Re: scaling the humiliation

[morlockelloi]

Rampant hypocrisy aside, it's interesting to note that regulating MAGAf 
would result in the almost exact "chinese" model as it is today. Which 
may explain the rabid opposition to it from the surveillance-industrial 
complex.


For those that didn't pay attention, what Huawei is accused of was never 
confirmed, but collusion between Cisco (our "good guys") and the 
government was confirmed:


https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/internet-privacy/snowden--the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.htm
https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/21/nsa-technique-for-cisco-spying/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwald-nsa-tampers-us-internet-routers-snowden

The whole thing boils down to data harvesting and channeling rights. 
Like water rights, they will shape the future.



On 2/14/19, 14:21, Roel Roscam Abbing wrote:

The global internet is splitting in two.

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Catalonia and mainstream opinion

[morlockelloi]

Is there some small country Spain can engage in a war with? That would 
work for all parties involved.


On 10/6/17, 10:08, chml wrote:

So...let's say, this is like House of Cards, but real. It's disgusting,
but it is like this. This situation led to an unprecedented polarization
in wich (like in


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: The 'Jake' Appelbaum case, or the rise and fall of

[morlockelloi]

The point is that it does take place, and that it places severe 
constraints on the organization that suffers from it. Whether the 
celeb-status is sought as a reward or loathed does not make any 
difference. Celeb-status creates a vulnerable focus point for the 
organization.

In today's technical and political circumstances, it's amazing that 
makers of anonymity and security systems still group in identifiable 
organizations with obvious 'leaders'. There are existing technologies 
that can provide collaborative publishing of Tor.

It is becoming obvious (from the recent Fear and Loathing in Tor 
Community threads) that knowing someone personally ('trust') means jack 
shit.

"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the 
credit." - H. Truman


> Where does this "becoming-celebrity" actually take place, and where is it 
> played
> out? I guess it must have something to do with passing a certain threshold of

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

How to Herd your Critics into Fake Communities and Waste their Time

[morlockelloi]

Kudos to JY for discovering this, an unwritten mission statement for
nettime :)

https://consentfactory.org/2016/05/01/how-to-herd-your-potential-critics-into-fake-communities-and-waste-their-time-part-1/


The full text is included below, without appropriate permissions. 
Moderators, moderate if you must.


-


(Part 1)

OK, this is one of our absolute favorites here at the Consent Factory.
For our money, in terms of distracting and rendering harmless
any serious critics of your corporate-controlled global empire,
this is definitely one you want to go with. Herding critics into
fake communities and wasting their time is not only essential to
maintaining your full spectrum dominance of virtually every aspect of
people’s lives, but, given the technology available these days, once
you get the infrastructure in place, it pretty much runs itself.

Now we’ve divided this into three parts, partly to make it easier
to follow, but mostly to hook you into coming back to our blog over
the next couple weeks to read the second and third installments
and increase our click count. In Part One (i.e. this part), we’ll
briefly discuss the origins of herding people into fake communities
and wasting their time and quickly review why this is an absolutely
essential component of any modern capitalist system. Then, in Parts
Two and Three, we’ll take a look the two main models that have
revolutionized this growing industry during the last twenty years or
so: (1) the Social Network; and (2) the Comments Section. So let’s get
started …

It is generally acknowledged among the disinformation community that
herding critics into fake communities and wasting their time became
a necessity somewhere around the middle of the 18th Century, as the
transition to modern industrial Capitalism was taking place, and
the former mostly agrarian workforce was being transformed into an
urban industrial workforce, and people were beginning to realize
how miserable and pointless their lives were becoming, and how
completely exploited and screwed they were. Without getting into
all the specifics — which would lead us off on a series of tangents
that would get us lost in all kinds of historical and philosophical
arguments we don’t want to have to speak to — it is important to
note that this transition to industrial Capitalism (whereby the
masses of former peasants, artisans, craftspersons, and the like
were forced to leave the countryside and move into overcrowded and
disease-ridden cities in order to work ten hours a day seven days a
week at soul-crushingly monotonous jobs in the factories that were
springing up everywhere) was accompanied by a sudden and inexplicable
interest among elements of both the intellectual and working classes
in certain “socialist” and “democratic” ideas — ideas that would
shortly thereafter lead to the formation of the first modern trade
unions, and on to Luddism, and Chartism, and Marxism, and ultimately
to the scourge of Communism, which President Ronald Reagan finally
eradicated at the end of the 20th Century … except for China, which
doesn’t really count.

But let’s not get side-tracked by the Evil of Communism just yet … the
point is, right around the same time that industrial Capitalism begins
replacing aristocratic/oligarchical Despotism as the preeminent power
structure, and improving everyone’s standard of living by transforming
them from de facto agrarian slaves into workers/consumers, the need to
start herding certain people into fake communities and wasting their
time arises. This is no mere coincidence, of course, but rather, is
one of the many structural adjustments required when navigating the
transition from a formerly despotic configuration of power to a modern
capitalist one.

Simply put, once you do away with Despotism (i.e. kill all the kings
and queens and their families, and as much of the landed aristocracy
as necessary, which you need to do in order to get the whole
Capitalism thing going), and adopt all kinds of pseudo-democratic
social structures (which you also need to do in order to trick people
into believing they’re free) … well, you can’t just beat and murder
people into submission anymore (or not on a regular basis anyway).
No, you need to start using much subtler means of controlling and
manipulating them.

Using the Power of the Media to Subtly Manipulate People (which we
introduced earlier, and will revisit later) is one of the essential
ways to do this; however, given the level of sophistication of the
public these days, it is not enough in itself. Unfortunately, no
matter how many people your media operatives are able to successfully
manipulate, deceive and/or confuse into a state of harmless
resignation, there is always going to be a small but significant
minority of people who recognize what you’re doing, and feel compelled
to point it out to others. These are the potential critics you want
to herd into fake communities and waste as much of their time as
possible.

Now we realize 

Re: web networks and the assault on our critical capacities

[morlockelloi]

We can add this (pretty good) description of the dismal state of
affairs to the growing collection. The previous ones did not do us
much good, but one can always hope.

It seems that at the core of these issues are two very different time
constants.

One is very short, and describes the time between convenient/compliant
action and immediate gratification. Ease of login, ease of contact,
etc. We are talking seconds here. The other is very long, perhaps
on the order of a decade, and relates to the negative effects of
the pervasive communication monoculture: loss of individual power,
job prospects, cost of living, mating opportunities. It is safe to
say that most will never even perceive the existence of the latter
relationship, that these negative effects are even caused by something
they routinely do today (critical thinking will not be imposed on
anyone.)

Perhaps a possible way of dealing with this is to shorten the second
constant. Instead of begging governments and corporations not to
do whatever, the right course of action might be to help them and
democratize the abuse, speed it up, make available to everyone, and
make the effects obvious. In a way this is already happening by
publishing concentrated data caches, but we need much more.



#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: If you talk to bots, you're talking to their bosses

[morlockelloi]

There is a persistent mythology emerging from the Bitcoin worshipers, 
that machines running smart contracts can be 'independent legal entities'.


I have heard it multiple times at various public occasions: someone has 
set up a machine as a legal entity, with hands-off approach after 
programming, and that machine is running transactions on its own, while 
the owner (now just a shareholder) has legally nothing to do with it, 
shielded from its actions through the act of incorporation.


This is of course silly, for the time being. But these people (assorted 
co-founders, cube slaves and marketeers from BC-centric startups) appear 
to really believe it, or at least say so.


The notion that machines are people is taking hold (not so new - "but 
the computer says so" justification is at least 20 years old.) How long 
will this be silly remains to be seen. The step from 'corporations are 
people' to 'machines are people' might be a small one.





#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: artfcity: Turbulence.org Going Offline

[morlockelloi]

One interesting aspect about stylometry and its counter-measures, is 
that it appears possible to use counter-measures as the noise channel 
for steganography.


In other words, instead of positioning oneself randomly within the crowd 
for each text (which is what, for example, Anonymouth does), that 
positioning may carry the signal. The topic of the text can be used as a 
key to find related pieces (ie. discussion about Californian Ideology).


My wild guess is that, with 100 authors, and (Anonymouth-specific) 
mapping space resolution, it may be possible to inject 5-10 error-free 
encrypted message bytes per few kilobytes of text. Because each 
background of author-space is specific (ie. nettime authors are 
different from respondents to some blog), detecting this may be harder 
than detecting image-based steganography.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: artfcity: Turbulence.org Going Offline.

[morlockelloi]

My limited exposure to Anonymouth was in 2013 - presentation, brief 
contact with Rachel Greenstadt, look at the published code, and few 
experiments. The conclusion was that stylometry works and it is very 
hard, if not impossible, to counter it without help of machines. Style 
goes deep. As a trivial example, see the below nonsense and try to guess 
from which nettime contributor's output was it synthesized.


It is obviously true that anonymity implies conformity, and may have 
long term conforming effects. Even 'going to a crowded public place' 
carries some conformity with it - one gets to be exposed to people one 
may not really want to be influenced by, but will, for the sake of 
anonymity. Using Tor also enforces conformity: going through the moves 
to install, work around blocks, etc. There is more diversity in the 
e-mail providers than in the anonymity providers, where the only option 
is controlled and influenced by a grand total of 4-5 people. I don't 
think that stylometry counter-measures are any more sinister than these. 
It's just a technique, like using public WiFi in a cafe, to position 
oneself in the crowd, a way of How Not to be Seen(tm).


The deeper question is: is easy availability of anonymizing technology 
serving as a neutering agent, providing safe (and ineffective) harbor, 
so no one has to risk the Blow on the Head, and changing the nature of 
the discourse for the worse? Probably yes. It's unclear if there are 
positive long term effects of the easily available anonymity. Which may 
explain sources of Tor funding.




 A SAMPLE 

Like man, wow, good to understand Fascism.  At a rediscovery of
identity control and the first draft was exemplified by them, and
consciously to a few bunch noted last hundred years, in the best
title of Deleuze.  As the user and thrive through mailing list which
is a longish text.  But at least near future.  That none other
culture again, very beautiful dreams of confidence, you have their
sociological attempt to the best cases will be called three Crises;
is a variety of continental and his article the included.  Society.
Well, what I the footnotes to the Nineties and so striking and
within the part of Facebook the global level!

Now everything depends (on what is kind of course The world time
people in the central theses of this is on a lot to see one point I
a crucial one of dissent in a new inter state I do something very
much more widely).  That one of flexible accumulation, which refers
seem to be a radically journalistic artefact that I the emergent
elite of Europe, the Radical times.  In a This possibility, Internet
merely stands to evolve in Europe, and the ambiguities of any
university (but there).

It came to increasingly reflect this kind of infrastructure building
accompanied by Deleuze.

