Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
Eric: But society *cannot* be designed -- not by you or anyone else. Indeed, this is why so many people are naive to imagine that there is a Deep-State (which doesn't exist and about which the Snowden disclosures tell us nothing) or that there is anyone to whom you could give a Big Brother Award. All this is amusing fantasy which is now confronted with harsh reality . . . !! g The conclusion to draw from all of this is that the political system as it is composed and functions right now is defunct Correct, but not for the reasons you imagine . . . not the internet is broken, but democratic politics is broken. Correct, and (perhaps without knowing it) you have put your finger on the *cause* of the current broken situation -- the Internet is incompatible with democracy (and globalism and consumerism and a whole lot more.) The response should not be to give up on all our democratic values and aspirations, but instead to re-emphasise them, more forcefully than ever. Wrong. Those values are not the ones we are going to move forward with. They were given to you by an environment that no longer has any power over you. So, along with that environment (i.e. television), those values are now also *obsolete* -- KAPUT . . . !! Those values are the product of the psychological war that you (and the rest of us) have been bombarded with all of our lives. They are the Democratic Surround that Fred Turner writes about and they were born in WW II, hatched by psy-warriors Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, as he amply documents. http://www.amazon.com/The-Democratic-Surround-Multimedia-Psychedelic/dp/0226 817466/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8qid=1406130582sr=8-1keywords=democratic+surround dpPl=1 They are the product of social engineering and the *response* to the FAILURE of their efforts (i.e.which was the defunct system you mention) is NOT to double-down on trying to engineer its replacement. And beyond analysis and critique, indeed how ever important, I believe we need to engage in the design and re-design of democratic politics - at the micro and the macro level. That won't work (which, given all the failures you list in your email, should be pretty obvious) . . . !! Instead of trying to do something to society, we all need to try to UNDERSTAND what our technological environment is *doing* to us -- just as it gave us our democratic values and aspirations, it is now giving us their replacements. LISTEN to the technology and hear what it is telling you (and think about what it means to be living in NETTIME) . . . Mark Stahlman Jersey City Heights # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
Florian, unfortunately, I agree with what I think is the gist of what you wrote -- but didn't say anything to justify your various rebuttals. So, for example, I noted that there's a fracture between how people working roughly political science and the humanities understand what it means for something to be 'political,' I didn't dismiss the latter, let alone the micropolitics it has enabled. And your suggestion that there's less to be learned from thinking about different academic responses to the FB study *now* than there is from reducing them to a reenactment of 'the last 30 years' seems strangely ahistorical -- but less so than listing off how much money starstruck CEOs paid the Ziggy Stardust of academia by way of arguing that higher ed's economics haven't changed in the last 50 years. And your response on photography is really quixotic in the sense of mistaking windmills for giants. I agree with you about photography's staggering cultural impact. In fact, I think it's been so wide-ranging and protean that it makes makes little 'macro' sense to use photography as a stable reference point like a labor category in a ministerial economic report. (Nor does it make much 'micro' sense to say aperture and shutter speeds have remained aperture and shutter speeds when we have incredibly fertile critical vocabularies for disassembling so many constituent practices and thinking about how they shaped ideas about the observer, time, landscapes, light[ing]...) My point was pretty simple, so I'll see if I can put it more clearly and 'go there,' like Michael wanted. Like the old joke that there are 10 kinds of people, those who can count in binary and those who can't, universities have 10 sides: they're microcosms where brilliant human minds investigate everything ever and they're bureaucracies, basically. Their bureaucratic aspect both enables inquiry (e.g., by providing security and some insulation from politics, commerce, etc) and hobbles it (I think we're all familiar with academics' litany of gripes). These institutions have changed drastically over the last century +/-, and that change has metastasized in the last few decades (financialization, standardization, etc). Faculties *should* assert themselves as a political force and press to redirect the transformative function of universities *as such* in more positive directions, but, it's safe to say on aggregate, they aren't doing that. With that failure, they're squandering a critical historical moment and pissing away their legitimacy -- basically, by serving as clerks while their students are reduced to