Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy

[Joseph Rabie]

Dear all,

To be honest, I did not get vey far reading this text. I found its enflamed 
sales-pitch rhetoric counter-productive.

And to be honest, it is only one of many, many texts that have been going 
around for years that call for the same thing: denunciation of the system, 
creating alternatives, in the vein of "L'Insurrection qui vient".

I have, at different periods, participated in the writing of such-like 
manifestos.

Worse, concerning this text, is that it is unsigned. Who is behind it? Does not 
say. "Contact" allows you to email an anonymous addressee. "For Clark" is 
written at the bottom, as a teaser.

It DOES conclude:
"They tell us heroism is dead, when
nothing is more disputed by our century."

Could be AB, for all we know.

Joseph Rabie.



> Le 9 nov. 2018 à 19:44, Ian Alan Paul  a écrit :
> 
> I think the reference to indigenous families is meant to point to some of the 
> indigenous-lead pipeline protests in the U.S. and Canada.
> 
> Regarding fight clubs, i'm not sure that equating all militancy with 
> masculinity is very helpful either, especially considering the rich tradition 
> of women's participation in antifascist movements, autonomist mobilizations, 
> etc.. (although of course the way that the book/film "Fight Club" has been 
> uncritically taken up in popular culture deserves all of this crutique).
> 
> Best,
>   ~i

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Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

[tbyfield]

This thing didn't pass the initial smell test, and after spending some 
time with it I can say: it stinks.


tl;dr: It's provocateur agitprop made by Americans for Americans, and 
it's crafted to blur distinctions between left and right — more 
specifically, to lure progressive/leftists into a rightist fantasy 
world, with — I think — the intention of normalizing and fostering 
consideration and discussion of violence. In part, it's a visual 
exposition of the "but Nazis were SOCIALISTS" nonsense that's going 
around in rightist circles; but unlike that pseudo-factual claim, this 
site is intended to be obliquely persuasive. There are signs that it's 
tied to murky efforts to identify leftist college students. Whoever 
developed it has put some serious time into studying Nazi aesthetics 
and, more than that, has a subtle sense of how to evoke them without 
being obvious about it. The fact that it comes in three languages, 
English, Spanish, and French is mostly pseudo-'internationalist' 
window-dressing. There are signs of a layered, deliberate editorial 
development process that, I think, was based on psychological modeling. 
This isn't a one-off project made by a band of nutters: it's planned and 
executed with subtlety and sophistication, with *very* high production 
values. We'll see more efforts that look and sound like it.


Here's why I think so:

It was inevitable that we'd start to see manifestoes/etc whose 
philosophy and production values are inversely proportional: as the text 
becomes hsallower, the visuals become deeper. They'll require two kinds 
of 'reading,' textual and (for lack of a better word) visual. As the 
philosophy falls way the value of close readings diminishes, and as the 
visuals become more sophisticated the value of 'close looking' 
increases. So let's take a close look at the website Ian pulled this 
text from: https[colon]//inhabit[dot]global/ — URL mangled because I 
don't want anymore links to it in the nettime archive.


The text casts future history as a 'choose your own adventure' exercise. 
It uses red-pill/blue-pill rhetoric ("there are two paths") to dress up 
a binary choice — which, tellingly, explicitly uses the language of 
A/B testing. Not very interesting, imo, except maybe as some sort of 
obligatory web-analytics gesture.


Much more interesting is the visual style, which is self-consciously 
modeled in several ways on print.


First image: an eagle flying above it all, against threatening clouds 
— but they're too close and detailed to be storm clouds, so maybe it's 
smoke? Hard to tell, in an almost perfect way.


The color palate, which is *very* unusual in terms current trends, 
mimics faded print — and not just any print but the kind you might 
expect from, say, 1930s Germany. The solid color fields, in particular, 
are reminiscent of propaganda from the period — close enough to hint 
at it, but not so close as to be too obvious.


The display type ("Lydia-BoldCondensed," if you chase down the CSS) is 
the typographic equivalent of alt.right rhetoric: it evokes Walter 
Höhnisch's National and Schaftstiefelgrotesk (literally, "Jackboot 
Grotesk") without quite going there, as they say.


https://www.colophon-foundry.org/typefaces/lydia/
http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-24194.html
http://de.academic.ru/dic.nsf/dewiki/1241667

The photographs are all black-and-white, which places them in an obvious 
historical register — pre-color photography. But, more than that, 
they're processed to mimic paper tinted with age: again, almost *but not 
quite* like the discoloration you get from early mass-produced paper 
from the '30s, a time when the production of cheap new kinds of paper 
skyrocketed but the chemistry hadn't been worked out.


