not

They comprise the ultimate YouTube playlist: a selection of the most unique, innovative, groundbreaking video work being created and distributed online during the past two years.

12:21 < barak> pash u googenheima http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmPKT4qTrQY
12:24 < ach> barak: tie posledne dve su super
12:30 < ach> barak:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DVN4m41QCE&feature=player_embedded#! super
komentare od cechov :)
12:34 < pht_> j tak to uz len otazka casu kym dostane ‘best new track’ na
spomalene shangaan electro
12:35 < pht_> hajpa hajpa
12:39 < barak> milos vojtechovsky: dobre, i kdyz ta guggenheimova soutez vypada
jako uplna kravina, jak se prave ujistuji
12:48 < ach> barak: samotne su tie videa fajn, len nerozumiem o co presne im
ide :)
12:51 < barak> videam alebo organizatorom akcie?
12:52 < ach> organizatorom
12:52 < barak> hierarchizovat horizontalny obsah
12:52 < barak> via modernisticka idea umenia
12:53 < barak> ako vrcholu spolocenskej aktivity
12:54 < barak> a vyberom youtube platformy legitimizovat svoje biele steny pre
21. storocie )
12:55 < ach> palo ti dal preprint svojho clanku na tuto temu?
12:55 < barak> vsetky tri strany (umelci, youtube aj guggenheim) maju myslim
celkom lahko citatelne dovody..
12:55 < barak> pise? nedal, vsak daj
12:55 < ach> pardon, to bol zart!
12:55 < barak> aha haha
12:55 < barak> ci co sa da ine o tom mysliet?
12:56 < ach> neviem, mozme skusit alternativnu interpretaciu podla toho kto je
v porote
12:57 < ach> laurie anderson a animal collective si hladaju novych reziserov
pre videoklipy
12:57 < ach> aronofsky potrebuje kameramana
12:57 < barak> v porote nejake nezname mena vyznamnych kuratorov
12:58 < barak> to by nesli cez guggenheim

Until recently, two main parties@Eur: a right-of-centre party (Christian Democrat, liberal-conservative, people’s) and a left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic); then smaller parties (ecologists, communists).
There is now one predominant centrist party that stands for global capitalism, usually with a liberal cultural agenda (for example, tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities). Opposing this party is an increasingly strong anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by overtly racist neofascist groups.
PL (Tusk’s christdem lib conserv Civic Platform 42% vs Kaczynski’s national conserv Christian Law & Justice 32, 10/07),
NL (Rutte’s cons lib VVD 21% vs Wilders’ right populist PVV 16 vs Cohen’s socdem PvdA 20, 7/10),
NO (Stoltenberg’s socdem Labour 32% vs Jensen’s populist lib Progress 22 vs Solberg’s lib cons Conservative 14, 9/05) – ale lava vlada,
SW (Sahlin’s SocDem 31% vs Reinfeldt’s lib conserv Moderate Party 31, potom daleko nic, 9/10),
HU (Orban’s conserv christdem national Fidesz 53% vs Vona’s radical nationalist Jobbik 17 vs Mesterhazy’s socdem MSZP 17, potom len pod 10, 4/10)

we are entering a new epoch in which crisis – or, rather, a kind of economic state of emergency, with its attendant need for all sorts of austerity measures (cutting benefits, diminishing health and education services, making jobs more temporary) is permanent. Crisis is becoming a way of life.
After 1990 we entered a new era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticised expert administration and the co-ordination of interests. The only way to introduce passion into this kind of politics, the only way to actively mobilise people, is through fear: the fear of immigrants, the fear of crime, the fear of godless sexual depravity, the fear of the excessive state (with its burden of high taxation and control), the fear of ecological catastrophe, as well as the fear of harassment (political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear).

What is increasingly emerging as the central human right in late-capitalist societies is the right not to be harassed, which is the right to be kept at a safe distance from others.

The contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics? This leads us to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness – the decaffeinated Other.

After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as “unreasonable” and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures: “We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and east European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organise a reasonable anti-immigrant protection.” barbarism with a human face. It reveals the regression from the Christian love of one’s neighbour back to the pagan privileging of our tribe versus the barbarian Other.

Once a critical mass of people express interest, anybody can offer to teach the class. A small committee moderates the final steps of the process, including finding an instructor and scheduling the course. However, committee members typically step down after several months, making room for new committee members to join and keeping the system as open to transformation as possible.

Telic co-directors Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton decided to discontinue Telic’s long-running program of exhibitions, performances, lectures, happenings, etc. and concentrate on The Public School.