indentured servitude (which is *not* an exaggeration). So, Michael, when I pointed out that most of the people who'd said something in this thread are dig-studs faculty, I wasn't 'liking' that fact, FB-style. On the one hand, it helps to think about how that perspective shapes what's said. On the other, I don't think it's a generic standpoint -- on the contrary, people working in that field have been sitting at a very special conjuncture -- say, of sectors, disciplines, networks. (That opinion is also self-validating: I spent the last decade+ as a faculty member in exactly that context, and my experiences in university governance, which were pretty extensive, left me very pessimistic and glad I've left that world.) My case certainly involved a crisis of conscience, and the problem of debt was at the heart of my own crisis. In time, I think more and more faculty will face their own version of that crisis as well -- too late. But make no mistake, the real crisis isn't inward at all, any more than the economic meltdown of 2008 was a Bildungsroman. It's bad enough that faculties are pretending there's no problem; it'd be be even worse if, like abolitionists adjusting the fit of a chain, they started lecturing to their students about how these changes -- which are very definitely macro and political-economical -- are unacceptable. So who can they talk to? 'Local' academic administrations are strangely even more powerless (not less powerful). 'Everybody'? The same 'everybody' who's coming 'here,' driven largely by the rise of computation that's one of the main objects of critical media literacy? Florian, like it or not, I think this validates the gist of what you wrote: that this curious conjuncture can and should play a crucial role in experimenting with the political as you put it -- in a descriptive, reflective, constructive, and experimental senses. But it also challenges what you say, because there does come a time when we need to think about how that model of politics can give rise to more traditional models of effective collective action. I also agree with your point that If we look at the larger picture, we see a major (and I would argue: global) economic shift from visual 'creative' practices - no matter whether photography, graphic design, illustration, moving image - to IT. But in
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
Dear Michael, nettimers, I can understand your exasperation about how an urgent and critically vital real-life political discussion reverts to an apparently 'academic' one, but in this case I think this is not entirely correct. You are right, however, in pointing out hat the discussion requires a bit more real-life, and what Germans so beautifully call 'real-poltischer', context. Let me try to provide that to complement the argument. So fist the core argument again: Felix sketches the emergence of a 'Deep-State' outside of democratic / electoral accountability, revealed by the Snowden / NSA disclosures, and rightfully observes that this is primarily a political problem, not a primarily technological problem. From this I conclude the problem is political, and therefore the solution also has to be political. My suggestion is to engage in 'political design' and not content ourselves with 'mere' critique. Now, political design needs to operate simultaneously on the macro and the micro level, and in between and across. The micro-political level is crucial because focussing only on the macro-political level quickly leaves one overwhelmed. We can make a quick analysis of the problem, but to engage it practically means taking on vested powers with huge interests and exactly that, power... The micro-political intervention circumvents that and creates opportunities for immediate action. Still, without macro-political changes, the micro-political remains, well.., powerless. Hence the need for 'political design' on both levels. The example of the 'Ecological Design' course was simply an example of a micro-political intervention, nothing more. I would not suggest that it is anything else in and of itself. Still, I would agree fully with Florian here that one should not underestimate the generative power of the arts / artists / designers - the power to bring something into being, where before there was none. This is a highly particular aspect of these practices and we should not underestimate its evocative / generative power, in particular with regards to political / ecological design. Question is, why is this all important for the question at hand (the reality of the 'Deep State' revealed by Snowden, WikiLeaks, etc.)