Odd detail: there's enough diversity in how the images were processed 
— cropping, blurring, and adding color gradients (in the first and 
last images) — to suggest that the art director knew what he (pretty 
sure of the gender there) has real experience.


And then there's the substance of the photographs... This part gets 
geeky, but bear with me because it's very telling. These images have 
been deliberately curated to


* balance racial/ethnic and gender
* appeal to indigenous struggles (Latin America, Dakota Access)
* make reference to internationalist militance
* make reference to survivalist training

I'm pretty sure the ~curator was a white guy.

Below is a list of the photos in order. Here's the legend:

* '+'   means a pictures with an identifiable person
	* '-'   means a pictures with with faces obscured by cropping or 
photoshop

* '[+]' means the photo is widely available
* '[ ]' means the photo does NOT turn up in reverse images searches.

— that last category is interesting, because it narrows the scope of 
where the images come from.


	* [#]   means there's some interesting detail (below the list) about 
its origin


The photos, in 

Re: Fascist "trolls" and back on track

[Emaline Friedman]

Dan,

Even before your solicitation, I was prepared to be the American
20-something (thanks, also, for your post, Alice):

What an interesting experience it's been here on Nettime for the last few
years as I've been writing a critical-psychological dissertation about
"Internet Addiction" (a perfectly Foucaultian generational problem)! In
between then and now I became deeply involved with a post-blockchain
project called Holochain and so went from resistant net-asceticism to deep
web, crypto-cultural exploration. What sets Holochain apart, at least in
the core group, is its having started with eco-hippies who had been
designing complementary currencies for intentional (and religious)
communities for decades. Which brings me to the point about the 60's...

I'll make the same preface about criticizing the youth, but in the other
direction. Please don't take my agreement with your points as Oedipal
variety anger. I do wish to emphasize, though, that it's worth taking a
good hard look at what's been created through the de-politicization of 60's
social movements. In my (odd) tech world this has taken the form of
solutionism + a staunch DIY ethos that refuses engagement with national
governments and other major social institutions and thus also eludes any
realistic political context. Simultaneously, in grade school as much as in
grad school, teachers and professors sang the praises of the 60's greats.
While first as moral heroes and later as exemplars of driving affective
flows, we never got much more than celebrated lifestyles that never seemed
to match up with the modes of reading the present from which they are
ostensibly generated.

The primary rift between young activists on the left and right (though
these terms are SO RARELY used) is that the young "left" believes that mass
movements are now smaller, but that that's *ok* because the most important
thing to uphold is being a good person...even if it never gets anywhere or
benefits anyone. The young alt-light has a deeper understanding of power
operating in the shadows and, contrary to Bard's Marxian heroism, accepts
that it will not look like it did in the 60's. Unless of course you're at
Burning Man or one of the numerous regional burns quite popular among
gamers and others in the Southeast.

By the way, I use the alt-light label to denote folks who will confess
their ultimately fascist ideals on lots of drugs but who have no problem
working with a jewish woman (me) by day on tech we all understand as a
powerful pharmakon. We happily hold our own hopes about whose hands these
tools will fall into. Note that the kindness you spoke of indeed crosses
these political boundaries. And why shouldn't it? As I said, these terms
are never used. They are hardly identities for us, making cooperation a
given on the backdrop of "you've got your fantasies and I've got mine".

Please understand that for me, like many young Americans, diversity has
always been depoliticized and thus is often rightly met with the proverbial
eyeroll of moralistic education. I'm from suburban California and then
moved, first to the rural, then urban, south. The moralism is extreme off
the heels of a disavowed Christianity, and I sometimes feel here as if I'm
occupying a place so far to the left that I appear to be looping around to
the far right -- ironically, because such morals feel impossible to uphold
provided one is not white, male, privileged, etc. As I see it, without
school or jobs, socializing is a huge motivator for involvement in
activism. So, when your peers begin to morally lambast you harder than your
parents for discursive missteps, prospects seem few. Compare this to the
style of engagement of someone like Bard. At least he gave a sporty
acknowledgement of your effort.