We started the public school in our basement to be in conversation with the exhibition space (open to all kinds of conversation: agreement, contradiction, influence, etc). After about 6 months, we were nearing 5 years of exhibitions and we felt that the school was more exciting for us to do than the exhibitions…it allowed us to work with people whose practices we wanted to support (practices that were conceptual, process-based, research-oriented, or other flavors of non-object centered practice, things that weren’t widely recognized as art, and so on) in a very easy and organic way. The gallery and exhibition context, on the other hand, imposed all kinds of expectations that were rarely very useful for those practices. Even an exhibition that shows something in progress requires this level of exhibit-ability that was more of a distraction.

Also when we swapped the gallery for a school, we swapped a number of terms, which had their own effects: an exhibition maybe became a class, the audience became…students? When a student goes to a class, they go with different expectations and they are prepared to engage with the others and the subject in a different way. They are prepared to stay longer, ask questions, argue with others, etc.

We could work with projects that were still only an idea and help them come into fruition; we could work with projects that have been going on for 10 years; we could work with vague constellations of thought or people that barely amounted to a project. All of these possibilities made it exciting for us to switch models and start operating as a school.

There are so many art worlds, it’s difficult to answer this question…I think the public school provides a certain kind of resource or space, maybe like a cafe or a bar or a library that allows for art and non-art, for juxtaposition of people and territories and ideas. [..] And I always imagine how huge Los Angeles is, and how small our new space is, and really can’t understand the relationship when the scales are so astoundingly dissimilar.

The galleries here are pretty conservative and the young people and students coming out of schools and others who don’t participate solely in the commercial art market are pretty ambitious, energetic, and creative and so they just make their own contexts for doing things.

I don’t think it’s sustainable, but file sharing is resilient. That part is sustainable if what’s meant is something that will weather bad economies, legal threats, changes in technology, etc. AAAARG probably won’t. But I don’t think it matters; it’s not trying to be the new library. That said, I don’t think it will disappear, I don’t think anything ever does. The word promiscuity for the digital object I think is a really good one.

I think pdf readers are going to be another real problem because they will demonstrate that pdfs are a market, a useful copy of the real thing. (parenthetically, I love when people upload highly personalized scans. I much prefer these to fresh ebooks). As ebook readers demonstrate a market, then sites like AAAARG become intolerable because they sit right in the middle of that market and maybe demonstrate how that market is built through the production of scarcity and highly controlled supply. But like I said it never goes away. People have been scanning and sharing books for a long time.

Verso letter?
My response was “Of course we’ll comply. Cease and desist letters are no joke, especially when backed by 3 million per year in sales.” I’m in the camp that it’s not only about copyright, so I’m not going to refuse to budge. It’s about sharing and exchange of knowledge, so if someone asks that I take it down, I will. But I wish it were the author who would ask. I prefer to think more about the desires of authors and readers. Publishers have other stakes.

There’s obviously nothing natural about property, copyright, restrictions placed on distribution, etc. The kind of sharing that people find themselves wanting to engage in, if it becomes normalized, can suggest possibilities for other ways of thinking about these things (which don’t always rely on cease and desist letters, defensive postures, and territoriality).

That’s why I’m also more enthusiastic about taking a positive approach to all of this – its not about fighting copyright or standing up to publishers or something

act of sharing itself constituted a kind of conversation. Focusing too much on the comments leads to a reductive idea of conversation, although I have visited sites with great comments.

The issues section instead becomes a kind of conversation, because people add texts into other people’s issues. Also it is a way to articulate your own argument through selection, omission, etc. The “shared issues” are less predicated on “here is my collection” and more on “I wish there was this collection, but I don’t know what would go in it”. That moves it to something before the presentation/ exhibition/ publication stage — to the earlier, discursive stage.

From Wikipedia: “small is beautiful” and “make each program do one thing well”.