? Here is where I need to bring in the 'real-politischer' context. In this case I can best reflect on my extended tenure at De Balie, the centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam (from late 1998 till early 2011). From the start we addressed questions of surveillance, security and privacy in the new media public programs, debates, and public events we organised. These debates / events would be staged with politicians, business reps, civil society / NGO types, artists, designers, technologists, hackers, theorists, academics, activists and so on in various wondrous mixes. I remember how in the early years we were simply waved away - nonsense, what do we have to hide?, fighting windmills, etc etc. Strangely though most support was coming from the business community. Still, in 2003, in the preparation of the 'Completely Safe Environments' / No Escape event at Paradiso, part of Next 5 Minutes 4, Rop Gongrijp (co-founder of xs4all, Dutch celebrity hacker and one of three people pursued by the US government over aiding the release of the Collateral Murder video with WikiLeaks) mourned how he had been trying to get the issue of privacy on the public agenda for over 15 years and it just didn't work. The event made it to the evening news and created a big stir - an indication of things to come. Ar the instigation of Maurice Wessling of xs4all and Bits of Freedom (the Dutch privacy organisation) we then started the NL series of the Big Brother Awards, and while it started small these events grew year by year. The last time it was still held in the De Balie it had become such a big thing that the national news featured it prominently, debates were staged in newspapers, the NL version of NewsNight (NOVA) devoted almost an entire show the same evening to it, and the privacy discussion moved mainstream, way before WikiLeaks rose to prominence. The next BBA had to be organised in a bigger venue, and the issue remained in the core of public debate in NL ever since. Then WikiLeaks broke, then the Snowden NSA Files disclosures - the issues moved into the public mainstream virtually around the globe, world media haven't stopped debating it since. Another remarkable detail here is that one of the people we worked together with in this series of so called 'info-politics' programs was a law scholar who had done a PHD on privacy issues and worked for the Institute of Information Law, University of Amsterdam - one of the regular 'academic' sites we worked with. He is now the vice prime minister of The Netherlands. Still, throughout the NSA Files disclosures he has remained conspicuously silent. The formal reason: not his department, he is minister of social
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
It seems to me that Felix is right in pointing out that the issues discussed here are primarily political. I consider in particular the emergence of a 'Deep State' largely outside of democratic (electoral) accountability and existing rights frameworks that Felix sketches here a deeply problematic and fundamentally important tendency. However, we should right from the start not limit ourselves to modes of critique: The problem is political, which necessarily implies that the solution is also political - it is not just a matter of critique (of incapable political structures, of the distortions of global and local capital, of unaccountable surveillance systems, etc.), but much more a question of political design. An interesting question here would be, what does 'political design' mean exactly? How can it be 'enacted'? What would be required in terms of material and popular investments, in terms of institutional (re-)design? What types of political and design expertise would be required here? In order for what? To progress towards a progressive composition of the good common world? The successive waves of popular protest that we have all been witnessing since 2011, that some refer to as the 'movement(s) of the squares' (a term I use only in brackets because of its inherent ambiguities), have not effected the kind of political changes as yet that seemed to be demanded there, neither in terms of 'giving democracy back to the people' (one of the recurrent slogans / demands), nor in terms of fundamentally redressing gross inequalities in income, material means of survival and possibilities for self-realisation. The activists involved have largely understood and accepted this lack of efficacy of the protests in and of themselves and are now actively engaging in acts of 'political design'. Important to question here, though, is exactly what 'design' in this context means. In my view it operates on different levels at the same time - on a macro level as in redesigning political institutions (evidenced a.o. in new political 'designs' such as Partido X and Podemos in Spain, the redrafting of the Iceland constitution earlier, the After arty in post-occupy US, and many other initiatives aimed at reconfiguring main-stream politics). However, 'political design' should and does operate simultaneously on a micro-level, small acts, localised and trans-local, by ordinary citizens aimed at changing particular aspects of local environments, establishing new shared resources, new modes of exchange (alternative currency systems that typically function trans-locally), small-scale environmental monitoring and restoration projects, open education, and many many more. 'Design' here is no longer concerned simply with giving shape to something that has already been conceived, but is more properly understood as a concrete and tangible intervention to reshape a configuration of things. I'm now developing a new short course for the Art Science Interfaculty in The Hague which is called 'Ecological Design'. The basic premise here is that the title perfectly expresses what the course is about, if only that it requires us to fundamentally redefine two terms: 'ecology' and 'design'. 