Contact info,
maybe even a archive of what you had really posted online (meaning on
UseNet), but certainly no way to reach any community.
Sadly, UseNet has become increasingly obscure, for reasons that I have
discussed at length, as part of the Capital-financed enclosure of the
peer-to-peer Internet with centrally controlled client-server
technologies.
As a result for years I’ve been lost in wilderness, making my
contributions on web-boards like Autonomedia’s InterActivist, mailing
lists, etc, and even *gasp* “Social Media,” Eventually being published
by Mute Magazine, and other websites, leading to the Telekommunist
Manifesto being released by the Institute for Network Cultures.
In an effort to co-ordinate my use of these disparate platforms,
somehow a blog emerged.
So here we are. I’ve accidentally become a blogger.
Last week the #28c3 occurred in Berlin, and it served as the point of
departure for the last six texts that I’ve written. For completeness,
I’ve collected links to all of them below.
- Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded! | http://wp.me/p24fq
When a place becomes too crowded, things like getting in, getting a
table, getting service, etc, become more competitive and thereby
difficult. Some of the original regulars become crowded out and stop
going, eventually the others stop too, “because nobody goes there
anymore.”
- The Suck Principle | http://wp.me/p24fqL-qo
Only places that suck can really have a continuous community, because
if nothing about the place sucks, it will attract more and more people
until it sucks because of crowding. So if you want a continuous, closely
knit community, something about the venue or event must suck, your only
choice is what should suck or how it should suck.
- Exceptionalism and The Internet Surveillance Industry |
http://wp.me/p24fqL-r1
Expressing outrage that enemies of the US and it’s allies are using the
technology being developed by the west also seems misplaced, and rests
on regressive exceptionalist view that privileges western states as
being somehow noble enough to be trusted with the ability to survey
their citizens, but not sinister foreign powers.
- Capital and The War on General Computing | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rg
It is not ignorance, nor even genuinely the needs of law enforcement
that is driving the war against general computing and a general network.
It’s too simple to understand this war as simply tyrannical law
enforcers and paranoid music execs duping clueless legislatures into
locking-down cyberspace to save Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Rather this
war is simply a consequence of the fact that our technology industry is
funded by finance capital, and finance capital requires profit as a
return.
- There Is No A List | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rC
Certainly the freedom-loving free markets will punish peddlers of
tyranny and domination! No doubt ethically minded investors will move
their investments to the virtuous firms of list A, leaving the B listers
starved of Capital. Justice conscious consumers will immediately dump
B’s products and take up the A list! Politicians, eager to