The wings of a regional patchwork the response to have found very
essence, or a crucial intervention so as a much more deeply, about
the infamous Biennial, this kind of our boys are recounted in the
public sectors by a collaborative project together, they have not
new: forms and Japan to national culture again, very well what is
likely to me define its second section Noughties.  Here is in
overcoming the use vicariously, through a difference though, from
the WikiLeaks Files. For a repeat offender in the really is a global
economic crises, is archived, a veritable political economic system.

A variety of direct control.  Has been an impressive and
collaboration?

You.  Because of the local assertion of the collapse of capture and
postindustrial landscapes, or what once a difference though (from
the Technopolitics through mailing list wide debates as though from
a global populations but in the political engagement that all or at
other people's lolcats or war are recounted In June of China have
yet to live in the spread of the emergence of neoliberal policies
and Seventies and depicts the first parts of Facebook which seemed
to others: that great to each other culture was passed on The use
vicariously through all on the end of movement of the century makes
that I mean of these systems).

Aka the antiwar protests to post, do find no website of this leads
to think a few years now however.  The things I recall, was trying
to face to make another Of confidence, you know about, it is.  For
example all this process, and buried compulsions, but on.  Don't am
totally ignorant about this obscure marriage of driverless cars
through Wired, But a global populations but the contemporary
possibilities for Us knowing it.  I'm a go at a lot to be not just
states and undoubtedly across Europe and in the BRICS expansion:
refers seem to know invent, commercialize and deadheads who its
counterattack.

We've had to coordinate, say all the second part of is a book of
resistance in consciously to a collaborative project was a
presidential project on a constant stream of chaos which I do I will
collaborate.

First order cybernetics, in the other culture Cultural center.

Re: alex van der bellen wins austrian presidentials!!!

[morlockelloi]

These are connected, however unpalatable it sounds. The single 
prevailing reason for the mass people movements, voluntary or 
involuntary, in the last few centuries, since governments had solid 
means of closing the borders, is to lower the local wages and increase 
profits, thus the local workforce (with decent wages and comfortable 
middleclass lifestyle) did vanish, but it is a consequence, not the cause.


With upcoming automation the population import is becoming a moot point, 
so the immigration will eventually stop. Industries that are still 
supporting immigration are the ones on the losing side.


On 5/24/16, 0:02, Patrice Riemens wrote:


culture". The loss of 'our own culture' is probably a moot point, but
the loss of homes and jobs is very real, and massive. It is being
deflected into a false concern about immigration and refugees, an issue
much less pressing in absolute terms. But as long as 'the establishment'
refuses to address substantially the homes and jobs issue, it is
complicit, and very directly and deliberatly so, to the raising of false
flags  by extreme right politicians.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: artfcity: Turbulence.org Going Offline

[morlockelloi]

That's what I had in mind - if the search results/curated lists in 
themselves have tangible value, then there has to be some mechanism that 
prevents those lists from simply being published for free (after the 
initial sale.) In this case it seems to be the legal aspect - no one 
wants to be found in possession of these.


So now we have the situation that the digitized content can be monetized 
either if (1) it is distributed by the one of 5-6 monopolies, or (2) it 
is illegal. There is little in-between.


As majority authors are not tapped by monopolies for sourcing, I wonder 
if they could somehow illegalize their work to make it sellable? In 
other words, is there a way to turn the writing and other creative acts 
into cocaine, from the legal viewpoint?


I'll skip the list deal :)

BTW, note that one way to really 'write in private' is to use hardware 
bought for cash while not carrying cellphone, connect to the network in 
a crowded public space, without carrying cellphone or credit cards, send 
one message through the Tor relays, from one throwaway mail account to 
another, and then pulverize the hardware. Gets expensive after a while. 
Postal letters are a bit simpler, just don't use nearby mail boxes, wear 
bunny suit when handling paper, and print with a single-use printer paid 
for by cash while not carrying a cellphone. Of course, in all cases the 
message must be made resistant to stylometry, so use something like 
Anonymouth on your original input (https://github.com/psal/jstylo)




On 5/24/16, 1:38, Jaromil wrote:


On Mon, 23 May 2016, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote:


Is there evidence for this? Any existing service where users pay
curators for links/search results?


you'll have to take my word for this, because I'm not going to send
links: these places are mostly deemed as "illegal", but the thing is
BIG and underground especially after the demise of piratebay.

if you REALLY want a list then write me in private, but beware I'll
require a trade for this information and finally get to know your real
identity! :^)

ciao


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: artfcity: Turbulence.org Going Offline

[morlockelloi]

Is there evidence for this? Any existing service where users pay 
curators for links/search results?



On 5/22/16, 23:48, Jaromil wrote:


but then why not simply release the archive
in a torrent file? nowadays curatorial activities
take place also within private trackers and there
more people are keen to even payfor it.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Live Your Models

[morlockelloi]

Maybe I'm missing something, but exchanging some gold (or BC) for some 
oranges or sex does not create a debt relationship. It's unclear how 
possessing an asset implies debt.


Debt can exist without any obvious exchange medium in sight. You can owe 
somebody oranges, sex, or diamonds. Some of these will depreciate 
(oranges and sex), some won't. Some debt enforcement modes will require 
a vig from the debtor, so if you owe 10 oranges today, it will be 20 
oranges next month. Or 2000 if you are unlucky. Rotting (inflation) of 
oranges is of now interest to your creditor, as he will send Cheech to 
collect. Cheech always delivers.


Viewing debt as a currency feature does not make sense, as it 
misrepresents the social phenomenon as a technical one.


Storing and saving value in instruments that local fiefdoms cannot 
snatch has definite benefits. If the mechanism to move this value is 
immune to the local fiefdom reach, that also has definite benefits. The 
argument that this can be used to evade fair (or less fair) taxation is 
valid and needs addressing. But the argument that inherent 
non-inflationary nature of the exchange instrument is evil is not.


It is naive to assume that "I am lending you 10 BC, and you must repay 
me 10 BC" is a technical issue; it is not. It's a convenient sleight of 
hand to automatically ascribe technical features of the currency and 
crude numbers to the social contract. There is nothing natural or given 
that the debt of 10 BC today is also debt 10 BC next year. Following 
that logic, borrowing an acorn requires repayment by 2000lb oak tree in 
few years. For 10 BC (today) to be equal 10 BC in one year, the creditor 
needs Cheech. If Cheech works for you, that debt may be equal to 3 BC 
next year.


The BC cat is out of the bag. Sooner or later it will be possible to 
freely move and hide non-inflationary exchange value, forever, and it's 
unlikely that anything can stop that. Cash is making a comeback. What is 
needed are mechanisms to keep the society from devolving into your 
favorite dystopia, without counting on turning this wheel back. It may 
mean elaborate non-monetary taxation and eventual abandonment of the 
very concept of money (after all, Star Trek was based on that.) But 
stopping the free currency movement and storage is not on the menu.



On 5/4/16, 13:55, Florian Cramer wrote:


But gold has hardly any intrinsic value - even less so than in the past
as it is no longer the best material to fill dental cavities - so it
boils down to a token of exchange, and hence for assets and debt.
Otherwise, you're just sitting on a pile of metal.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Live Your Models

[morlockelloi]

If the currency is inflationary, then it's useless as a vehicle for 
savings, leaving only local-force-monopoly-backed notion of "property" 
as the savings method. If it is not global, it's useless outside the 
local fiefdom and subject to whims of the local government.


The above has been observed in vivo: in pre-fall East Europe (and many 
other countries today), local currency was good for paying monthly 
expenses; all savings was in 'hard' currency, although this was 
frequently illegal. Sometimes the amount of savings was $50, sometimes 
much more, but it was ubiquitous among the poor and the rich.


Good part of population would have a problem with touting inflationary 
local currency as a cure for neoliberalism. It's not, as 1960s hippie 
communes were not cure for anything, especially not 'the system'.


Debt is a separate phenomenon, and not necessarily related to non-fiat 
currencies, possession does not automatically imply debt, eg. if I 
invest my time into digging gold, and find some, who owes me? Debt is 
predicated on enforcement capabilities, without which it does not exist 
(without enforcement, there is no debt, but there is gold.)


On 5/3/16, 13:31, Florian Cramer wrote:


Since mining of Bitcoins is artificially capped (when the predetermined
number of Bitcoins has been reached and can no longer be extended),
deflation is hard-wired into Bitcoin. If Bitcoin was the global
currency, and some people would have assets in Bitcoin while others
would have debt in it (since on a macroeconomic scale, every monetary
asset of someone is someone else's debt), automatic deflation would mean
that the richer get automatically richer while the poorer are drowned in
automatically increasing, never repayable debt.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[morlockelloi]

The apparent tremendous complexity of the situation stems from the 
inability to see the obvious and futile attempts to apply defunct 
notions and theories to the present.


In natural sciences and mathematics, a standard way of looking for 
explanation is to look at the extreme states, boundary conditions: what 
if technology retires all - or 99.9% - of the human work?


The end game then is that a small number of families controls 
'production' of everything on the planet, perhaps including O2 
allowances. What is the 'market' then, and where is all the bs around 
it? No one needs your work at all. You can't 'buy' anything. Without 
need for work there is no need for market. The 0.1% is perfectly 
happy without your participation in anything whatsoever (except maybe as 
a game in reservation ... "get that fatty over there".) Even sex 
becomes, finally, free. Nothing much is being produced, the planet is 
clean and green, and you get shot by a drone if you step out of the 
reservation.


Large number of humans already live in such world (they don't frequent 
nettime.) We are also getting there - most of the investments go into 
creating unemployment: self-driving, self-fucking, self-reporting 
things. Remote-operated is a transition phase, you will fondly remember 
'militarized police' when the 'police' part gets factored out.


It's hard to find anything that prevents the above scenario. Most 
'employed' are already blindly following scripts on their screens, they 
are like the compulsory 'human driver' in the self-driving cars. The 
millions of technocrati believe that they are safe as programmers and 
maintainers (just saw a poll that 50% of twentysomethings want to work 
for two major corporations), but that's just underestimating the 
technology. There will be a need for few thousands, maybe.


The 'market' will not thrive even within reservations. That's a fantasy, 
as Zizek's rants that future social models will arise from Brazilian 
favelas.




prices. The volume of exchanges along with price discovery and the
gradual emergence of a "just price" for each type of product tells the
state not only what people value, but also, what is the most efficient
way to produce what people value. Every move of the state that furthers
the cheaper production of whatever people value is therefore legitimate
in neoliberal politics and foundational for neoliberal society. That is
the foundation of the ordoliberal state through a pure reference to the
market. So, why did Germany veer away from being a society oriented
toward labor unions, social welfare and complete inclusion, to gradually
become the society that promotes unequual competition and savage


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[morlockelloi]

To enumerate what we know about the unknowable future shifts:

1. The change will not happen by violently interacting with keyboards, 
touchscreens and displays;


2. The change will not happen by violently interacting with others on 
the street.


What envisionable venues does this leave available? Somebody or 
something must convince the keepers of the current physicality dynamics 
(where food, fuel, energy, bullets, chains, sex, etc. go or do not go) 
to change their ways and have these go somewhere else.