'Ecology', first of all is reconfigured (as a concept) along the lines of the classic Guattari text on the three ecologies; the material environment / the social relations / human subjectivity; and this ie extended with the presence and role of the non-humans. The point here is to think and act transversally between and across these different ecological registers. 'Design' is reconfigured to mean essentially any type of tangible 'intervention', which transgresses the disciplinary boundaries of professional design, to include interventions coming from the domain of the arts, civic initiatives, social movements, and even politics itself. An important consideration here is that it is too easy to forget that the different crises we are talking about (financial, economic, political, democratic, military and environmental) do not only affect humans badly, but also the non-humans. The question is, how to bring the non-humans into democracy, as evidently they cannot 'speak' for themselves there, at the heart of democratic deliberation. This obviously introduces another layer of complexity and complicates things further, yet in thinking and doing political design I nonetheless find the presence of the non-humans indispensable. The task for the students following this course will be to come up with a 'design' for an intervention of their own (and possibly execute it). To give these endeavours direction I hold to the Latourian formula of the 'progressive composition of the good common world', which aims to sustain and strengthen the plurality of external relations - it becomes thus an exercise in (re-)designing political ecology. At this point I'm very curious to see what is going to come out of this new
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
Felix wrote: Again, this is less a media issue, than one of political economy. Perhaps, our productive systems are becoming too efficient for capitalism. Robert Kurz had a thought-provoking response to this comment you make below. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/crisis-of-exchange-value I'm still trying to fully digest it, but I agree this is an issue of political economy and as such it is a issue of valorisation, which Kurz and others (included in that journal issue) focus on directly. Joss # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
One curious thing about this discussion is that most of the people involved are speaking from their experiences on faculties involved, broadly, speaking, in 'digital culture.' This field sits in an odd conceptual space between design, art, 'technology' (e.g., computer science), and critical fields grounded in somewhat politicized humanities (as opposed to, say, political science). Certainly, many of the main ideas proposed are shaped by different disciplinary inflections, which are mainly institutional in their orientation: they seem to look outward, but they remain tacitly inward-looking in that constant reference is made to the experiences and prospects of graduates, new classes to taught, and so on. They're also shaped by different regional inflections: you can hear echoes of, on the one hand, different national policies regarding educational funding and employment policies, and, on the other, the emergence of transnationally legible fields of practice -- enabled partly by the standardization of 'technologies' (ranging from TCP/IP to Adobe products), and partly by seismic shifts in governance (e.g., the EU's impact on our own biographical options). If we had contributors writing from China, Korea, Japan, Israel/Palestine, Turkey, Australia, Brazil, India or Pakistan or even for that matter different parts of the US we'd hear some perspectives with key differences. For example, in NYC there are immense amounts of money sloshing around in 'digital design,' but in very contingent ways. I think they're mainly a byproduct of megacorps' distinctions between their 'core' capacities (where they make direct investments in employees) versus peripheral needs (which they can outsource at lavish rates to agencies and boutiques, which can easily be jettisoned ). It doesn't take much effort to see how this will end in tears for many. Felix is absolutely right that this is all at root political -- and not just politicized, in the way noted above, but political in the sharply defined sense of people's will and ability to recognize where they stand in structural terms and to act effectively on that understanding. This is where the roll (I would say the *plight*) of faculty expresses itself most poignantly, because faculties these days are at a fork in the road, or, as I think, sitting on the edge of a knife. Their status n veery sense is directly grounded in their employment in a particular kind of institution -- one whose function is, basically, to mediate change in a sort of Goldilocks way, i.e., not too much and not too little. That mediation takes many forms, some 'synchronic' (e.g., sectoral), some 'diachronic' (e.g., generational). But, internally as it were, a central part of this process is the practice of standing 'outside' the forces it mediates -- in ways that are both imaginary and real. What does education do, after all, but transform the imaginary into the real, yes? In 'digital' fields, this ambiguity or ambivalence is completely concrete in ways that were exemplified by the recent ruckus