IT sector takes over the media industry, the cult of “free” and “open” is nothing but ironic revenge on the e-commerce madness.
During the post-9/11 reconstruction period, Silicon Valley found renewed inspiration in two projects: the vital energy of the search start-up Google (which successfully managed to postpone its IPO for years), and the rapidly emerging blog scene
Whereas blogging embodied the non-profit, empowering aspect of personal responses grouped around a link, Google developed techniques that enabled it to parasite on other people’s content, a.k.a. “organizing the world’s information”
Profit is no longer made at the level of production, but through the control of distribution channels. Apple, Amazon, eBay and Google are the biggest winners in this game
Whereas Keen could still be read as a grumpy and jealous response of the old media class, this is no longer the case with Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch (2008),[2] in which he analyses the rise of cloud computing
The last chapter, entitled “iGod”, indicates a “neurological turn” in net criticism. Starting from the observation that Google’s intention has always been to turn its operation into an Artificial Intelligence, “an artificial brain that is smarter than your brain” (Sergey Brin), Carr turns his attention to future of human cognition: “The medium is not only the message. The medium is the mind. It shapes what we see and how we see it.” With the Internet stressing speed, we become the Web’s neurons: “The more links we click, pages we view, and transactions we make, the more intelligence the Web makes, the more economic value it gains, and the more profit it throws off.”
In his famous 2008 Atlantic Monthly essay “Does Google make us stupid? What does the Internet do to our brains?” Carr takes this argument a few steps further and argues that constant switching between windows and sites and frantic use of search engines will ultimately dumb us down.
Internet-savvy users, she states, seem to lose the ability to read and enjoy thick novels and comprehensive monographs.
Carr and others cleverly exploit the Anglo-American obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness – mainstream science reporting cannot get enough of it. A thorough economic (let alone Marxist) analysis of Google and the free and open complex is seriously uncool.
The Internet and society debate should be about the politics and aesthetics of its network architecture and not be “medicalized”. So instead of repeating what the brain faction proclaims, I would like to turn to trends that need equal attention
There is a fundamental shift away from the static archive towards the “flow” and the “river”.
History is something to get rid of. Silicon Valley is gearing up for the colonization of real-time, away from the static web “page” that still refers to the newspaper. Users no longer feel the need to store information and the “cloud” facilitates this liberating movement.
Some have even said goodbye to the very idea of “search” because it is too time-consuming an activity often with unsatisfactory outcomes.
Despite all the justified calls for “slow communication”, the market is moving in the opposite direction. Soon, people may not have time to pour some file from a dusty database.
Much like in finance, the media industry is exploring possibilities to maximize surplus value from the exploitation of milliseconds.
There is no evidence that the world is becoming more virtual. We are no longer encouraged to act out some role, but forced to be “ourselves” (which is no less theatrical or artificial).
Trust is the oil of global capitalism and the security state, required by both sides in any transaction or exchange
The old idea that the virtual is there to liberate you from your old self has collapsed. It is all about self-management and techno-sculpturing: how do you shape the self in real-time flow?
The self that is presented here is post-cosmetic. The ideal is to become neither the Other nor the better human. The polished perfect personality lacks empathy and is straight-out suspect.
Our profiles remain cold and unfinished if we do not expose at least some aspects of our private lives. Otherwise we are considered robots, anonymous members of a vanishing twentieth century mass culture.
In Cold Intimacies, Eva Illouz puts it this way: “It is virtually impossible to distinguish the rationalization and commodification of selfhood from the capacity of the self to shape and help itself and to engage in deliberation and communication with others.”
At first glance, the idea of the netizen is a mid-1990s response to the first wave of users that took over the Net. The netizen moderates, cools down heated debates, and above all responds in a friendly, non-repressive manner. The netizen does not represent the Law, is no authority, and acts like a personal advisor, a guide in a new universe. The netizen is thought to act in the spirit of good conduct and corporate citizenship. Users were to take social responsibility themselves – it was not a call for government regulation and was explicitly designed to keep legislators out of the Net.
Bots play a increasing role in the automated policing of large websites.
“personal information autonomy”, as David d’Heilly once put it
The rise of the national web
42.6 per cent of Internet users are located in Asia
Only around 25 per cent of content is in English these days.
China is now exporting its national firewall technology to Sri Lanka, which intends to use it to block the “offensive websites” of exile Tamil Tiger groups
“Democratization” means that firms and politicians have a goal and then invite others to contribute to it.
young people are reluctant to use Twitter – it just isn’t their thing.