Few come to mind:

A. Technologically empowered individual (everyone is Batman). One makes 
robots and drones (or designer viruses or mind control appliances) in 
the closet (along with required chips, chemicals and enclosures), and 
these go out to intimidate/eliminate/baptize targets.


B. New religion/philosophy/ideology (wetware virus). It's so good, that 
after few minutes of exposure to it (several kilobytes of text, imagery 
or few megabytes of video/audio), subjects permanently change their ways 
and are capable of sustainably converting others.


C. Alien intervention. (Mars Attacks!)

The current efforts are evenly split between A (hackers, cypherpunk 
leftovers) and B (tenured scribblers, FSMers and establishment rebels.) 
C is sadly neglected.



On 4/17/16 1:55 , Alexander Bard wrote:


Which is why the next revolution will not happen in the streets (we need to
get over Paris 1789 and even more so Paris 1968 as our model) both in our
minds and our digital environments once this new ideology of digital-global
solidarity has become available to us. And to get there we need both
technology, ideology and a good dose of destinal luck. A return to the
depth of our timeless psyches in the current chaos (humans do not change,
technology does, and ideology must change with it).


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[morlockelloi]

The widespread imposed or voluntarily adopted anonymous (or not so 
anonymous) ideologies, that facilitate the demise of their believers, 
are hardly a new phenomenon. Expecting that naming them is going to 
change anything is a fallacy.


The current predicament is exactly this - assumption that changing mode 
of thinking is a way out. Modern rebel economists, activists, 
whistleblowers, all of them cement this predicament, basically that "the 
truth will set you free" (and that shit is hardly new - John 8:32). They 
are starting to sound like freakin' hippies.


It doesn't work. We've seen the truth and we are not free. Get over it.

Defeating an ideology takes another ideology that produces better 
weaponry. Historically speaking, the new winner is generally less 
aesthetically pleasing than the defeated one. Expect nostalgia for 
neoliberalism.



On 4/16/16 17:27 , nettime's_encyclopedist_ wrote:


Neoliberalism -- the ideology at the root of all our problems


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Review: Michel Bauwens and The Promise Of The

[morlockelloi]

If "community" means 100-200 people, the size of clan/tribe that 
persisted long enough for brains to get hardwired to it, there is no 
need for any technology. Everyone knows everything that needs to be 
known about everyone.


Beyond this size, some technology is required, and today that means 
silicon, transistors, "devices", radios, PHYs, wired/fibered 
infrastructure. All of this is highly centralized today (there are fewer 
than 10 semi fabs on the planet that matter, for example.) A clan 
"owning" this today is a pipe dream.


The only realistic direction to re-enable the brain-circuit-friendly 
community system is to have expertise and means to make chips in every 
single community. The probability of this happening is kind of low, though.


The choices are stark, but that is not rationale to use lipstick on this 
pig.



On 4/13/16, 3:33, Jaromil wrote:


There are qualitative solutions to the problem and they cannot be
automated, but only aided, adopted, appropriated and run by
communities, bottom-up. They are also based on ownership of production
means and political decision-making processes that include "workers".


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers

[morlockelloi]

Maybe I'm missing something, but the mere notion that something that 
3-400 people have access to (more likely thousands, with associates, 
managers, etc.) is a tight secret is ... mind boggling. And then when 
the logistics of distributing all these terabytes to hundreds of 
recipients, months ago, without a single accident, is considered, this 
becomes a virtually impossible proposition.


On top of this, it appears that each entity got a custom subset - a 
major editing task.


And none of these thousands - not a single one - sent a copy to 
Wikileaks? Give me a break.


What we have here is a totally unrealistic interpretation of the 
reality. But then it was only a matter of time when the 'anonymous 
leaks' strategy will get weaponized and incorporated into media business 
model.




has a full copy of the entire data set, as became known yesterday,
apart from the 370 investigative journalists that have worked on the
case:


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Richard Stallman: Eradicate Facebook!

[morlockelloi]

It is hard on Android and very hard on iOS to have a handset receive 
unsolicited messages, which is the only way to avoid centralized 
servers, even the rendezvous-only ones. This is by design. Tor is not 
the solution because the number of exit nodes is many orders of 
magnitude lower than the number of popular social operator users, so it 
is effectively centralized.


The solution is not going to be along the lines of some privacy-loving 
entity setting up a privacy-loving servers and distributing 
privacy-loving apps - that's the dead end, as we have seen. It is harder 
- what is needed is ubiquitous serverless p2p connectivity between 
consumer devices. Very hard (if you think getting out decent crypto is 
hard, you haven't seen hard.) But it's the only viable direction which 
is not a total waste of time and a temporary distraction. This is not a 
new concept - it has already been mentioned that public needs to own and 
operate the basic infrastructure.


The main obstacle is that the current dead-end infrastructure acts as a 
perfect honeypot and sinks millions of developer-hours. Maybe the way to 
start dealing with this problem is to tell anyone who designs a new 
server-assisted app to fuck off. The real solution, as usual, is 
ideological, and the technology will follow.


This is a huge amount of work, uphill and against the wind, and there is 
no way around it.





I think we need distributed social networking, with nodes that act
like a Facebook on your own device but only interact through a network
of agnostic relays, Tor style, with zero external authorities. Not even
"trusted" people running some pods or other overinformed server nodes.
That's what I'm working on since 2010.

Before that I tried decentralization and federation, but realized that
it was a dead-end street. I wished everyone had learned that lesson as
me, instead many still preach decentralization and federation.
Probably also some lobbyists, since it is the best way to ensure
that Facebook and Google aren't challenged at all.



#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Richard Stallman: Eradicate Facebook!

[morlockelloi]

Open or closed software doesn't make much difference, it's all about
data. An operator cannot 'open' data (like in letting everyone know
what the data and its derivatives are) without factoring itself out
of the business. On the other hand, there are (yet) no signs that
consumers will stop feeding operators data in exchange for convenience
and simulated intimacy.

The situation is somewhat similar to smoking - bad stuff comes
after decades, if ever. Perhaps repurposed ads from anti-smoking
campaigns may help. Each handset should be labeled in bold type with
slogans like "Using this device can damage your employment and health
insurance prospects", "Data transferred with this device can turn you
into a prosecutable criminal in less than 5 years", "Usage of this
phone can raise your mortgage interest" etc.


I realize that this is a short interview, but I almost wish Stallman
hadn't mentioned free software (his particular obsession, obviously,
and a reasonable one), which could overshadow some much more basic
concerns with FB. Using proprietary software is one thing--maybe
it's inherently evil, maybe not--and collecting data on people's
every movement is another. It's conceivable, just slightly, that
Facebook could open-source all their software and not change their
behavior a bit. If someone really wants to smother you, they can
probably smother you with


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Richard Stallman: Eradicate Facebook!

[morlockelloi]

Open or closed software doesn't make much difference, it's all about
data. An operator cannot 'open' data (like in letting everyone know
what the data and its derivatives are) without factoring itself out
of the business. On the other hand, there are (yet) no signs that
consumers will stop feeding operators data in exchange for convenience
and simulated intimacy.

The situation is somewhat similar to smoking - bad stuff comes
after decades, if ever. Perhaps repurposed ads from anti-smoking
campaigns may help. Each handset should be labeled in bold type with
slogans like "Using this device can damage your employment and health
insurance prospects", "Data transferred with this device can turn you
into a prosecutable criminal in less than 5 years", "Usage of this
phone can raise your mortgage interest" etc.


I realize that this is a short interview, but I almost wish Stallman
hadn't mentioned free software (his particular obsession, obviously,
and a reasonable one), which could overshadow some much more basic
concerns with FB. Using proprietary software is one thing--maybe
it's inherently evil, maybe not--and collecting data on people's
every movement is another. It's conceivable, just slightly, that
Facebook could open-source all their software and not change their
behavior a bit. If someone really wants to smother you, they can
probably smother you with




#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Fwd: Re: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance

[morlockelloi]

The question is, does it matter at all?

The degree of mind-engagement is irrelevant if not properly coupled with 
feet-engagement.


In other words, whatever you do with your fingers touching plastic 
surfaces and your eyes scanning electronic screens, your brain 
constructing fantastic models of could-be worlds, regurgitating those 
worlds with other plastic-touchers, may be a totally irrelevant 
honey-trap, if it does not result in your feet taking you somewhere and 
eventually confronting men with guns. And it does not appear to result 
in that at all.


While it may be hard to accept, no one in position of control gives a 
flying fuck about these ideas - that's why you can do these idea 
exercises ad nauseam and publish all you want. The feet coupling is 
lost. The only way to regain such coupling may be a forced abstaining 
from plastic-touching.



At the same time, there is a whole generation of people experimenting
with new social values and forms of being together, centering
arounf networked collaboration and complex systems thinking,
all-based on digital technology but extending from experimentation


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: To distribute somethings while keeping others central?

[morlockelloi]

It should be noted that blockchain/bitcoin are inherently fascist - they 
blindly enforce the majority rule. Plus, this majority is not really the 
majority, as it is represented by less than ten (9, I think) privately 
operated minting outfits.


Technology is the message.


What is funny about bitcoin promotion argument though is it is based
on Austrian economists' ideology; complaining about the role of state
in control of money and corruptness that brought: as if it was not the
Wall Street one emerged from very same ideologies that defended
private or liberalized financial and monetary policies and 'autonomous
polity' from the state?!


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: High Country News > Hal Herring > Can we make sense

[morlockelloi]

Looks like another in the series of endless surprises that precarity is 
not just for the poor. Tune in 'first they came for ...',

>Can we make sense of the Malheur mess?

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch

[morlockelloi]

> I think you are overrating technologies of control, neither the Stasi
> nor the KGB could save their systems from collapse (though the ruined
> a lot of lives).

I think that the conclusion that nothing really changed and that power 
grabbing and re-grabbing mechanisms are the same as they were (and will 
stay the same in indefinite future) is grossly wrong (as is the notion 
of immutability of 'human nature'.)


This school of thought is essentially waiting for the next successful 
'organizing of masses and revolt' to make things right again. The 
organizers have just to say the right words and tweets, publish the 
right pamphlet, which somehow they missed to figure out so far (in all 
previous failed revolts), but they will find the magic words eventually, 
and then the Revolution will happen. It's all about words.


It is going to be a long wait, as it's a classic example of Einstein's 
Insanity.



It really depends how you think repression works these days. If you
think that it's about repressing particularly dangerous individuals,
then both encryption (when they can be dealt with individually) and
large numbers (when they cannot be dealt with individually because you
cannot imprison, or shoot, a very large number of people) help. If you
think repression works by influencing the patterns of how people think
(e.g. creating an environment that incentivizes people to put all
emphasis on maximizing the number of useless "friends", or competing
in a rat race of faking their own happiness), then encryption won't
help much, but nothing much will.