I often feel torn between participating in overtly activist spaces, what
sometimes feels like "just being a body" and doing the not so glamorous
work no one seems willing to do. Shake hands with people in positions of
"power over". It's a choice between socializing and grant writing. This is
where identity comes in for me -- I am grateful to be a woman when I have a
minor surge of hope that it'll give me better opportunity to struggle to
fund my peers and me to live how we want: in zero-waste communities,
learning regenerative agriculture, and confidently networked enough to know
that we can provide and receive swells of support in what are obviously
impending disaster zones. Not a far cry from the pamphlet Ian just posted
in the other thread, which was promptly accused of being masculinist
alt-right literature. Sigh.

Thanks, Dan, and everyone, for your insights. I've wanted to express my
appreciation for this group for a long time. <3

On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 7:30 PM Dan S. Wang  wrote:

> Thank you, Angela.
>
> Until Ryan singled out the tasteless and revealing remark about
> Charlottesville, it hadn¹t registered for me. Why not? Because in Bard¹s
> response addressed to me, his first line about my post 

Bruce Sterling and Benjamin Bratton talk 22nd century

[Molly Hankwitz]

Dear nettimers,

Enjoyed this video of interview/convo between  Bratton and Bruce Sterling,
who covers ideas in sci fi as related to industrial design especially as
they emerged during Art Deco in US and in NY. Also, “involuntary parks” an
interesting way to consider post-natural tracts of land, uninhabitable
seams between spaces, and his very expressive description of
post-cyberspace; the two of them on why it is that 22nd century is not
being predicted now, as 21st c was all over the early 20thc sci fi, in sets
of predictions. Interesting rambles on anthroposcenic geopolitical spaces
and other trends.

enjoy cybernauts
Molly


http://youtu.be/Z0__x5SG8WY
-- 




2018-2019 - Reflections Art Program Coordinator, District 2 PTA
https://capta.org/programs-events/reflections/
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Re: Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

[Morlock Elloi]

Left doesn't abstract. Left lays fiber.

On 11/10/18, 08:06, tbyfield wrote:

to lure progressive/leftists into a rightist fantasy world


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Re: Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

[Ian Alan Paul]

Unfortunately I don't have the time to fully respond to every claim of this
larger analysis/investigation except to simply say that I think the
projection of a white male subject onto a collectively written text (which
has happened twice now) is a tired critique of militancy that isn't helpful
in the sense that it actively erases the explicitly feminist movements
which have adopted and practiced similar kinds of political thought. Of
course it's fine to be critical of militant politics, and indeed we must be
having these kinds of debates more often, but to do so on the grounds that
there is something irrevocably masculine about militancy is to simply echo
right wing talking points about gender.

Relatedly, a larger debate can be had about the role of
transparency/publicity and obscurity/secrecy in political life in relation
to accountability, security, difference, and intimacy (I would side with
Glissant here), but that's also a debate for another time and place.

After having circulated various anarchist / communist / autonomist texts on
nettime, of which I have varying degrees of affinity with as well as
substantive critiques of, it's become rather obvious that nettime is not
interested in these ideas and so I don't think it's worth anyone's time to
post them any longer.

Following the debacle with AB, to be honest I'm not sure nettime is a
productive place for meaningful political discussion at all, simply because
the actual stakes, responsibilities, and investments are all so low as to
be functionally nonexistent, leading the discussions nowhere except
abstraction and generalization, and so I think I'll refrain from starting
or participating in such political debates on nettime going forward as well.

Regardless of all of the above, I hope it's strikingly clear to everyone
how incredibly urgent our political moment is, and as such how critically
important the task of clarifying political strategies is with people who
you can actually organize and take political action with. I sincerely hope
to encounter some of you in these other times and spaces where such
discussion is actually possible.