over the Facebook 'manipulation' study. From a certain, very idealized standpoint, the FB study shocks the conscience, violates important ethical norms and probably many laws as well, and so on. At the same time, I think many people working in these fields are utterly befuddled by the ruckus, because that woolly combination of study and intervention is the *point* of design; and from that parochial perspective, the academics who are upset by it seem like the village green preservation society, hopelessly naive nostalgists. Worse, that nostalgia prevents them from seeing as clearly as they should the ways in which the FB study exemplifies a profound shift in universities, where declining public funding and prestige is forcing them to seek out alternative sources of funding and prestige. That shift from public to private sources of funding is another area where regional differences will express themselves *very* clearly. The political, economic, and cultural traditions that have shaped higher education -- again, in part, as a mediator -- as a *national* phenomenon. Historical experiences in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany have varied dramatically in the postwar period, to say nothing of the countries I mentioned above that we haven't heard from. So I think it doesn't make much sense to spend time on particular national studies about the economic prospects of any given 'creative' practice -- in particular, *photography*, as though it were a useful historical constant or reference on any level. But if every single thing about photography has changed since, say, WW2, we can at least note that it *existed* before that war. The same cannot be said of 'digital' fields, can it? So presumably they've changed even more than photography in that same period -- not least, by absorbing it. Given these abysmal depths of change, I don't think (_pace_
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 8:46 PM, t byfield tbyfi...@panix.com wrote: Felix is absolutely right that this is all at root political -- and not just politicized, in the way noted above, but political in the sharply defined sense of people's will and ability to recognize where they stand in structural terms and to act effectively on that understanding. The problem is that such an argument can also be used to kill off discussion or engagement; the problem is political-economical, so it needs to be solved through some larger political action. This paints a rather simplistic picture of politics (and economics) that ignores micropolitics, and it also paints a reductive picture of the arts (including the messy in-between-disciplines such as media art/design/studies/technology) because it implies that their very practice cannot be political. - With that, I do not just mean political in a descriptive or reflective sense, but also in a constructive and experimental sense. All avant-garde arts movements that deserved their name, from Russian futurism to present-day afrofuturism, have been political in that sense. In 'digital' fields, this ambiguity or ambivalence is completely concrete in ways that were exemplified by the recent ruckus over the Facebook 'manipulation' study. From a certain, very idealized standpoint, the FB study shocks the conscience, violates important ethical norms and probably many laws as well, and so on. At the same time, I think many people working in these fields are utterly befuddled by the ruckus, because that woolly combination of study and intervention is the *point* of design; and from that parochial perspective, the academics who are upset by it seem like the village green preservation society, hopelessly naive nostalgists. Worse, that nostalgia prevents them from seeing as clearly as they should the ways in which the FB study exemplifies a profound shift in universities, where declining public funding and prestige is forcing them to seek out alternative sources of funding and prestige. I only see an issue of critical media literacy. The same experiment could have been conducted, just with different triggers and measuring methods, 30 years ago using network TV as a medium instead of Facebook. There would hardly have been the same outcry because it was common wisdom that TV manipulates its viewers. Today, this outcry only speaks of complete naiveness, even of educated people, towards media like Facebook. That shift from public to private sources of funding is another area where regional differences will express themselves *very* clearly. Again, I fail to see a fundamental difference. And the field of media studies always has been tainted. To quote the introductory paragraph of the 1969 Playboy interview with McLuhan: His free-for-all theorizing has attracted the attention of top executives at General Motors (who paid him a handsome fee to inform them that automobiles were a thing of the past), Bell Telephone (to whom he explained that they didn???t really understand the function of the telephone) and a leading package-design house (which was told that packages will soon be obsolete). Anteing up $5000, another huge corporation asked him to predict ??? via closed-circuit television ??? what their own products will be used for in the future; and Canada???s turned-on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau engages