Neither of the above. Targeted repressing or influencing is not 
relevant, it's too expensive and ineffective. That's smokescreen and 
useful for PR.


It works by inferring correct forecasts, from exposed communications, 
about group behaviours, before groups themselves understand them. The 
rest is easy. The biggest obstacle is that this is hard to understand by 
those who haven't been exposed to the data. It's not intuitive - it's 
statistics and number crunching, it's a new phenomenon. The way around 
is to look for secondary tell-tale signs, for example what's legal and 
what's illegal, what goes into standards, etc.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch

[morlockelloi]

The trend(s) that Europe is seeing itself dragged to are not result of 
'wrong' thinking and misbehaviour of supposedly powerful masses. They 
are the result of material circumstances, and no amount of magical 
(group)thinking will change that.


Material circumstances are mostly related to technologies of social 
control, and these can not be handled by 'not being afraid' and 
stampeding, which is what current proposals boil down to. That's like 
not being afraid of bullets - looks great the first 5 minutes. What can 
make the difference is (painstakingly slow) acquisition of 
counter-technologies which can change the landscape of material 
circumstances and make the change sustainable outside the stampede phase.


Privacy technologies are definitely party of this equation. For those 
that can't jettison the 19th century revolutionary scene from their 
minds, think meeting on dark street corners. That was a technology. 
Today's privacy is the same thing, but it looks a bit different and 
takes far longer to learn, and it has to be done.


Nothing will change until the would-be changers stop taking knives to 
gun fights (hoping that bravery and motivation will compensate - they 
won't). Privacy technologies, including encryption, are essential part 
of this armament.


Asking people to 'loose their fear' and stampede into the machinegun 
fire is short-sighted - and today 'we don't care that they know about 
our moves better than we do' is equivalent of this.


Absolutely nothing will change as a result of people gathering and 
talking themselves into this or that, and then regurgitating it in the 
social media. The modern society is immune to such knives. The proof is 
obvious - that event in Berlin was completely legal, as are others of 
its kind, while encryption is less and less legal.


The change may come only from the change in the material circumstances 
(it's not any more about material circumstances of production these 
days, as is all done by robots, but use of that phrase may help bridge 
the cognitive gap.)



On 2/13/16 2:29 , Felix Stalder wrote:


Here, I really totally disagree. Repressive orders crumble when people
start to loose their fear and act in large numbers, despite being
monitored not because they found ways to evade it. Security, in this
case, comes from social solidarity and collective action, not from
technology.

I'm not against encryption as such, of course, there are many
instances where it is vital, but this is not one of them (unless
one follows a kind of Leninist approach). In this case, to focus on
encryption seems more like a form of political procrastination.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: It’s Been 20 Years Sinc

[morlockelloi]

Well, it started as elite platform (one needed computer, modem, access, 
time, IQ), unregulated, then it was commercialized, commoditized, masses 
came in, and finally it got heavily regulated. Compare with European 
conquest of North America. Looks like 'space'.


On 2/9/16, 11:05, Florian Cramer wrote:


What is needed, above all, is a thorough critique and abandonment of
the colonialist trope of "cyberspace".


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Julian Assange arbitrarily detained by Sweden and the

[morlockelloi]

The capital of the notion of something being 'legal' is wearing thin.

It's interesting to observe what will replace it - make no mistake, the 
working system will pop up, so that the business can go on, and it won't 
be something simple as ad-hoc brute force threats.


I guess that a well-defined (possibly overlapping) power-legal domains 
will emerge, so it will be clear to all involved what it exactly means 
when principality X says, for example, "this will be the taxation rate 
for these activities". Depending on the coverage of X's domain, this may 
mean that you don't care, or that you will implement it ASAP. We need 
some kind of more accurate domain-dependent rules, in order to predict 
and plan.


Concepts of nation-states, national sovereignty and 'international law' 
are not applicable tools any more. Invoking them is pointless, as they 
cannot be enforced (the purpose of such invocations is to 'show the 
people' how badly these concepts are violated in hope of creating 
outrage and restoring them, but that doesn't work any more, as people 
know well it's all bs.)


We are already seeing de facto emergence of these new legal domains. Now 
we need the code.




The Opinions of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention are
legally-binding to the extent that they are based on binding


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: de Jong, Lovink, and Riemens: 10 Bitcoin Myths #ANON

[morlockelloi]

Here ( 
https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 
) is a proper requiem for Bitcoin, written by the insider:


...
Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. 
What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money that lacked 
“systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become 
something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful 
of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical 
collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have 
broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think 
Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.

...


> Bitcoin mining is currently reduced to less than 10 operators. There is
> relatively small number of people involved, and none of these seem to have a
> standing army or a navy. How much would it cost to coerce/subvert 51% of these

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: aaaaarg lawsuit digest #ANON

[morlockelloi]

So you will keep and feed your own poet in your basement?

Or is he going to be paid by the enlightened government?

Or we'll just have to do with:

- the already existing poetry?
- bad poetry by Uber drivers written in their spare time?
- free propaganda poetry funded by various parties?

Pick one.


I genuinely hope so. All IP regimes must be abolished, including the
quaint small merchant.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: aaaaarg lawsuit digest #ANON

[morlockelloi]

Unfortunately, the current knowledge distribution is sustainable. Due to 
high productivity and automation, the system can function well while 
majority of the population is illiterate (Idiocracy comes to mind), and 
universal knowledge distribution is not sine qua non for the machine to 
go through its routine.

The poetic intervention being the only possible one is evidence of 
defeat, and perhaps a means to keep the light going on, so that we don't 
forget. The fact that such interventions are prosecuted hints that they 
work in this sense, but let's not kid ourselves that they are anything 
more than memory refresh cycles. Poets will get fucked, that's the price.

On 1/12/16, 20:06, Marcell Mars aka Nenad Romic wrote:

>sada??nja situacija oko pristupa, proizvodnje i distribucije znanja je
>neodr??iva. to je posljedica historijskih sistemskih zastoja koje su
>digitalne mre??e u??inile samo bitno vidljivijima. zamka koja me najvi??e
>rastu??i u raspravama je ona koja u digitalnim mre??ama vidi uzrok, a ne
>simptom. (daleko od toga da su one neutralne...)
>
>pozivi u solidarnost ne bi smjeli biti igra rje??avanja puzzle-a. niti
>kreativno izbjegavanje 'halting problema' u kojem je kapitalizam
>univerzalni turingov stroj i mi mu se klanjamo nude??i izra??unljivost.
>no razo??aranje neuspjehom u takvim igrama uvijek je toliko manje od
>onoga u kojem se izjalovi poetska intervencija. a poetsko je jedino
>??to sam sada u stanju ponuditi i ??to mi se u ovom ??asu u??inilo
>dovoljno primjerenim.

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: aaaaarg lawsuit digest #ANON

[morlockelloi]

This reminds of sentiments of small software publishers in the 90s (but 
they used to express themselves in more colorful ways.) Ease of copying 
killed the cottage software industry (only the big 5 survived), and it's 
only now slightly recovering due to proprietary appstore/device platforms.

Publishing books/texts is somewhat similar, except for the fact that the 
final product runs on any human, not just the two proprietary device 
platforms, so it's much easier to propagate. The end game for small 
publishers (no lawyer budget) is bleak - the money comes from two 
categories: readers who prefer paper, and readers who really, really 
want to pay. The upside is that there is the paper option, which 
software publishers never had.


>I've got a new little book about Hillary Clinton and it's already up on
>arg, or however many fucking a's it requires. I'm a writer and I
>hope to get paid for my work. It's how I pay my bills. "Small authors"
>aren't exactly thriving and this isn't helping. So fuck this piratic

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: introducing @nettime_bot

[morlockelloi]

Would it be possible, for those who don't want their names ending on 
TWTR disks, to have a Subject: tag that bypasses the bot - for example 
"MO:" (mail only), like in:


MO: Re:  introducing @nettime_bot

Alternative to the full bypass would be omitting [Sender] field.

---

The idea of opening nettime to new audiences is good, but are 
microblogging/social behemoths really the techno-ideological equivalents 
to the early e-mail? It was relatively hard, with distributed ownership, 
and free-form (which mandated some basic cognitive skills.)


Perhaps running a hidden Tor service would be more instrumental in this 
regard. The use is hard (need to download Tor client and type .onion 
address), the infrastructure is distributed, and there is underground flair.


On 12/28/15 9:58 , nettime mod squad wrote:


Hi, nettimers --

The mod squad elves have been hard at work upgrading nettime's
so-called infrastructure.

 (1) Nettime has a shiny new twitter bot: @nettime_bot.

 (2) It reports each new mail in a simple format:

 <#nettime> [Subject] | by [Sender] [URL]




#  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

Re: Jason Scott > FaceFacts

[morlockelloi]

This is obviously an engineered backlash on the pot culture, as THC 
makes you lose short term memories and dissolves the Now. I wonder what 
happens to Facebook products when they get high on pot ... what's left?


On 12/24/15 10:12 , nettime's_about_face wrote:


and negotiate it for search and topic control and usefulness. No. Not
happening. Everything on Facebook is Now. Nothing, and I mean nothing
on Facebook is Then. Or even last month.



#  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

Re: Vice > Peter Sunde > I Have Given Up

[morlockelloi]

Equating 'freedom' with 'right' to consume unpaid commercial content was 
the biggest meme hijack of the decade. It reminds of the sinister side 
of some hippie communities, where 'free love' was used to excuse rape.


The worst part is that 'free' re-distribution of the commercial content 
causes exposure to trash of those who could not afford to pay for it, 
and would otherwise be spared.


On 12/12/15 0:41 , nettime's_checkered_flag wrote:


"The internet is shit today. It's broken. It was probably always
broken, but it's worse than ever."



#  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

Re: de Jong, Lovink, and Riemens: 10 Bitcoin

[morlockelloi]

[2/x This message should not go out to the nettime-l list, but if it does we 
apologize.
We're troubleshooting an issue that affects morlock's outgoing emails. -- mod 
(tb)]

This concern also applies to other lowly workers in data mining 
industries (which is really the only thing going on in data centers today.)


Colocations (one 'l') are cold, noisy, often locked down to the point 
where one needs an escort to go pee, there are surveillance cameras all 
around the place, you are lucky if you can find a broken chair, and 
there are no girls.


On 11/30/15, 13:09, John Hopkins wrote:


This info from the morlock & elloi and the previous poster raised the
question in my mind -- a question that is *not* facetious -- of the
conditions that Bitcoin miners are working under.




#  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

***SPAM*** Re: de Jong, Lovink, and Riemens: 10 Bitcoin

[morlockelloi]

This concern also applies to other lowly workers in data mining 
industries (which is really the only thing going on in data centers today.)


