Re: nettime RIP: Aaron H. Swartz (November 8, 1986 -- January 11, 2013)
I wrote this meditation and so far have shared it with no one. Thoughts Following the Death of Aaron Swartz I didn't know Aaron and I have no special knowledge of his life or death. We were only fellow travelers, but I admired him a great deal and still do. Like he surely was for many people, he was the sort of person I hoped I could be but could not. I am writing this because, first, I feel I know something of the project he believed in and, second, my own experience with suicide makes feel compelled to say something about it. Years ago, when I was a sophomore in college, my friend Nelson Pavlosky and I obtained an e-mail archive detailing flaws in voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems. We got it from another activist leader on campus, Micah White. Diebold attempted to suppress the information in the documents using claims of copyright infringement. With the help of the EFF and a law clinic at Stanford, Nelson and I a target=_blank href= http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/05/paperless-chase;successfully sued them/a. The case resulted in a finding of liability for their frivolous copyright claims against what was found to be a legitimate distribution of information in the public interest. There was a flash of attention following the lawsuit and, with the help of Professor Lessig, our Swarthmore college group sparked an organization called Students for Free Culture. I quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing and did not know how to lead anyone or even what I wanted to do with myself. I lacked Aaron's brilliance and courage; after graduation I was quickly overtaken by my own difficulties. I ended up in San Francisco working in the environmental movement. I was glad to contribute my skills despite the mundane nature of the technical work involved. I found that there are structural connections between the problem of the environmental commons and the problem of network commons. Both are threatened by a market logic of enclosure and exploitation that creates grave negative externalities and undermines the benefit of the commons to humanity as a whole. But during this time I also found myself struggling with a lot of pain, physical and otherwise, and I didn't get much done outside of my job. I regret that I have not contributed much to the Free Culture movement since the lawsuit. In contrast with my flash in the pan, Aaron was a shining light. His rare combination of technical genius, communication ability, and social perceptiveness made him a true unicorn. But he must have been fighting through depression, too, and that's one thing I want to talk about. I think it's true that people who commit suicide ultimately do so for deeply interior reasons that no other person can really understand. I was very close to my mother, but when she killed herself three years ago I knew that I could never truly know the reason. But there were still reasons I could know. She was a person driven by a desire to do right by other people. Her work as a therapist in private practice was important to her and she operated on generous terms. In the year leading up to her death, however, our family's circumstances resulted in the loss of her business. My father's job, working as an attorney for UAW union members, disappeared with the decline of the union itself. My parents lost health benefits. My mother had to try working for a hospital and found that the severe lack of resources in the world of mental health treatment made it intolerable. I know that in her final months, the inability to continue her life's work, the feeling of being thwarted, must have contributed to her distress. Her purpose in life was about helping others; in the end she could not help herself without it. Some people believe that suicide is an act of cowardice or selfishness. I reject this view absolutely and find it offensive. Neither my mother nor Aaron was a coward. Their lives reveal no selfishness. No one I've seen has said this negative stuff about Aaron and that is a good thing. The more common belief is that suicide is the product of a disease, an unfortunate result of a chemical imbalance that was not successfully treated. I believe that this view is less wrong but it is incomplete, and it does not do justice to the experience of people who commit suicide. Of course, we should not stigmatize people with depression or suicidal thinking -- we should help them any way we can, with drugs, therapy or whatever works. But depression is as much a disease of our society as it is a disease of individual people. Its increasing prevalence has to make you wonder: why now? What is wrong with this world that requires us to intervene so drastically on so many people's lives just to convince them to keep participating in family, society and the economy? In my mother's case, her depression was connected to a grinding incompatibility between her compassionate desire to help other people on a person-to-person basis and the direction
nettime Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Let us honour Aaron by continuing his work, collectively. Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (https://gist.github.com/4535453) Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The worlds entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? Youll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? Its outrageous and unacceptable. I agree, many say, but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and its perfectly legal theres nothing we can do to stop them. But there is something we can, something thats already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources students, librarians, scientists you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not indeed, morally, you cannot keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. Its called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isnt immoral its a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. Its time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, well not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge well make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Facebook's perfec spam laboratory.