him in monthly bull sessions designed to improve his television image. [ http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/] The political, economic, and cultural traditions that have shaped higher education -- again, in part, as a mediator -- as a *national* phenomenon. Historical experiences in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany have varied dramatically in the postwar period, to say nothing of the countries I mentioned above that we haven't heard from. So I think it doesn't make much sense to spend time on particular national studies about the economic prospects of any given 'creative' practice -- in particular, *photography*, as though it were a useful historical constant or reference on any level. Ted, this is a plainly ridiculous statement if you only think of the cultural and media history of photography, and to which degree it has shaped critical thinking on media from Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes. And photography ranks, next to fashion, as one of the most globalized and internationalized 'creative industries'. The $2000 average sales figure of Dutch photographers also reflects global star photographers like (Dutch nationals) Anton Corbijn and Rineke Dijkstra. And, last not least, photography is one of the main selling points for smartphones these days. If you compare the stated decline of the average wage of photographers to the $715 million Facebook paid for Instagram - a company with only 13 employees - then photography is just a powerful example for contemporary shifts in media and economy. If we look at the larger picture, we see a
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
I'd like to engage with the last paragraph of Florian's post- And ask whether the generally low pay and insecure conditions for practitioners of what have become known as the creative economy really is such a new phenomenon? Are the average earnings enjoyed/endured by commercial photographers (and designers/illustrators/animators/writers) that Florian identifies as $20,000/year really that much worse than average earnings for these sectors during other historical periods? Although I don't have data to back this up, I don't think so. When I left college way back before the digital revolution, one might also on average also be lucky to match the income of most factory workers or those in the building trade. Then as now those who entered the creative domains were not attracted by the expectation of big pay packets but instead the lure (sometimes delusion) were the pleasures of creative engagement and the dream of being one of the few to defy the odds and make it big. There was a decade when tech savvy creatives (dread term) defied -for a few short years the usual logic of capitalist supply and demand in this area. But this moment has long since passed and I would argue that we have returned to a longstanding norm. Volatility in the creative sector is cyclicle. For instance, in the often overlooked discipline of illustration a large class of well paid illustrators (engravers) who produced illustrations for popular Victorian news journals (on an industrial scale) became surplus to requirements with the introduction of half tone photography to news print. However illustration did not disappear it re-invented itself as a more expressive and interpretive craft. And carved a large new niche for itself as publishers and art directors re-discovered the fact that images sell! They sell arguments, ideology and they sell units. Today the same domain is undergoing a similar trauma as cheap stock images (among many factors) are undermining the lively-hoods of commercial editorial illustrators. And forcing adaptation as some seek to embrace the possibilities of digitally native platforms with thumbnail animations, live data feeds etc. I guess what I am saying is that the arts (including the commercial sector) have always been riskier than most and the rewards of a life of expressive creative engagement has always had to be balanced against greater risk and sacrifice. We may aspire to change this reality but is it really a new set of conditions ? David Garcia In the media and information sector, the business model for the new players (Google, Apple, Facebook) has not only been centralization, but also the fact that they are media companies that no longer employ content creators. This conversely means that thee economic exchange value of media creation, in the classic sense of editorial or artistic/audiovisual/design work, is sinking to unforeseen lows. For regional commercial video producers in Europe, to take an example with which I'm familiar, hourly rates are the same as for repairman only in the best case; in most cases, they are lower, and don't reflect investment into equipment. Another example: according to market research, the average pre-tax income of commercial photographers in the Netherlands is about $20,000/year. If this is indicative of any larger trend in media jobs, then it means that nothing is more obsolete than the notion of the creative class, but that the bulk of information society and media jobs have become working class employment or worse. d a v i d g a r c i a new-tactical-research.co.uk # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