In solidarity,
 ~i

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 11:07 AM tbyfield  This thing didn't pass the initial smell test, and after spending some
> time with it I can say: it stinks.
>
> tl;dr: It's provocateur agitprop made by Americans for Americans, and
> it's crafted to blur distinctions between left and right — more
> specifically, to lure progressive/leftists into a rightist fantasy
> world, with — I think — the intention of normalizing and fostering
> consideration and discussion of violence. In part, it's a visual
> exposition of the "but Nazis were SOCIALISTS" nonsense that's going
> around in rightist circles; but unlike that pseudo-factual claim, this
> site is intended to be obliquely persuasive. There are signs that it's
> tied to murky efforts to identify leftist college students. Whoever
> developed it has put some serious time into studying Nazi aesthetics
> and, more than that, has a subtle sense of how to evoke them without
> being obvious about it. The fact that it comes in three languages,
> English, Spanish, and French is mostly pseudo-'internationalist'
> window-dressing. There are signs of a layered, deliberate editorial
> development process that, I think, was based on psychological modeling.
> This isn't a one-off project made by a band of nutters: it's planned and
> executed with subtlety and sophistication, with *very* high production
> values. We'll see more efforts that look and sound like it.
>
> Here's why I think so:
>
> It was inevitable that we'd start to see manifestoes/etc whose
> philosophy and production values are inversely proportional: as the text
> becomes hsallower, the visuals become deeper. They'll require two kinds
> of 'reading,' textual and (for lack of a better word) visual. As the
> philosophy falls way the value of close readings diminishes, and as the
> visuals become more sophisticated the value of 'close looking'
> increases. So let's take a close look at the website Ian pulled this
> text from: https[colon]//inhabit[dot]global/ — URL mangled because I
> don't want anymore links to it in the nettime archive.
>
> The text casts future history as a 'choose your own adventure' exercise.
> It uses red-pill/blue-pill rhetoric ("there are two paths") to dress up
> a binary choice — which, tellingly, explicitly uses the language of
> A/B testing. Not very interesting, imo, except maybe as some sort of
> obligatory web-analytics gesture.
>
> Much more interesting is the visual style, which is self-consciously
> modeled in several ways on print.
>
> First image: an eagle flying above it all, against threatening clouds
> — but they're too close and detailed to be storm clouds, so maybe it's
> smoke? Hard to tell, in an almost perfect way.
>
> The color palate, which is *very* unusual in terms current trends,
> mimics faded print — and not just any print but the kind you might
> 

Campus Berlin / Re: back to normal

[Nina Temporär]

> Am 10.11.2018 um 20:58 schrieb Morlock Elloi :
> 
> GOOG has been offered Stasi building for Berlin HQ:
> 
> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrojODFXgAAMPK-.jpg 
> 
Hm, looks like some of the protesters might end up in a moral conflict because 
of this… ;)

Btw, I couldn’t find one single newspaper correctly analysing the situation.
https://www.gloreiche.de/presseclipping/google-campus/ 

(International press review)

Actually the protesters didn’t win, but google delivered a perfect media stunt:

The truth is google nevertheless pumps 14 million into renovating the building, 
remains
The main tenant, just gives the space away for 5 years, and only invited 2 
handpicked 
And google-friendly organisations to what they advertise as „social center“. 
One of them is a „google impact“ laureate, the other one gets depicted as 
social fundraiser 
Platform while not mentioning its other end of the tail with a think tank 
promoting to shift social 
Responsibility to the private sector. I guess the advertising agency 
specialising in „experiential 
Marketing“ that the fundraiser works with has recommended that sharing a space 
with an institution
Hosting 15 homeless teenagers makes for the best 3D experience for its stock 
holders.
Perfect example of social washing, not backing down.

Funny enough, though, the fact that the protesters can yet capture some kind of 
victory from this,
derives from that obviously neither journalists nor politicians are using a 
search engine for vetting 
the news google’s marketing department delivers to them :)#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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back to normal

[Morlock Elloi]

GOOG has been offered Stasi building for Berlin HQ:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrojODFXgAAMPK-.jpg

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Re: Fascist "trolls" and back on track

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi Iain,

You're right about the "deep intergenerational transmission of a culture of
resistance."

About the anecdote, just some context: the journalist was asking this
question in reminding Macron's "Make the planet great again" vs "Make the
USA great again," so the interviewed person was explaining that it's
necessary to, first, make the USA great again in order to, second, save the
planet. This is then that the the interviewee used the analogy, doing so
putting Europa in the position of a child and the USA in a parent
position... Nationalism, I think, we can call that, "right"?

And concerning the oxygen mask: let's hope it will not take too much time
to find it.