Felix, I find myself heartened to see your thoughts in my inbox, and that has been the case for me for many years. But perhaps that is because I friended you on nettime many years ago. And because I have developed a respect for your capacities and your efforts, I actually do bother to try to make sense of what your write and I try to get at the more elusive truth of what you think and the still more elusive truth of what is actually going on through the lens of what you think. I'm not on Facebook in any real or active form, so I can't tell you my impression. Perhaps Keith or Ted, those who do use it, can. I can say that I see something in your second paragraph that gives me pause. I want to take issue with how that paragraph turns on turning. Simply, does social media (i.e. Facebook) turn people into avid self-promoters and greedy quantitative collectors of friends? Does it reduce people to only glad handing and appearance management? Or does it draw out and consolidate what many people want from both the social and from media? I could have fallen asleep at my Unix terminal fifteen years ago and not have missed a whit if Facebook has merely turned the naive into self promoters and image managers. Even more detrimental than a society of self promoters and most pernicious to my mind is the sense that anyone is determined by these media. It is us who fail the media, or we get the media we deserve. Or maybe we get the experience of media that we deserve. One way to constructively look at actually existing social media is as a petri dish for the consolidation of error as old William Blake used the phrase. It is that much easier for us to talk about the way a primitive group devolves into friend collecting and spam wars, and it looks even more comic and silly now than such trends looked on Usenet. And as they try to quantify and monetize, to give a price tag to social capital, they consolidate error ever more distinctly and more farcically. But today's social media is also many people's first homesteading in the noosphere and such conversations and uses as they are capable of are available to them. I imagine that new capacities for conversation are being born in individuals every day. And I also imagine that a gorging on the use of media for self aggrandizement and narcissistic satisfaction might even be salutary for those who grow weary of it. On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:05:16PM +0100, Felix Stalder wrote: I must admit, I'm thinking about joining Facebook. It's such a giant social experiment. The main direction seems to be to totally obliterate the difference between advertisement and virtually all other forms of speech. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Facebook's perfect spam laboratory
Hi Ed, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Generally, I don't think Facebook forces anything on people. It's more subtle, and it's embedded in a general, let's say, neo-liberal context. As both traditional communities and traditional hierarchies are grumbling, people are pushed, and are pulling, to create new social context for their lives. One of the tools they have at their disposal is Facebook, and whatever Facebook affects, it does so in relationship with many other forces, some of them counteracting whatever Facebook does, others amplifying it. That said, from what I can see from the outside, and from the inside in other social media networks, frames this deep human urge to find recognition and the current social pressures to build you're own networks, in very particular ways, and attaching a precise in order to jump outside one's own network of friends, and differentiating this price in relation to the importance of the person is a very crass way of framing things. Now, the fact that Facebook does this framing in a particular way, does not mean that people are simply accepting this and not finding other ways of using these powerful resources, but still, such suggestion of how to communicate, or, really, how to think, are powerful. Again, facebook is part of a very complex infrastructure and people move in and out of various elements of it as they see fit. I'm sure most activists of Anonymous have also facebook accounts, but they do not use it for their activities as Anonymous. Yes, I totally agree, media determinism is self-defeating and my post, written sloppily, might have suggested that. But that's not point I want to make. But the fact that there are many forces at play, doesn not mean that they are all equally strong or that they cancel each other out into some general neutrality. Felix On 01/15/2013 09:04 PM, Ed Phillips wrote: Felix, I find myself heartened to see your thoughts in my inbox, and that has been the case for me for many years. But perhaps that is because I friended you on nettime many years ago. And because I have developed a respect for your capacities and your efforts, I actually do bother to try to make sense of what your write and I try to get at the more elusive truth of what you think and the still more elusive truth of what is actually going on through the lens of what you think. ... -|- http://felix.openflows.com books out now: | *|Cultures Ethics of Sharing/Kulturen Ethiken des Teilens UIP 2012 *|Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa. transcript 2012 *|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studienv. 2009 *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions. ScheideggerSpiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society.Polity P. 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed Futura / Revolver, 2005 | # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Software developer outsources own job and whiles away shifts on cat videos