Colocations (one 'l') are cold, noisy, often locked down to the point 
where one needs an escort to go pee, there are surveillance cameras all 
around the place, you are lucky if you can find a broken chair, and 
there are no girls.


On 11/30/15, 13:09, John Hopkins wrote:


This info from the morlock & elloi and the previous poster raised the
question in my mind -- a question that is *not* facetious -- of the
conditions that Bitcoin miners are working under.



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: de Jong, Lovink, and Riemens: 10 Bitcoin Myths

[morlockelloi]

Compared to the trust in traditional currencies, the trust in Bitcoin is 
in the fanaticism end of the scale, due to the simple math - how much 
does it cost to subvert a currency:


Traditional currencies, operated by the state-size actors, lose value 
when the state's economy and the state itself collapse. Why this happens 
is a different topic, but there almost always major losers, who invest a 
lot to prevent this from happening. There can also be major winners (ie. 
invading army) who invest a lot to make this happen. What is are the 
baseline amounts involved in these investments? Most likely not less 
than several hundreds of $MM.


Bitcoin mining is currently reduced to less than 10 operators. There is 
relatively small number of people involved, and none of these seem to 
have a standing army or a navy. How much would it cost to coerce/subvert 
51% of these and do anything with Bitcoin (split hash trees into 
oblivion, etc. etc.)? At worse few $MM, if really expensive first-class 
thugs are hired. This is completely different situation from the early 
days of Bitcoin, when there were thousands of miners, and the cost of 
obtaining control over 51% of those was much closer to the cost of 
subverting state-run currency.



On 11/30/15, 11:06, nettime's_forgotten_password wrote:


4. "Bitcoin is not a fiat currency."

In practice, acceptance of Bitcoin payments takes place before the
(irrevocable) recording of the transaction in the distributed database.
That is, without formal confirmation of its validity. Apparently, the
parties involved in payments in bitcoins_believe_  in their eventual
recording. The payee therefore trusts the_eventual_  availability of
received funds.

This looks distinctly similar to the way traditional instruments of
payments, such as coins, banknotes and bank transfers, operate. The
users trust, based on  experience and social convention, the correct
operation of the system such that received funds are available for
further spending. This 'systemic trust' in traditional, fiat, currency
is underpinned by a mix of technical features such as hard to copy bank
notes, fraud detection software in financial institutions and government
imposed and enforced regulations.

Conclusion: Where in practice the 'systemic trust' in Bitcoin is no
different from that of traditional currencies, Bitcoin operates _de
facto_ as a fiat currency.



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime

[morlockelloi]

The unsaid conclusion is that nettime did not get coopted in any 
particular (and ultimately ephemeral) movement/activism and did not 
develop stifling intimacy. It remained slightly uncomfortable for all 
involved, which is a quality rarely attained.


(too bad 'cosmopolitan' has been coopted)


On 11/1/15 7:24 , nettime's mod squad wrote:


Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia asked us to draft an entry/essay
on  for their upcoming anthology on tactical media, so we
did. But it quickly became clear that if we seriously believed our
our argument, we'd need to invite comments from the entire list. So,
without further adieu, here it is:



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: what if we were all right but all wrong?

[morlockelloi]

IaaS indeed. Technology is the cause of everything, ideology is there
to explain it.

By 'technology' I didn't really mean things that happened in the
last 10-20 years. The only recent developments of significance are
establishment of vigorous keyboard punching as effective honeytrap
for neutering activism, and skyrocketing of compartmentalized
identity politics due to global networking, so weirdos can now find
self-similar in faraway lands ... like nettime.

By technology I meant the means of securing the top few hundred places
in the global public person-space which imprints itself onto the
multitudes every hour of the day. It used to be a national phenomenon
but today it's global. This was well understood in the early 20th
century.

I am not anthropologist, but it's fairly accepted that one can 'know'
about 200 people, and that those 'neighbors' will shape the life and
actions of the average human. This is the whole point of branding and
celebrity - getting into that set.

If the change is to come through voting (1 body = 1 vote, ie.
'democracy'), then such change has to be broadcast from this Fortune
200 club. The only way to get in that club is to have considerable
power, because the competition is fierce and well-armed. The means
of being widely heard are very physical and controlled: EM spectrum,
billboard space, print space. Getting a meaningful fraction of any of
these is very expensive.

The 'truthiness' of what have to say is irrelevant, and will not
supplement your lack of the broadcast power. Unless there is a
tectonic shift where dinosaurs are slow to react (but let's be real,
the Internet wasn't it - that space was re-conquered after only few
years ... good few years, though.)

Is there a hope, beyond activism as a lifestyle/hobby? Yes: tectonic
shifts. They won't come from ideology, but from technology, so don't
follow prophets, follow nerds without cellphones.




Alex' text is pointing to the very tactical understanding of
ideologies that you are mentioning and a process of appropriation
for a new sort of... service.

Sure, technology-based mass manipulation services. Does that rings
a bell? Beyond seeing just the opportunity for 'manipulation' in
there, a lot of what is going on into the participatory democracy
scene, a lot of the prismatic transformation of old party duopolies,
can fit into this vision. That's what your provocation makes me
imagine... we may call it Politics as a Service perhaps, or PaaS if
it's not already taken. Ideology as a Service may also fit, IaaS. So
funny that it sounds almost like 'jacket' in Dutch, jaas.






#  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

***SPAM*** Re: what if we were all right but all wrong?

[morlockelloi]

The understanding and manipulation of masses has become a 
technology-based activity. Like transportation or food production.


Reflexes and intuition in activism from the last few centuries are 
becoming irrelevant in this regard - this is what 'activists' generally 
refuse to understand, despite repeated and consistent failures.


'Knowledge' how to stir political movements based on Marx, '68, etc, is 
as relevant as knowing how to hunt lunch with bow and arrows: when you 
enter supermarket with those, you will be tased, hamstringed, and beaten 
for a good measure. What puzzles me is that these people, after they 
recover, go back to practice bow and arrow to 'do better next time.'


The myth that, unlike everything else, political technology is at the 
18th century level, and that all it takes is to gospel the truth (via 
Internet this time), which will set everyone free, is the main reason 
that they will continue to fail.



much I know of Italy the country also Alex comes from.  In Italy we are
literally engulfed by (critical or not, same) intellectualoids swimming
into academy/politics and unable to get anything done, or even
understood by the masses, completely detached from the actual legwork it
takes to carry on a political campaign or initiative.



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: Welcome to the Internet - if you've missed the past

[morlockelloi]

IPv4 is here to stay. The first consumer that gets IPv6-only line from 
ISP will find out that he/she cannot visit sites that did not convert to 
IPv6, and that would be the end of business for that ISP. This means 
that all servers that this consumer needs will have to convert *first* 
to IPv6, and there is little incentive for them to do so - there are 
more than enough IPv4 addresses for server colocations. Just got few 
hundred with no questions asked.



After they have, in despair, removed most of these features and made
IPv6 look and work almost exactly like IPv4, the same Internet community
that previously told them that IPv6 changed too many things began
complaining that the IPv6 protocol is insufficiently revolutionary and
does not address some of the core challenges which would justify the
large expense of a transition.  Unfortunately, by that time IPv4
addresses largely ran out and a transition was necessary anyway.



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

[morlockelloi]

It's all about the economy, stupid, and the end game is straightforward:

1. All databases will be public

When there is more than N records on one machine, and the cost of a 
breach is less than the value of each record times N, then records will 
grow legs. Looking at pricing trends for 0days and 'security solutions', 
for records containing peoples names in the near future N will become 
less than 1000.


Therefore, all databases will be public, eventually.

2. Privacy will become common sense

When all databases with > N records are public, one will communicate 
details that should not be public only in ways that do not touch disks 
with more than N records - which means strongly protected P2P 
communications, from whispering to encryption.


Obviously, the proper course of action is to accelerate data collection.



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: VW

[morlockelloi]

Consumers have been at the mercy of technology vendors for a long time. 
The novelty here is that it is the government that found itself in the 
subordinate role.


The lowdown is that the technology one doesn't fully understand and have 
full transparency into ("user") can and will screw you, and no amount of 
regulations can change that. Anything with software is especially 
insidious in this sense, as for most users it is impossible to fully 
grasp it.


The upside is that this enables multiple centers of power (from startups 
to VW), so in a way we are entering the age of pre-feudal fiefdoms. 
Whether the government model will prevail or not depends on how much 
power the illiterates have. I wouldn't hold my breath.



On 9/25/15, 12:01, t byfield wrote:


A few thoughts about the VW scandal

<...>


#  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

***SPAM*** Re: what if we were all right but all wrong?

[morlockelloi]

This could be a manifestation of one of the finer points of Reed's
Law, namely that the worth (and effect) of the network is not how
many nodes are attached to it, but how many different groups can form
within it.

In this case, the 'network' is general anti-whoever-has-the-power
sentiment, but apparently it does not promote inter-group connections.

Perhaps the fundamental problem with this network concept is that it's
anti-something, as there are many possible ways how that something can
be fixed.

Networks based on for-simple-something tend to be more cohesive, for
example capital and money: those who are for money will find ways to
cooperate regardless of the initial group affiliations.

The point being, these nodes need to figure out what the f*ck are they
for.


i mean, all the green, red, social-democratic parties are floundering
everywhere (corbyn notwithstanding;), xenophobic/fascist parties are
sprouting everywhere, but with the notable exception of Barcelona
and Madrid we have failed to come up with something new that unifies
the people around the digital vanguards of the precariat and
eco/socio/queer strands in urban movements and civil society.






#  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

***SPAM*** Re: gentrification of hacking

[morlockelloi]

There is one attribute of the 'hacking' meme that is being 
systematically ignored.


Technology is complex. High tech is extremely complex. Prodigies 
notwithstanding, it takes many years of expensive education and training 
(say, 10-15) to get meaningful insights into the technology, which can 
then translate into meaningful and efficient interventions. During this 
process one usually gets co-opted to the point where meaningful 
interventions are the last thing they will engage in.


Folksy 'hacking' doesn't get anywhere near to this. It's more a 
warm/fuzzy social activity with efficiency of a cargo cult. The simple 
truth is that if you don't have money for the mentioned 
education/training, your output is usually irrelevant. And no, most 
hackers are not prodigies.


Unfortunately, the 'community' propagates the idea that it only takes 
will to intervene, reducing interventions to the popular stereotype 
activities ('look ma, no hands'), which effectively seals off the real 
infrastructure and makes it impenetrable.


This comes back to the class issue, of course.


#  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

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

[morlockelloi]

I think that this is the core problem - assumption, ultimately 
ideological, that it is good that only a small number of participants 
define something, and then everyone can use the same and be 
interoperable, in the name of protecting us from the stupid, and it 
being a condition for the 'widespread adoption of the technology'.