All the best,

Frederic

On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 10:45 PM Iain Boal  wrote:

> Frédéric:  You say "To be a rightist is the opposite way: me first; then,
> maybe, the world (I heard on France Info (French radio) someone in Texas
> saying: First, the USA, then the planet; "it's like parents in a plane:
> first;, they put on the oxygen mask; then, they can take care of children"-
> that's the essence of the right)."
>
> Putting on an oxygen mask is, surely, not a case of ‘me first’ but simply
> the condition of possibility of taking care of the children. I’ve rejected
> positing this kind of scenario - favored by Jesuits and other specialists
> in situation ethics - even since I was required to argue, in a ‘balloon
> debate’ at school, the case for throwing overboard one of the following:
>  the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Queen Mother or Mahatma Gandhi.
>
> In general, I don’t believe we get to the essence of human nature or
> political allegiance by studying - or imagining - people’s reactions *in
> extremis*. In any case the remarkable story of the Chamonnais under Nazi
> occupation, told by Philip Hallie in *Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The
> Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There*,
> offers a profound challenge to any glib account of the relation between
> politics and morality, and attests to the power of deep intergenerational
> transmission of a culture of resistance.
>
> Iain
>
> 
>
> Hi Dan, hi Angela,
>
> Thanks for your posts.
>
> Just an idea about morals and politics:
>
> - When the most important thing is me, myself, my identity, my job, my
> work, my resentment, my religion, etc., we are in the realm of morals and
> revenges and trials (and lawyers and money and punishments) reign;
> - I would say that politics begins when I speak about a situation that
> does not concern me first, but someone else, a stranger, a foreigner, an
> embodiment of gender or sexuality that is not *exactly* mine (it has not
> to be completely other, of course).
>
> So politics begins with an *impossible* identification, and it is this
> impossibility that is the proof that a real plurality, not a homogeneous
> community but an heterogeneous assemblage, is at stake. It is also the
> proof that I don't speak *for* but *with* someone else.
>
> I try to remember what Spivak says about the subalterns, it's something
> like: speaking instead of subalterns is maintaining the voiceless, but
> considering that their situation is their business only is also a way to
> maintain oppression. A double bind that has to be negotiated, and undone,
> in every specific situation.
>
> Another recollection: Deleuze saying that to be a leftist is to begin with
> "le lointain," the world, the horizon, what is far away, and then, only in
> a second moment, we can see how that concerns my situation. To be a
> rightist is the opposite way: me first; then, maybe, the world (I heard on
> France Info (French radio) someone in Texas saying: First, the USA, then
> the planet; "it's like parents in a plane: first;, they put on the oxygen
> mask; then, they can take care of children"- that's the essence of the
> right).
>
> In solidarity,
>
> Frédéric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 7:13 PM Angela Mitropoulos 
> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 9 Nov 2018 at 11:30, Dan S. Wang  wrote:
>>
>>> The reduction of politics to a question of good and bad people deeply
>>> afflicts radical political subcultures in the US,
>>
>>
>>  Dan,
>>
>> I find it difficult to reconcile your historiography of US activism and
>> politics with what I know about both US history and theoretical paradigms
>> more generally. I'm also a bit confused by the definition of "identity
>> politics" as a paradigm of good and bad people.
>>
>> I mean, I understand your suggestion that "identity politics" is
>> depoliticising, but I also don't understand it at all because the treatment
>> of conflicts "over resources and labour" has always been conducted through
>> more or less tacit assumptions about identity that link to entitlement. And
>> your disappearance of white men's identity politics as a tacit default or
>> "universal" has the effect of yielding a narrative that says (incorrectly
>> in my view) that "identity politics" only began when the 

Re: Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

[Justin Charles]

I agree with Brian. These folks aren’t alt-right. I can’t pin down the
politics precisely but Brian gets the Invisible Committee thing right.
They’re probably somewhere around leftcom/anarcho-communist/communization.
I’m pretty sure they’re somehow connected to the Woodbine collective in
Ridgewood, Queens. I picked up a copy of the pamphlet when I was at a
workshop there.