Hello David, And ask whether the generally low pay and insecure conditions for practitioners of what have become known as the creative economy really is such a new phenomenon? Are the average earnings enjoyed/endured by commercial photographers (and designers/illustrators/animators/writers) that Florian identifies as $20,000/year really that much worse than average earnings for these sectors during other historical periods? I should have been more concrete in my posting. The $20,000/year figure came from a market research study on Dutch professional photographers - in other words, a demography where photographers who identify themselves as visual artists are a small minority, and the bulk of the profession is represent by photojournalists, commercial portrait and wedding photographers and the like. The same study also said that the $20,000 figure represents an income loss of 20% in comparison to statistics gathered three years earlier. Colleagues working in advertising tell me that today's production budgets for commercials have more than halved in comparison to the golden age in the 80s and 90s. In graphic design, hardly any of the big bureaus still exist anymore, and freelancers working at home have taken their place. Aside from anecdotal evidence, my colleague Paul Rutten has compiled hard figures and statistics for the creative industries in the Netherlands that clearly show shrinkage [https://hro.app.box.com/s/gz6vf5hkn99ndsta2psz] along with the rest of the economy since 2008. (For the U.S., the Salon.com article The Creative Class is a Lie drew similar conclusions in 2011: The dream of a laptop-powered 'knowledge class' is dead. The media is melting. Blame the economy - and the Web, http://www.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/.) Intuitively, this makes sense, but it sharply contradicts the run-of-the-mill rhetoric that the creative industries are the area of biggest growth within the overall economy. I guess what I am saying is that the arts (including the commercial sector) have always been riskier than most and the rewards of a life of expressive creative engagement has always had to be balanced against greater risk and sacrifice. I wouldn't argue with that! We may aspire to change this reality but is it really a new set of conditions ? What seems to have changed is the fully commercial sector of the arts. Large parts of it have economically collapsed and therefore no longer provide alternative income opportunities. In other words, wedding photography no longer pays the bills for experimental photographers, copywriting no longer the bills of starving writers, etc.etc. -F # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
Hello David, And ask whether the generally low pay and insecure conditions for practitioners of what have become known as the creative economy really is such a new phenomenon? Are the average earnings enjoyed/endured by commercial photographers (and designers/illustrators/animators/writers) that Florian identifies as $20,000/year really that much worse than average earnings for these sectors during other historical periods? I should have been more concrete in my posting. The $20,000/year figure came from a market research study on Dutch professional photographers - in other words, a demography where photographers who identify themselves as visual artists are a small minority, and the bulk of the profession is represent by photojournalists, commercial portrait and wedding photographers and the like. The same study also said that the $20,000 figure represents an income loss of 20% in comparison to statistics gathered three years earlier. Colleagues working in advertising tell me that today's production budgets for commercials have more than halved in comparison to the golden age in the 80s and 90s. In graphic design, hardly any of the big bureaus still exist anymore, and freelancers working at home have taken their place. Aside from anecdotal evidence, my colleague Paul Rutten has compiled hard figures and statistics for the creative industries in the Netherlands that clearly show shrinkage [https://hro.app.box.com/s/gz6vf5hkn99ndsta2psz] along with the rest of the economy since 2008. (For the U.S., the Salon.com article The Creative Class is a Lie drew similar conclusions in 2011: The dream of a laptop-powered 'knowledge class' is dead. The media is melting. Blame the economy - and the Web, http://www.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/.) Intuitively, this makes sense, but it sharply contradicts the run-of-the-mill rhetoric that the creative industries are the area of biggest growth within the overall economy. I guess what I am saying is that the arts (including the commercial sector) have always been riskier than most and the rewards of a life of expressive creative engagement has always had to be balanced against greater risk and sacrifice. I wouldn't argue with that! We may aspire to change this reality but is it really a new set of conditions ? What seems to have changed is the fully commercial sector of the arts. Large parts of it have economically collapsed and therefore no longer provide alternative income opportunities. In other words, wedding photography no longer pays the bills for experimental photographers, copywriting no longer the bills of starving writers, etc.etc. -F # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