Why is this centralization apriori good?

Why is it apriori good that a small number of OEMs can cheaply produce 
huge amount of technological gadgets, as opposed to every village 
producing their own more or less incompatible technology, at a slower 
rate and at a higher cost (and employment, BTW) ?


Why is 'widespread adoption of the technology' good, and also 
conditioned on centralization and interoperability? It's not like that 
adoption of the literacy technology suffered because there are hundreds 
of tongues.


This is all 'good' for only two reasons, and they are both ideological:

1. Steep stratification of power and control
2. Profits

Some may say this is one reason, though.

Nothing to do with the technology.


On 7/30/15, 10:08, r1ftrou...@hushmail.com wrote:


consensus. Without this, widespread adoption of the technology is going
to be difficult as people will do any write their own. It is a bit of a
luxury from a systems perspective that we have a commonality - the OSI
model by example - from which engineers can agree to build upon. This



#  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

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

[morlockelloi]

I was present when people with pointy ears entered IETF meetings and 
ordered this. Is this the answer you expect?


Perhaps search engines can provide better answers. Worth trying:

ex. http://www.quora.com/Why-is-ADSL-asymmetric

Without getting in codecs and frequency allocations, consider that there 
are perfectly functioning symmetric variants of DSL (SDSL etc.) The 
underlying narrative is that "there is more download than upload", which 
then, combined with NATs, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.


Before DSL, we had modems for analog audio lines, and they were fully 
symmetric.


To dig out the chain of causality, one would need to track where this 
narrative originated in 90s, and how it found its way into the standards 
bodies, and why ISPs preferred ADSL to SDSL. All in 90s, it was too late 
after that.


It may well be true that most people really have nothing to say and 
create, so asymmetry makes sense, as they just need to be fed. But 
neglecting social consequences and amplifying this situation with 
technology *is* a political decision. Most people don't vote - does it 
mean that the number of voting booths should be cut down?



On 7/28/15, 2:56, Iain Boal wrote:


So there was a purely political decision to build in the asymmetries.
Can you corroborate, beyond the mere assertion? Who? When? Evidence
welcome.  IB



#  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

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

[morlockelloi]

The Internet *is* it's lowest protocol layers. The ideology and politics 
are embedded in protocols, and attempts to 'solve' the problem without 
addressing these fundamental issues are doomed to fail.


Example: the asymmetry of DSL and cable bandwidths in the two 
directions is built into the link layer, and it was purely political 
decision, little to do with technology.


On 7/27/15, 11:53, Florian Cramer wrote:


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



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: Hacked Team

[morlockelloi]

I didn't have cryptography in mind, but the general centralization of
the control and data ownership mediated by the machines (computers
etc.), which then become enforcement tools, and the growing asymmetry
between those who build and operate those machines and those who are
subjected to them.

The shift I mentioned is the shift from being managed/herded by a
relatively large number of humans, to being managed/herded by a
large number of machines controlled by a small number of humans, and
the power pyramid becoming a very steep needle. How do you classify
builders of these power-multiplication machines?

Cryptography can help not being seen (consult "How Not To Be Seen"),
but it hardly changes the power equation. On the contrary, it enforces
the centralization paradigm: the number of people that benevolently
design cryptographic machines is miniscule. 10? 100? 500 (I doubt)? It
is trivial and cheap to subvert that whole ecosystem.

While, of course, "everyone should be free to study", it just
doesn't happen, and the asymmetry grows. Everyone just wants
to download. How many can understand and deploy the real
Voight-Kampff test (but designed for humans, and works faster:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.04441.pdf )?

But I agree, blaming the worker bees is futile, and the Luddites end
up badly. Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?



On 7/19/15 3:52 , Jaromil wrote:

On Fri, 17 Jul 2015, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote:


The cause of confusion may be that this (the last few decades) is
probably the first time that power apparatus' enforcement model is
making a big shift from thugs with guns to thugs with compilers.

These are two completely different demographics, and while societies
had thousands years to learn about and deal with thugs with guns [...]
it is hard to project the same notion at the bright middle-class kids
that get stock options and catered food. It will take some time.


I disagree on two points here, the first indirect (just to make sure)
and the second more specific to your approach.



<...>





#  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

***SPAM*** Re: Hacked Team

[morlockelloi]

The cause of confusion may be that this (the last few decades) is 
probably the first time that power apparatus' enforcement model is 
making a big shift from thugs with guns to thugs with compilers.


These are two completely different demographics, and while societies had 
thousands years to learn about and deal with thugs with guns (look at 
the pretty much consenting opinions about the military and the police 
across the globe), it is hard to project the same notion at the bright 
middle-class kids that get stock options and catered food. It will take 
some time.


On 7/17/15, 1:51, Jaromil wrote:


I'm very interested in how does that sounds in the ears of activists and
how do we plan to react to the bigger picture, in case we like to
organize a response after having burned the witches that need to be
burned, pardon me if I still find that as smelling disgusting, yet I'm
not willing to exonerate them from being spooky and evil at times. Not
sure about you in fact, but I'm so perverse I do find interesting to get
to know people that present themselves as spooky and evil at times,



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: Hacked Team

[morlockelloi]

Exonerating makers of malicious tools because they did it only for the 
irresistible appeal of money (as opposed to being inherently evil and 
wanted to screw activists) is ridiculous. They knew exactly what they 
were doing. Just following orders is not a valid defense, for some time now.


Eventually, it will come to those just following orders, programmers and 
engineers, enabling efficient population control, and doing it just for 
$100K+ salaries and stock options. It always does.




I say this because I believe that HT would have never become what it was
and would have never sold to the regimes it sold to without the
partnership of *very big* business players, whom I believe are the main



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: Europe: from bad to worse

[morlockelloi]

Isn't the biggest fear of all that it won't, and that Greece and Greek 
will continue to exist in relative order? To ensure that such 
catastrophe does not happen, chaos must be created by any means.

On 6/28/15 1:06 , Felix Stalder wrote:
>If Greece is being pushed into the wilderness outside the Eurozone,
>it's likely to create economic and social chaos domestically. While


#  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

***SPAM*** Re: What should GCHQ do?

[morlockelloi]

I think that there are two distinct issues here conflated together, both 
of them already mentioned in the comments:

1. Technology

Like literacy, or ship's voice pipes, Internet and crypto are 
technologies. They are presented in end-user contraptions called 
computers (as literacy is presented on the contraption called paper.) 
These technologies can carry and replicate communication, in ways 
invisible to the speaker (couriers, postal service, photocopiers, voice 
pipes, fiber, switches) to some end recipients one may not see or eve 
know about.

2. Public/private

There was a huge difference between public in private before these 
technologies existed. Private was something you communicated to one or 
few individuals that could hear you, public was something you shouted at 
the gathering to all. Today you whisper and shout into the same 
contraption, and this is totally non-intuitive. Is that voice pipe 
ending in the machine room, ship's mess, or captain's bedroom?

The only way to re-establish the intuitive concept of public/private is, 
again, to use technology, in this case cryptography. Like literacy, not 
everyone will be able to effectively do that, but many will (though 
likely fewer than in the case of literacy.)

There is really no choice - technologies are here to stay. If you don't 
want to learn to read and write, and must rely and trust scribes, you 
shall be f*cked. Same thing with crypto. Stop wasting time begging 
governments to stop listening - it's stupid and silly, at the same time. 
Instead, become literate, or join the ranks of the f*cked. It's called 
civilization.

A side technical note on:

> known-crypto approach, state actors -- being *state* actors -- will just
> revalue the currency, as it were, by switching over to more flexible,
> exploratory systems. The 'increase the cost' argument may be one of the
> few things less durable than motives.

There are no known automated ways to efficiently decipher 
human-generated scramblings of any quality. That strategy raises the bar 
in the sense that it requires similar (if not greater) expenditure of 
wetware brain cycles to de-scramble, than to scramble. Narrowing the 
context to individual correspondent pairs, the context not shared with 
any other pair, makes the de-scrambling expensive. Just as example, the 
two can pick a book or mp3 song and then communicate by using page and 
word (byte) numbers. Today this can be electronically done very 
smoothly. The common mistake made here is that such naive pad 
implementation is easy to break, much easier than, say, breaking 256-bit 
ChaCha20-Poly1305. That's very true, but it has to be broken *per* 
correspondent pair, not once for all. If it takes only one minute to try 
petabytes of all known mp3s, do frequency analysis, guess the language, 
and, assuming that it was simple XOR (without doing ROT-13 first), 
retrieve the plaintext, it makes mass surveillance dead in the water. 
They don't have that minute to spend.


#  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

Re: What should GCHQ do?

[morlockelloi]

There is a fine point here which is almost always missed, but from which 
most of these conclusions come from.


It is about the concept that 'crypto' is created by some small set of 
Illuminati, it needs to be standardized, and the rest of the world must 
trust them. These 'crypto wars' are then waged between the mentioned 
Illuminati and various evil agencies that would like take away the 
tools, bestowed by Illuminati upon the unwashed.


The concept works great both for the Illuminati and evil agencies - both 
do everything they can to maintain it.


Illuminati get livelihood: denigrating terms like "home brew crypto" are 
deeply entrenched and help maintain the guild exclusivity.


Evil agencies get their job made easy - it is trivial to subvert several 
standards or rubberhose few dozen experts into submission. Mass 
surveillance is only possible when there is a small number of crypto 
technologies.


This is all total bs.

While crypto is not the simplest technology in the world, it is far from 
being rocket science in practical terms. If everyone that did some 
scripting in any language would construct their own custom terribly weak 
cipher (ROT-14, ROT-15, etc), and use it only between themselves and 
their personal correspondents, totally incompatible with ways that 
"standard" web sites and VPNs do crypto, it would become too expensive, 
for any evil entity, to break millions of terribly weak ciphers. There 
is nothing "standard" about your circle of correspondents. There is no 
need that everyone in the world can participate in your crypto technology.


Back to the point: you don't need absolute crypto. You don't need to 
trust anyone. Scramble your communications in some custom way that will 
take evil agency's analyst 10 minutes to break: they can't afford it. 
And if they target you, you are f*cked anyway, no matter what you use.



On 5/24/15 19:09 , t byfield wrote:


Normally I don't go in for oracular bluster like that, but when it comes
to cryptography I've learned to make an exception. The alternative is to
trust the mathematicians. That's no exaggeration: one of the rallying
cries of the crypto crowd is 'trust the math.' I don't, because math
doesn't exist in the abstract. Its relationship to engineering is
obvious: engineers implement math, they make it real, make it happen.
Its relationship to law is less obvious. I don't mean ITAR, Wassenaar,
or any other mechanism by which states would standardize or regulate
cryptography. Instead, I mean the kinds of individual and collective
sovereignty that cryptography enables through various implementations.
The Cypherpunks understood this potential in their own way ('crypto
anarchy'), and the Bitcoin/altcoin advocates understand it in other ways
-- hence all the experimentation and excitement about things like side
chains.