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 7:26 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> This pamphlet reads like an American redux of The Invisible Committee. Its
> concepts and general outlook go back to a text like "Civil War" in Tiqqun
> #2. Its production values are within reach of anyone who can afford a
> laptop, an Amazon bucket and a domain name. Its imagery is of a piece with
> the rest; and by looking around on the web you can see that it was
> originally published as an orange-tinted book, so maybe the pseudo-print
> aesthetic has a simple explanation.
>
> The idea that it's a psychologist's honey-pot crafted to catch the naive
> is far-fetched. This is anarchy. The positions codified by Tiqqun and
> popularized by the Invisible Committee have become widespread through the
> experiences of Exarchia, the ZAD, Standing Rock and many others, with the
> Palestinian resistance and the Kurdish war of independence blazing in the
> background. The elemental question to be asked is, do I make common cause
> with these authors? A corollary line of questioning would be: Is civil war
> inevitable in the capitalist democracies? Could it have positive effects?
>
> I say no on all three counts. The serious threat of civil war comes from
> the extreme right, they have both the numbers and the guns. Throw gasoline
> on that fire and it will explode in your face. Punching a Nazi has become
> legitimate, yes, and it's a good thing. The legitimacy, I mean. That makes
> it possible to gather large numbers for anti-fascist demos and to seek
> criminal prosecution against the extremists, while city governments topple
> the statues of racists and carry out investigations of police abuse, etc.
> The rule of law is definitely not all it's cracked up to be, but its
> absence would be worse. The potential of life degrades exactly to the
> extent that societies are not able to keep violence of all kinds in check.
> In militarized countries like the US it has degraded a lot, and the point
> is to reverse the process, not accelerate it.
>
> The really weird thing here is the typeface, for sure. I think that in the
> age of atrophied thought and controlled imaginations there is an
> unconscious sexualized attraction to the passions of war, symbolized by the
> aesthetics of the 1930s. In this sense I agree with the gist of Ted's
> analysis: the intention is that of normalizing a largely fantasmatic
> violence, without realizing how enabling the practice of that fantasy can
> be for the hard right.
>
> Where I agree with Ian is that we do have to discuss these things. Energy
> companies ARE expanding their operations. Cities ARE being smashed by
> hurricanes. US troops ARE camped at the border with Mexico (and possibly
> militias too). How do you respond to a dystopian reality? What is the best
> strategy? With whom can you carry it out? How can you bring it up to scale?
> These are the questions we should be answering.
>
> best, Brian
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-- 
Justin Charles
862.216.2467
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Re: Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

[Brian Holmes]

This pamphlet reads like an American redux of The Invisible Committee. Its
concepts and general outlook go back to a text like "Civil War" in Tiqqun
#2. Its production values are within reach of anyone who can afford a
laptop, an Amazon bucket and a domain name. Its imagery is of a piece with
the rest; and by looking around on the web you can see that it was
originally published as an orange-tinted book, so maybe the pseudo-print
aesthetic has a simple explanation.

The idea that it's a psychologist's honey-pot crafted to catch the naive is
far-fetched. This is anarchy. The positions codified by Tiqqun and
popularized by the Invisible Committee have become widespread through the
experiences of Exarchia, the ZAD, Standing Rock and many others, with the
Palestinian resistance and the Kurdish war of independence blazing in the
background. The elemental question to be asked is, do I make common cause
with these authors? A corollary line of questioning would be: Is civil war
inevitable in the capitalist democracies? Could it have positive effects?

I say no on all three counts. The serious threat of civil war comes from
the extreme right, they have both the numbers and the guns. Throw gasoline
on that fire and it will explode in your face. Punching a Nazi has become
legitimate, yes, and it's a good thing. The legitimacy, I mean. That makes
it possible to gather large numbers for anti-fascist demos and to seek
criminal prosecution against the extremists, while city governments topple
the statues of racists and carry out investigations of police abuse, etc.
The rule of law is definitely not all it's cracked up to be, but its
absence would be worse. The potential of life degrades exactly to the
extent that societies are not able to keep violence of all kinds in check.
In militarized countries like the US it has degraded a lot, and the point
is to reverse the process, not accelerate it.

The really weird thing here is the typeface, for sure. I think that in the
age of atrophied thought and controlled imaginations there is an
unconscious sexualized attraction to the passions of war, symbolized by the
aesthetics of the 1930s. In this sense I agree with the gist of Ted's
analysis: the intention is that of normalizing a largely fantasmatic
violence, without realizing how enabling the practice of that fantasy can
be for the hard right.

Where I agree with Ian is that we do have to discuss these things. Energy
companies ARE expanding their operations. Cities ARE being smashed by
hurricanes. US troops ARE camped at the border with Mexico (and possibly
militias too). How do you respond to a dystopian reality? What is the best
strategy? With whom can you carry it out? How can you bring it up to scale?
These are the questions we should be answering.

best, Brian
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Our revels now are ended

[David Garcia]

Our Revels Now are Ended.. Or at least they bloody should be!
(Or I blame Shakespeare)

Yesterday I heard four journos on the radio discussing the unfolding 
Brexit nightmare (I nearly said ‘drama') in the wake of the 
resignation of a junior minister whose departure would have caused no 
more than a ripple were it not for the fact that his brother is the Killer 
Clown of Brexit Boris Johnson.