Pando.com: New San Francisco billboard warns workers they'll be replaced by iPads if they demand a fair wage http://tinyurl.com/mn2xzzn # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime More Crisis in the Information Society
Your posting on the crisis of the information society struck me as a useful summary of a current state of affairs. There seem to be obvious conclusions to be drawn from this which, apparently, nobody dares to clearly state: (a) The Internet - i.e. anything traveling over TCP/IP and routed via DNS - cannot be trusted for any form of truly private or classified information. It needs to be seen as one, global, public billboard - yet with varied privileges of access that non-corporate and non-governmental users are in not control of. The fact that all information received through this network is, as you write, potentially tampered, is the second issue on top of the privacy issue. However, these restrictions still imply that the Internet can serve such good purposes as running UbuWeb (to refer to Kenny Goldsmith's article on this list) or Nettime. Crypto activism does not solve these two issues despite its good intentions. Too many core technologies such as OpenSSL, TrueCrypt, PGP-E-Mail (with its lack of meta data encryption), TOR, ... have turned out to be flawed or compromised. They all can do more harm than good for one's privacy if one isn't a highly skilled computer user using non-mainstream operating systems like Tails. Offline communication still remains a simple alternative for dealing with these restrictions. A good example is Henry Warwick's Radical Tactics of the Offline Library ( http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/no-07-radical-tactics-of-the-offline-library-henry-warwick/ ). (b) These two above issues lead to the logical conclusion that no critical infrastructure should ever rely on Internet communication. That includes all mainstream scenarios of the Internet of Things, Smart Cities and most other technologies marketed with a smart prefix, drones, robotics and autonomous cars. To give one example: If I correctly interpret information I received from a colleague of mine, a researcher in water management, then it is already possible to flood the Netherlands through computer hacking because its current systems of levees and watergates is controlled via a local sensors in the levees connected to a data center that controls the pumps based on the real time sensor data; all these data connections run over the Internet via a VPN. If technology development blindly proceeds with such smart technologies, we'll be able to study Philip K. Dick novels and Terminator movies as predictive scenarios - and write screenplays for war movies where countries get attacked by someone hacking and crashing all Google cars. (c) The San Francisco billboard likely epitomizes the end of an information society and media bubble period roughly between 1998 and 2008. In that time, the classical media and information economy, and their jobs, were still in swing while the industries that were about to replace them first came in as additional players working on venture capital. The temporary coexistence of these two economies created an inflated market. I remember how in the late 1990s, newspapers such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung suddenly boomed and expanded (employing some Nettimers as writers, btw.) because dotcoms massively placed their ads in them. In retrospect, this could be described as the media eating itself. The same must have historically happened in other industries, for example in transportation, when railroads where built while coachmen were still in business. In both cases, the economic growth model - and investment stimulus - for the new industry is the prospect of taking over the market with a fraction of the previous costs and resources, basically replacing comparatively inefficient, local and regional players with a few global players. In the media and information sector, the business model for the new players (Google, Apple, Facebook) has not only been centralization, but also the fact that they are media companies that no longer employ content creators. This conversely means that thee economic exchange value of media creation, in the classic sense of editorial or artistic/audiovisual/design work, is sinking to unforeseen lows. For regional commercial video producers in Europe, to take an example with which I'm familiar, hourly rates are the same as for repairman only in the best case; in most cases, they are lower, and don't reflect investment into equipment. Another example: according to market research, the average pre-tax income of commercial photographers in the Netherlands is about $20,000/year. If this is indicative of any larger trend in media jobs, then it means that nothing is more obsolete than the notion of the creative class, but that the bulk of information society and media jobs have become working class employment or worse. -F On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 6:20 PM, michael gurstein gurst...@gmail.com wrote: Pando.com: New San Francisco billboard warns workers they'll be replaced by iPads if they demand a fair wage http://tinyurl.com/mn2xzzn # distributed via