Software developer Bob outsources own job and whiles away shifts on cat videos Verizon's hunt for firm's mysterious hacker exposes 'top worker' at firm who let Chinese consultants log on to do his daily work guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 January 2013 18.12 GMT When a routine security check by a US-based company showed someone was repeatedly logging on to their computer system from China, it naturally sent alarm bells ringing. Hackers were suspected and telecoms experts were called in. It was only after a thorough investigation that it was revealed that the culprit was not a hacker, but Bob (not his real name), an inoffensive and quiet family man and the company's top-performing programmer, who could be seen toiling at his desk day after day and staring diligently at his monitor. For Bob had come up with the idea of outsourcing his own job – to China. So, while a Chinese consulting firm got on with the job he was paid to do, on less than one-fifth of his salary, he whiled away his working day surfing Reddit, eBay and Facebook. The extraordinary story has been revealed by Andrew Valentine, senior investigator at US telecoms firm Verizon Business, on its website, securityblog.verizonbusiness.com. Verizon's risk team was called by the unnamed critical infrastructure company last year, asking for our help in understanding some anomalous activity that they were witnessing in their VPN logs, wrote Valentine. The company had begun to allow its software developers to occasionally work from home and so had set up a fairly standard VPN [virtual private network] concentrator to facilitate remote access. When its IT security department started actively monitoring logs being generated at the VPN, What they found startled and surprised them: an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang, China! As in this connection was live when they discovered it, wrote Valentine. What was more, the developer whose credentials were being used was sitting at his desk in the office. Plainly stated, the VPN logs showed him logged in from China, yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor. Verizon's investigators discovered almost daily connections from Shenyang, and occasionally these connections spanned the entire workday. The employee, whom Valentine calls Bob, was in his mid-40s, a family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn't look twice at in an elevator. But an examination of his workstation revealed hundreds of pdf invoices from a third party contractor/developer in Shenyang. As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less than one-fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him. He had physically FedExed his security RSA token, needed to access the VPN, to China so his surrogates could log in as him. When the company checked his web-browsing history, a typical work day for Bob was: 9am, arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours, watch cat videos; 11.30am, take lunch; 1pm, eBay; 2pm-ish, Facebook updates, LinkedIn; 4.40pm–end of day, update email to management; 5pm, go home. The evidence, said Valentine, even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually. Meanwhile, his performance review showed that, for several years in a row, Bob had received excellent remarks for his codes which were clean, well written and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building, wrote Valentine. Bob no longer works for the company. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Facebook's perfec spam laboratory.
I'm not on Facebook in any real or active form, so I can't tell you my impression. Perhaps Keith or Ted, those who do use it, can. I am, many of us are I am sure, though I've been on since it was college-only. Back then the rule was, more or less, that if you hadn't met face-to-face, you weren't going to get friended. It was a college/professional network, and quickly replaced the clunky + increasingly disfunctional Friendster. This policy changed over the years, and soon I was collecting friends like lint. But then the baby pics kept coming in, I lost track of who really mattered, and the Newsfeed became an overwhelming glut of Farmville, cat photos, more baby pics, baby diaper pics (WTF!?), and inane utterings. So, over the past year I have been axing friends, cutting it down from what was 1700 to 700. My goal is 500. There are some rules to this too --- if you replace your profile shot with that of your baby, you're GONE. When you remove a friend, they still say subscribed to your public posts, kind of like Twitter. This is handy, as people can subscribe to you, rather than befriend you. So it's a bit of a platform if you want it, while keeping something of the core conversation private (well, private lite, given that FB reads it all). As a semi-disfunctional media artist / writer, I receive friend requests from what are undoubtedly interesting artist + writer + creative types, but I don't know them and they don't know me, and I no longer think FB is the place for that. If someone messages me, and we start writing to each other, sure, online friendships are possible. But most of the time I write new friends and they never reply back. So I don't add them. I don't need to know everyone. I don't feel the drive to increase these numbers. I feel the opposite drive, in fact: to whittle them down, see how low I can go. With around ~700 friends --- many of whom I have known for years, many very, very well --- I appreciate the tight-knit exchanges and discussions on posts. There is some substantial debate going on through my Newsfeed on good issues that are local to where I live. My Events listings are becoming relevant and somewhat manageable again. I post no pics. So there's many ways to engage with FB. For my community of friends, many of whom are ex-ravers and with whom I was very active with on artistic projects and political movements 10 years ago, FB is the sole means of communication among us. By whittling down my friends, it's become more like a mailing list. The multimedia aspect makes it richer. By contrast, my blog and blogging in general has died; the walled garden is now a comfortable prison, I guess. A side observation --- a millenial friend of mine (he's in his mid 20s) is not on Facebook. He recently asked me, Do people still use that?. That blew my mind. Investors take note. He is very active on Twitter, however, and uses it for conversations in a way which I have not yet managed to get going at the same level, mainly because I am continually frustrated by 140 chars. Point being, Facebook is already uncool with certain generations. With highschoolers it is undoubtedly love/hate. After being harassed digitally off the playground, one can easily imagine a FB backlash, as the young'uns seek to disconnect from their hate circles. In short, it is entirely possible that FB will fizzle out in the end. Nothing stays cool forever. best / tobias. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Facebook's perfec spam laboratory.
thought this might give some inside on FB users: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJeNUv_qbwUfeature=youtu.be # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