Towards the end of the discussion the radio host invited the commentators 
to throw some light of the big debate on the ‘final deal’ that May
might (or might not) bring back to Parliament in the coming weeks. 
It was framed as the moment of great "parliamentary theatre”. And
you could practically feel the journos salivating at the ("marvelous darling")
drama of it all. As though the curtain will come down and the provincial
troop of poor character actors (oh we English love a ‘character’) come
on for their final bow. The audience will applaud their favorites, the lights
will come up. And we (the audience/public/citizens) will troop out
into the gathering gloom of a chilly winter evening and a long journey home
(oh yes the trains will have been cancelled again). 

After a two year long performance we will wake up to a reality that unlike 
actual theatre we will have irrevocably changed the world outside..Unless 
that is someone (who people listen to) rushes in and shouts “fire”..This
is not an exercise!

Brexit negotiator Sabine Weyan described the English negotiators as indulging
in ”magical thinking” and yes that is our national talent and our burden. In 
the last
speech of Shapspear’s last play the magician Prospero has the good sense 
renounce 
magic. He declares that “These our actors as I foretold you, were all spirits 
And are melted 
into thin air:” (like Cameron among others) 
He then talks of the great globe itself also dissolving “like this insubstantial
pageant”.. And many believe that he was eliding the Globe Theatre with 
the globe of the world. But Shakepear had the sense to recognise that 
he/Prospero had to 
set magic aside.. And if we don’t we to will learn the hard lesson that 
politics may have an 
aspect of theatre but it is NOT theatre .And that politicians may enjoy the 
brief applause of 
the ‘audience’ but be left to face the longer term anger of the “citizens” they 
sacrificed to 
their vanity and delusion.

David Garcia   

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Re: Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

[Justin Charles]

Some links to Woodbine:

https://woodbine.website/
https://twitter.com/woodbinenyc/
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/woodbine-into-the-future

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 10:06 PM Justin Charles <
justinrobertchar...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree with Brian. These folks aren’t alt-right. I can’t pin down the
> politics precisely but Brian gets the Invisible Committee thing right.
> They’re probably somewhere around leftcom/anarcho-communist/communization.
> I’m pretty sure they’re somehow connected to the Woodbine collective in
> Ridgewood, Queens. I picked up a copy of the pamphlet when I was at a
> workshop there.
>
> On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 7:26 PM Brian Holmes 
> wrote:
>
>> This pamphlet reads like an American redux of The Invisible Committee.
>> Its concepts and general outlook go back to a text like "Civil War" in
>> Tiqqun #2. Its production values are within reach of anyone who can afford
>> a laptop, an Amazon bucket and a domain name. Its imagery is of a piece
>> with the rest; and by looking around on the web you can see that it was
>> originally published as an orange-tinted book, so maybe the pseudo-print
>> aesthetic has a simple explanation.
>>
>> The idea that it's a psychologist's honey-pot crafted to catch the naive
>> is far-fetched. This is anarchy. The positions codified by Tiqqun and
>> popularized by the Invisible Committee have become widespread through the
>> experiences of Exarchia, the ZAD, Standing Rock and many others, with the
>> Palestinian resistance and the Kurdish war of independence blazing in the
>> background. The elemental question to be asked is, do I make common cause
>> with these authors? A corollary line of questioning would be: Is civil war
>> inevitable in the capitalist democracies? Could it have positive effects?
>>
>> I say no on all three counts. The serious threat of civil war comes from
>> the extreme right, they have both the numbers and the guns. Throw gasoline
>> on that fire and it will explode in your face. Punching a Nazi has become
>> legitimate, yes, and it's a good thing. The legitimacy, I mean. That makes
>> it possible to gather large numbers for anti-fascist demos and to seek
>> criminal prosecution against the extremists, while city governments topple
>> the statues of racists and carry out investigations of police abuse, etc.
>> The rule of law is definitely not all it's cracked up to be, but its
>> absence would be worse. The potential of life degrades exactly to the
>> extent that societies are not able to keep violence of all kinds in check.
>> In militarized countries like the US it has degraded a lot, and the point
>> is to reverse the process, not accelerate it.
>>
>> The really weird thing here is the typeface, for sure. I think that in
>> the age of atrophied thought and controlled imaginations there is an
>> unconscious sexualized attraction to the passions of war, symbolized by the
>> aesthetics of the 1930s. In this sense I agree with the gist of Ted's
>> analysis: the intention is that of normalizing a largely fantasmatic
>> violence, without realizing how enabling the practice of that fantasy can
>> be for the hard right.
>>
>> Where I agree with Ian is that we do have to discuss these things. Energy
>> companies ARE expanding their operations. Cities ARE being smashed by
>> hurricanes. US troops ARE camped at the border with Mexico (and possibly
>> militias too). How do you respond to a dystopian reality? What is the best
>> strategy? With whom can you carry it out? How can you bring it up to scale?
>> These are the questions we should be answering.
>>
>> best, Brian
>> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
>> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
>> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
>> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
>> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
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>
> --
> Justin Charles
> 862.216.2467
>
-- 
Justin Charles
862.216.2467
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1000 kilometers of walls built in Europe since 1990