Hard crypto everywhere all the time has become one of those internet
pietisms that's hard to challenge. First of all, anyone who does so ends
up with some really troubling bedfellows (e.g., the NSA). But even if we
ignore that kind of implication (i.e., ultraist extrapolation), we
quickly come to basic, practical questions: If you want anything less
than absolute crypto, where and how would you draw the lines? For
example, the lines between what's permitted and what's forbidden, or
what's practically possible or impossible, or for how long (e.g., key
length vs 'Moore's Law' and misc innovations).



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: nottime: the end of nettime

[morlockelloi]

To state the obvious, non-commercial and detached moderation is valuable 
and sought after, and cannot be bought.


The reward chain is obviously broken, as all moderators get is some 
amount of unsaid appreciation from several hundred people around the 
world. I guess it may feel unreal - nothing in the physical domain -  no 
drinks, promotions, tenures, sex, or even mention of the topic (I mean 
nettime).


The real question is how to repair the reward chain and make the process 
sustainable? The machine-mediated real world will not let anything 
through, except cash.



#  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

***SPAM*** Re: nottime: the end of nettime

[morlockelloi]

While the quality of nettime did go down, it did so far less and far 
slower than the rest of forum formats. It even seems that it plateaued 
and is steadily hovering above the slime - close enough to smell it but 
still airborne. An observation platform.


This alone is a major success.


#  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

Re: Photography and repetiion

[morlockelloi]

One of definitions of kitsch is that it shifts the focus from the object 
to both the subject and subject's peers. Emotions are triggered because 
it's so nice to have those emotions, and because it's so nice to have 
the same emotions others will also have - fuzzy ad nauseam. The object 
itself is relevant only to the point of being easily emotionally 
interpreted, including imbeciles.


The automation of 'social' interactions amplifies kitsch by orders of 
magnitude, leaving no emotional space for anything else.


But there are upsides:

- It's now easy to determine, algorithmically via big data, what is not 
kitsch: the search returns no results.


- Authors motivated by recognition are being weeded out, as they stand 
no chance against the Big Amplifier.



On 3/27/15 16:48 , daniel rubinstein wrote:


How many times was it liked, shared and re-twited?



#  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

Re: The Greek elections?

[morlockelloi]

Look what you've done - now everyone is going to try this!

On 2/5/15, 12:47, Flick Harrison wrote:


money taken from the mouths of babes



#  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

Re: Hackers can't solve Surveillance

[morlockelloi]

This is exactly the issue - the (assumed) need for interpretation.

If there is a small number of potential interpreters who really 
understand issues (1 in 1000?), and even smaller number among those who 
are willing to interpret to the public for altruistic reasons (1 in 
1,000,000?), then it is trivial to hijack the interpreted message and 
drawn it into whatever narrative the highest bidder needs, which is what 
is going on today.


I think that there may be a critical fraction value (CFV), the number of 
people who understand some issue, and if that number is above CVF, then 
the population cannot be easily manipulated by the bandwidth owners.


Looking at the past, I'll make a wild guess that CVF is somewhere around 
2-5%.


Getting this number up, closer to CVF, is generally termed 'education'.

Regarding crypto and the information hygiene, I think that we are 
currently far below CVF. If you start from the assumption that this 
cannot be fixed, then there is no hope.



On 1/4/15, 10:45, John Hopkins wrote:


particular technological concept is any solution -- I think more
principled understandings that are not so difficult to grasp, when
presented in the right way, can address this problem. Given that the
tech is predicated on systems theory -- perhaps some critical systems
thinking could go a long way in allowing people to understand many of
the power relationships that are operational in the present situation.



#  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

Re: Hackers can't solve Surveillance

[morlockelloi]

The nature of "political challenges" has changed *due* to the 
technology, and there is no way to enroll the unwashed into the action 
without understanding the said technology.


In 19th and 20th century it was relatively easy to explain issues and 
causes - "the rich get all the pussy and power, while we work long hours 
for nothing". Cue in the Capital, means of production, etc.


Today, to get political traction on this issue, one needs to explain (a) 
long term consequences of the loss of privacy by (b) complex technical 
means. It's not going to happen unless you essentially teach the 
population to do crypto themselves, without benevolent or malevolent 
elites. You will not get real political traction on blind faith 
("something elite hackers tell us to do".) You cannot substitute real 
political engagement by religion, which this "trust us, we're the good 
guys" approach boils down to.


So it is back to the technology, and deep understanding by pretty much 
everyone. There are no shortcuts, and no amount of 20th century politics 
will solve this. That's the real challenge - education, and it looks 
like a lost cause. The unwashed are dumb, and the smart ones are well paid.


On 1/2/15 18:11 , Dmytri Kleiner wrote:


mass communications. In order to achieve a society where we can expect
privacy we need more hackers and hackerspaces to embrace the broader
political challenges of building a more equal society.



#  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

Re: The Creative Question--Nine Theses

[morlockelloi]

The main cognitive dissonance here is in the (implied) claim that 
creativity should be rewarded by the prevailing (capitalist) system 
currencies.


Remove that requirement, and suddenly everything works like a charm !

On 11/19/14, 22:46, Geert Lovink wrote:


artists can only participate if they reinvent themselves and morph into another 
role.

5. There is no Creative Ecology

Creative industries policy started with the ambition of setting up creative 
ecologies
where  ideas and innovation can be born, mature and thrive.



#  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

Re: FW: Blogpost: Smart Cities vs. Smart Communities: Enabling

[morlockelloi]

The problem is more fundamental, but was encountered before: literacy.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png 
- we're somewhere in the computer literacy where France was in the 
traditional literacy in early 1700s. And it will probably take us as 
long to get out of this.


Higher literacy rates were not accomplished by fancier tools (pens and 
paper), but by slow and painstaking education.


Fancier tools won't accomplish much - that's one of the most damaging 
myths around computer literacy. Computer literacy is not something you 
can give to someone.


So if you think that you have a solution that will arm illiterates 
against the organized literates in few years, you don't have anything, 
except maybe a hobby.



On 11/7/14 9:02 , Mark Simpkins wrote:


Thanks for posting this, I have been trying to use the idea of the
'smart-er citizen', but this is really an analogue to the community level
thinking that you mention.

Rather than encourage the use of top down technology/control systems that
are sold by the big technology players I have been focusing on the
cataloguing and findability of existing techniques and tools for citizens
to get together and decide on how to develop and improve their community.
In a way developing a Smarter Citizens Catalogue - access to existing tools
and methods.



#  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

Re: textz.com: Complete Historical-Critical Edition (2014)

[morlockelloi]

textz with javascript is the best epitaph to textz !

[While attempt at cleverness is appreciated, note that safe browsers 
with redirect cleaners don't get to see the page source.]


On 10/30/14, 2:27, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:

The textz.com Complete Historical-Critical Edition ARG
starts on October 30, 2014, 6 PM UTC at 48.7797,9.1813



#  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

Re: a free letter to cultural institutions

[morlockelloi]

It seems that there is disconnection here: terms market, art, labour, 
culture, production, demand, reward are cherry-picked to prove this or 
that point, throwing them as needed in disjunct contexts.


From a purely 'market' PoV, there are:

(1) a limited (as in not infinite) cash-supported demand, and it's doing 
fine. This demand is adequately met by the production of some 0.1% of 
the 'artist' population, and the rest have lottery-class chances of 
getting in.


(2) far less limited 'cultural' demand, which is perhaps best defined as 
non-cash-supported, and can be loosely defined as superset of ideas, 
ideologies, individual inclinations, etc. regarding what 'society' 
needs/wants. Every single 'artist' can produce something for this 
market, as there are at least few people who will buy it, paying with 
flatter, emotional support, drinks, sex, tips, etc.


The confusion arises when (1) and (2) are mixed up. They are completely 
separate mechanisms. (1) influences feeble-minded and somewhat shapes 
(2). (2) migrates to (1) by the mentioned lottery system.


It is unlikely that any particular licensing mechanism (it's silly to 
talk about licensing where no real money is involved and participants 
can't afford real lawyers) will affect the lottery, so perhaps the best 
strategy is the shotgun approach - get your stuff everywhere and hope 
for the best. While operating in the market (2), licensing makes no 
difference anyway - nazis will use the stuff regardless of licensing. 
The whole licensing paradigm in this market looks more like a cargo 
cult: if I attach some 'free/community/fair' license to my stuff maybe 
the real money will land.


If the artist gets a winning ticket and enters (1), it will be very 
traditional licensing enforced by a very traditional system.


Contrary to the wishful thinking, there is no evidence of middle ground.





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





#  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

Re: tensions? elites? governance?

[morlockelloi]

This is not a change in the production pipeline - the product was always 
the same.


The change is in the demand - the herd of independent thinkers is no 
longer being *paid* for the product (through tenures, foundations, 
royalties), as that particular venting method became obsolete. There are 
cheaper ways for social control, and anyway the population has been 
dumbed down to the level where they don't really get much of it.


It's all about the economy. Lefties lost their lefty jobs.


that all we -- lefty artist/intellectuals on this list -- manage to
produce is a cynicism and bickering." And, that the discussion is
'stale.' Yes, to say the least. Gentrification is talked about in the



#  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

Re: Gentrification - or a focus on income and wealth?

[morlockelloi]

We should not. The average nettimer earns 3x more than the average SF 
evictee, and we like it that way.


Now back to the noble cause of helping the poor ...


Should we not be more concerned with the classic issues of wealth and
income distribution and Piketty's extremely vaiid point that Europe



#  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

Re: do you know the way to san jose digest [x3: hankwitz

[morlockelloi]

This is a slippery slope.

What is "natural" about diversity, or letting the poor live?

> Nothing "natural" about capitalism!


#  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

Re: Douglas Belkin, Caroline Porter: Corporate Cash Alters

[morlockelloi]

I was wondering where that sleight of hand will be ... and of course, 
it's in the dictionary.


This is not about 'merging of business and education'. This is about 
replacing education with training.


Try merging autopsy with surgery, see what you get.


This merging of business and education has some academics unnerved.



#  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

Survey

[morlockelloi]

Just doing a survey on a startup idea:

Would you use a free condom with BT & IPV6 address ?

Totally free.

On 3/25/14 19:58 , John Hopkins wrote:


http://tinyurl.com/l5vcnp7 and
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175822/

Finally somebody makes a public argument against the breathless Red
Herring Utopian hype around IoT and its purported deep and beneficent
innocence.

Back in the 90s, there was the same level of hype around the Web in
general, and we got the NSA. Imagine what IoT will bring us. The ACLU
makes a powerful argument to where we *don't* want to end up, given the
level of technological sophistication and data agglomeration we, under
this globalized techno-social regime, are converging on...