[Geert Lovink]

Member States of the EU and Schengen Area have built around 1000 kilometres of 
walls since the 1990s to stop migration flows

Barcelona/Amsterdam, 9 November. On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin 
wall, a new report reveals that the EU and Schengen Area states have built 
around 1000 kilometres of walls, the equivalent of six Berlin Walls since the 
1990s in order to stop the arrival of forcibly displaced people into Europe”. 
From only 2 walls on European soil in the 1990s, the number of walls increased 
to 15 in 2017, with 2015 marking the sharpest increase with 7 new walls built. 
10 of 28 EU member states (Spain, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Austria, Slovenia, 
United Kingdom, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) have built walls on their 
borders for migration reasons, as well as Norway (which belongs to the Schengen 
Area)

The research in the report Building Walls. Politics of fear and security in the 
European Union, also examines the different kinds of walls constructed – 
including maritime walls and ‘virtual’ walls of surveillance that extend across 
the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean that far surpass the Berlin Wall of 
the Soviet era. The research was carried out by the Delas Centre of Studies for 
Peace and is co-published by the Transnational Institute (TNI) and the Dutch 
campaign against the Arms Trade (Stop Wapenhandel).

 The report’s analysis of 8 major EU maritime operations, 7 of which were 
carried out by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) reveals 
that “None of these European operations in the Mediterranean had the rescue of 
people as their principal goal. All the operations had the objective of 
eliminating criminality in border areas and slowing down the arrival of 
displaced peoples. Only one, Mare Nostrum, carried out by the Italian 
government, included humanitarian organisations in its fleets, and this was 
replaced by Frontex’s Triton operation with a smaller budget. “These measures 
lead to refugees and displaced peoples being treated like criminals”, says 
Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto, researcher for Delàs Center and co-author of the report.

The rise of European programmes for control and monitoring of peoples’ 
movements, and the collection and analysis of biometric data (digital 
fingerprinting, iris-scanning, facial and voice recognition systems among 
others) represent the ‘virtual’ walls examined in the report. “These measures 
have increased control and surveillance of society while turning people’s 
movements into an issue of security, treating them as threats”, says Ruiz 
Benedicto.

The report finally analyses the mental walls that have been created through 
language of fear mobilised by xenophobic and racist messages by extreme-right 
parties. They have identified migrants and refugees as threats to European 
societies which has then been used to justify the construction of physical and 
virtual walls. They seek to create a collective imaginary of a safe ‘interior’ 
and an insecure exterior.

According to the study, 10 out of 28 EU member states (Germany, Austria, 
Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Sweden) have 
significant xenophobic parties, winning more than half a million votes in 
elections since 2010. Apart from Finland, all increased their parliamentary 
representation. These parties, including when they have minority 
representation, have an undue influence on their governments’ migration 
policies. “Europe’s embrace of the extreme right is building structures and 
discourses of violence that are moving us away from a politics of defending 
human rights, of living in harmony alongside neighbours, of equality and of 
more equitable relations between countries,” says Pere Brunet, researcher at 
Centre Delàs and co-author of the publication.

 Europe’s building of walls, closing borders, increasing surveillance and 
securitisation, and increasing suspension of free flows of people is creating a 
Fortress Europe.  The stated goal is to increase security against a supposed 
threat, but in the end it is creating a more dangerous situation for the life 
and rights of people inside Europe and beyond.

“Europe’s own history shows that building walls to resolve political or social 
issues comes at an unacceptable cost for liberty and human rights. Ultimately 
it will also harm those who build them as it creates a fortress that no one 
wants to live in. Rather than building walls, Europe should be investing in 
stopping the wars and poverty that fuels migration” concludes Nick Buxton, 
researcher at the Transnational Institute and editor of the report.

Links:

https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/building_walls_executive_summary_english.pdf
 

https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/building_walls_-_full_report_-_english.pdf