Cheers.
jh



#  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

Re: an historic retreat

[morlockelloi]

This seems like beneficial evolution from central authority to multiple 
authorities, and in the future probably to the truly decentralized 
personal level, as technology advancements begin to support smaller 
entities controlling their own namespaces and the routing.


The Internet was never like broadcast ether, it was just presented that 
way. Imagine if the air was subject to the mechanics of the Internet: 
you talk to several people in the room, but some can't hear you, because 
the air operator didn't feel like it. You act surprised, indignated, and 
then you complain to the government. All because of your own ignorance 
about how the air works, and your own gullibility to buy into the air 
marketing.


Internet is not like air, and will never be. Decentralization is a good 
thing, and the sooner the public perception of the Internet gets closer 
to reality, the better.


Of course, the newly empowered fiefdoms will never agree to further 
delegate the authority to their subjects, but it will happen to them as 
it happened to ICANN. Expect to see the exodus of Internet luminaries 
parasiting on the current centralized system into new subdomains. That's 
where the money is.


take place in a manner which would "Support and enhance the 
multistakeholder model". This should be seen in the context 
of the USG's statement to the



#  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

Re: irreversible digest [x3: newmedia, hankwitz, hopkins]

[morlockelloi]

I find this crass anthropocentric approach to be unworthy of this
list.

These chauvinists draw an arbitrary line in the past when the "air"
was "good" and "water" "unpolluted", and then scream about "pollution"
and exhaustion of the "natural" resources.

What a BS. I didn't notice any matter destroyed in the process.

Why not go few billion years ago and blame Cyanobacteria for the
mindless polluting of the planet's atmosphere with free O2 and
thus obliterating thousands of species of progressive peace-loving
anaerobic organisms? Talk about genocide.

And why Cyanobacteria did it? They liked binary fission and kept doing
it until it was too late.

We have evolved in this poisonous atmosphere, and it's only natural to
start another pollution cycle. It's not the end of the world.





#  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

Re: Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world

[morlockelloi]

This is the essential fallacy.

The idea that the security is so complicated that only the guild
members (from gov/corporate employees to open source celebrities) are
supposed to handle it, has been successfully floated for a while.
Which leaves the unwashed with the choice of 'trusting' either the
former or the latter. Whoever they choose, those will continue to
earn 10-20x the poverty level income for performing the holy rites.
The guild members are likely sincere when promoting this notion:
self-preservation is a great motivator. "Never make home brew crypto"
is what got us where we are today.

It's like literacy. There is nothing easy or natural about learning
to read and write. Literacy used to be confined to the ruling circles
and prohibited to the rabble. But literacy for the masses caused great
power shifts, and very few question it today.

Fuck the scribes.

Learning basics about communications security may be somewhat harder
that learning to read and write, but it's not orders of magnitude.
The only security that will work is the one that a person truly
understands, and fuck the UI. Witness the very successful use of
cryptography by those who understand that their well-being depends on
it.

What needs to happen is a shift from "trust me, I'll do it for you",
to "I'll teach you how to make your own". Not the easiest path, not
the quick one, but the one that may work. Bickering about whom to
trust and begging the authorities to stop what they are doing is a
total waste of time.



On 3/10/14 5:35 , Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

i disagree: not only specialists like "nerds, hackers or cryptographers"
should have a basic and differentiated understanding of the cultural
techniques that digital technologies offer; by analogy, of course, you
can always tell somebody that a vocabulary of 300-500 words is enough to
read a tabloid newspaper and that should be sufficient for getting by;
but would you really tell anybody to stop after those 300 words and then
go do "better things"?





#  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

Attack on homoentropy [Re: Ippolita Collective, In the

[morlockelloi]

One of the hardest things with machines is to generate sufficient 
unpredictability, to create good encryption keys or quality simulations. 
Randomness is hard to come by, for computers. Usually this is done by 
listening to the supposed outside world, network interrupts, A/D noise, 
disk seek times, keyboard and mouse input. If you are lucky  you'll get 
5-10 high entropy bits per second. And then there are successful attacks 
by flooding the machine with the input which is known to the attacker 
and not random at all. The computer then becomes predictable, the 
simulations take the same sequence, and keys can be guessed.


The intended analogy is, of course, the quality time alone, where one 
can tap into thermal noise of synapses, or that flu virus screwing with 
your immune system, to generate new snippets of thoughts that the 
outside world simply cannot predict.


Lowering the entropy of humans will have interesting consequences.

Perhaps the class division in the future will be more accurately 
described by the person's entropy than by income numbers. There will be 
gigabyters on one side and two-bitters on the other. Guess which will 
you be able to outguess.




others. The risk is very high that massive partaking in life on social
network won't lead to 'collective authorship', but to a buzz-swarm of
totally superficial interactions. As Michel de Certeau has convincigly
argued [15] it is time, and time only, which makes it possible to shape
the everyday world 'below'. When one does not have a place of one's own,
one acts on someone else's territory; if one is unable to put a strategy
in practice, one can resort to tactics. In theory, personal time can
therefore be used to build up significant relationships, also within
heteronymous contexts as are social networks, whose rules are not



#  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

Re: Torygraph: The Snowden privacy panic has spread to

[morlockelloi]

This is not the problem, but it would be interesting to see who is 
behind declaring this to be a problem (or perhaps journalistic 
incompetence is indistinguishable from malice).


A cursory search on "de-identifying" will provide insights about 
technologies that have been around and have been used for a while (more 
than a decade) to deal exactly with these issues:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-identification
http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/coveredentities/De-identification/guidance.html
http://www.bumc.bu.edu/hipaa/de-identified/

On 2/8/14 8:26 , nettime's_institutional_review_board wrote:



 The Snowden privacy panic has spread to medical research.
  This is a problem

<...>


#  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

Re: Harassing People for Watching a Movie in a Cinema

[morlockelloi]

Maybe we should look at the demand side for answers.

This recruitment of gargoyles could be another attempt to create content 
surrogates. Looks similar to taping of video game walkthroughs, where 
hapless game consumers are compelled to record their 'experiences' and 
show them to the world.


Whatever method can create apparently moving images, enlarging the body 
of search engines' finds, is justified.


Perhaps there is nothing sinister here - the search engine industry is 
just trying to remain relevant by enabling fresh discoveries of useless 
bits, and the big data scam is a benign side effect. As long as the 
public keeps 'searching' the business will prosper.


On 1/23/14 11:20 , Flick Harrison wrote:


Prescription google glass?  Talk about a wanker.  Perhaps even a
livestreaming wanker.



#  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

Re: The Californian Reality (from: New Geography)

[morlockelloi]

Where is the evidence that the present situation is not stable?

The caste systems - and we do live in one - have been known to endure 
for centuries (compared to them, egalitarian societies are ephemeral 
flashes.) The steep pyramid of ruling class/praetorian guard/token 
citizenry/rabble appears to be rather resilient. The talent percolates 
up, performs its duty, and then sinks down, like bubbles in the glass of 
cold Guinness.


"Let's make a website" initiatives notwithstanding, there is nothing on 
the horizon of reality that can disturb the ale. It's hard to see 
anything short of serious genetic engineering that would make 
egalitarian societies persist, and genetic engineers are not paid to 
work on that.




On 1/22/14 16:03 , Brian Holmes wrote:

I think the keyword of systemic change already exists: political
ecology. There are many people working in that direction. But the





#  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

Re: Anonymous movement in decline?

[morlockelloi]

Anonymous is an open public *channel*, not a group (to be pedestrian - 
who were the group members? Oh, right, they were anonymous.)


Absolutely anyone was free to use the channel. It is interesting to 
examine why more did not, why there was so little spoofing and abuse - 
majority of messages did consistently follow the common ideology.


This channel-ideology seems to be a novel phenomenon, impossible without 
the Internet. There will probably be more.





But, even if nobody would ever use the name Anonymous anymore, and all
the Guy Fawkes masks would rot in drawers around the world, what would
that mean? Decline? Of what exactly? Of an attractor which allowed
different actors to coalesce? What happens if a different one appears?



#  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

Re: John Naughton: Edward Snowden: public indifference

[morlockelloi]

The real problem is quantifying the consequences, the danger and 
negative outcomes of the surveillance.


Why is surveillance bad? How does it affect one's life in unambiguous 
terms? What really happens to the victims of surveillance?


Do they get less income/benefits in the future?
Do they buy more of the shit they don't need?
Do they get less influence in the society?

How is this quantified beyond generalities?

There are examples where mass education worked, which illustrate the 
hardness of the problem - like smoking, or relationship of microbes to 
infections. Smoke and you may get serious health problems in 15-20 
years. Rather obvious, but it took several decades and billions of 
dollars of concerted government and non-government efforts to make some 
impact. Or when Pasteur demonstrated benefits of sterilization, it still 
took quite some time for everyone to get it, although the incentive was 
rather obvious.


Where is such incentive regarding surveillance? That your folks will be 
doomed to remain lower class? That the state will become too strong? 
Good luck explaining that with measurable effects.


The only way the surveillance can be tamed is if basic measures are 
widely and sustainably adopted by individuals, like elementary hygiene - 
washing hands and not eating from the garbage. Sustainably means that it 
does not depend on 10 or 1000 open source developers. This requires wide 
acquisition of technical skills, which is simply not going to happen in 
the today's society without demonstrating clear and present danger.


No one will wash your hands for you.


Is there a real technical reason to have the kind of private
centralized electronic communication spaces on the WWW that have been
carved out of the decentralized and public internet by 'industry'.

No, not really, I think. But, do we see the 'professional peers' or
academics (who previously built the internet up and until the web)
stepping up? Not really.

What's more is, the people who really need to keep their data or
conversations a secret from the US government - I don't know say
Angela Merkel, drug dealers, paedophiles, journalists, activists, etc
- should learn to use the existing tools to do so. The smart ones do
already.

But, do we see normal users turning to the existing alternative
communication spaces and tools (that are often less-convenient or
require more of users)? No, not really.



#  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

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

[morlockelloi]

This realization per se is pretty much useless, as are endless 
ruminations regarding how free we were, once upon time. The old Marxist 
postulate that awareness will save the species is blatantly false - look 
around you.


These technologies came to rule the world because their proponents made 
coherent efforts to make it so. The only way to do something about it is 
to actively develop other technologies which tilt the balance in the 
direction you like better. Countering technology with words, laws and 
general awareness will get you nowhere. See 'bronze age'.


The corollary is that the future belongs to the few, not to the masses, 
because high tech is centralized by nature, as it requires 
understanding, and those capabilities are scarce. The rest are fucked 
... I mean 'users'.


There are only competing elites.



NSA at all. It is about the dawning realization that we all now live
inside a "virtual" system that compels us to *control* ourselves,
since all the details of our lives are being "remembered," in a way
that no *human* civilization has EVER even imagined it could do!



#  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