social networking sites did not originate in a social movement setting. They were developed as post-dotcom responses to the e-commerce wave of the late 1990s, which had no concept of what users were looking for online
Instead of being regarded merely as consumers of goods and services, Web 2.0 users are pressed to produce as much data as possible. Profiles are abstracted from so-called “user generated content” that are then sold to advertisers as direct marketing data.
In China, dissidents with their own proxy servers that help to circumvent the Wall remain marginal as long as they cannot transport their “memes” into other social contexts.
11:11 < barak> Carr and others cleverly exploit the Anglo-American obsession
with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness .
mainstream science reporting cannot get enough of it. A thorough
economic (let alone Marxist) analysis of Google and the free and
open complex is seriously uncool.
11:12 < barak> Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch (2008), in which he analyses the
rise of cloud computing
11:12 < barak> The last chapter, entitled “iGod”, indicates a “neurological
turn” in net criticism
11:13 < barak> coskoro na logu
11:18 < barak> carr napisal pred dvoma rokmi ten google makes us stupid clanok
11:19 < barak> ze freneticke prepinanie medzi oknami v prehliadaci etc nas
oblbuje
11:20 < barak> Whereas Carr’s take on the collapse of the white male’s
multi-tasking capacities had the couleur locale of a US
IT-business expert a.k.a. East Coast intellectual, Schirrmacher
moves the debate into the continental European context of an
aging middle class driven by defensive anxiety over Islamic
fundamentalism and Asian hypermodernity.
11:21 < barak> Like Carr, Schirrmacher seeks evidence of a deteriorating human
brain that can no longer keep up with iPhones, Twitter and
Facebook on top of the already existing information flows from
television, radio and the printed press.
11:21 < barak> potom schirrmachra sprdli ze je konzervativec a navyse novinar v
sebeobrane voci internetu
11:22 < ach> typicka sokratovska kritika noveho media.
11:22 < barak> jj
11:22 < barak> lanier detto
11:23 < barak> Lanier asks why the past two decades have not resulted in new
music styles and subcultures, and blames the strong emphasis on
retro in contemporary, remix-dominated music culture.
11:23 < barak> ?!?!
11:23 < ach> ]]: aha, uz to stihli dat dole :)
11:23 < barak> akoby hudba nebola vzdy retro
11:24 < barak> The democratization of digital tools has not led to the
emergence of “super-Gershwins”. Instead, Lanier sees “pattern
exhaustion”, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of
variations on traditional designs and becomes less creative:
11:26 < ach> “When asked why in the past 20 years, on paper, new types of music
and culture is characterized by the reasons for Yee, but the
defendant quickly and again, mixed culture.”
11:29 < ach> pre triforce gang
http://i461.photobucket.com/albums/qq340/pigcore/061.jpg
11:33 < ach> “The night smelled like Roisin Murphy, and a child has been born.
And it wasn’t a regular child, it was a girl with very small head.”
11:33 < ach> …25 translations later we get:
11:33 < ach> “Murphy Dermde overnight. So this is no ordinary boy with his head
woman.”
11:35 < barak> Some have even said goodbye to the very idea of “search” because
it is too time-consuming an activity often with unsatisfactory
outcomes.
11:36 < barak> There is a fundamental shift away from the static archive
towards the “flow” and the “river”
11:36 < barak> History is something to get rid of. Silicon Valley is gearing up
for the colonization of real-time, away from the static
11:36 < barak> web “page” that still refers to the newspaper. Users no longer
feel the need to store information and the “cloud”
11:36 < barak> facilitates this liberating movement.
11:36 < barak> oda na cloud computing
11:37 < barak> This could, potentially, be the point at which the Google empire
starts to crumble
11:37 < barak> ^ tak
11:38 < barak> Despite all the justified calls for “slow communication”, the
market is moving in the opposite direction. Soon, people may not
have time to pour some file from a dusty database
11:40 < barak> It is no longer necessary to approach the PC with a question and
then dive into the archive. The Internet as a whole is going
real time in an attempt to come closer to the messiness, the
complexities of the real-existing social world.
11:40 < ach> utopicke/zovseobecnujuce.
11:40 < barak> jj, lovink at his best :)
11:40 < barak> look at Twitter, which resembles ascii email and SMS messages on
your 2001 cell phone
11:41 < ach> moj twitter urcite nepripomina ani jedno
11:41 < barak> to sa tykalo dizajnu
11:43 < ach> ved ma uplne ine farby ako moj telefon.
11:49 < barak> The self that is presented here is post-cosmetic. The ideal is
to become neither the Other nor the better human. The
11:49 < barak> polished perfect personality lacks empathy and is straight-out
suspect.
11:49 < barak> Our profiles remain cold and unfinished if we do not expose at
least some aspects of our private lives. Otherwise we are
11:49 < barak> considered robots, anonymous members of a vanishing twentieth
century mass culture.

filesharing cases @USA:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas / verdict: $1.92m; ended in a mistrial. But in that case, the judge commented that he believed that the damages sought were something like 1000 times excessive. / Earlier this year (2009), Jammie Thomas Rasset was found guilty of illegally sharing 24 songs via Kazaa. She was ordered to pay a total of $1.92m, or $80,000 per song.
2. RIAA vs Tenenbaum (aj ked v PDFkach je Capitol Recs)

* DMCA act of 1999: (1) $750-$30,000 per song; (2) $750-$150,000 per song if the infringement was “willful”
* T shared mp3s via Kazaa
* 2003, RIAA starts new business-plan, T received a notice (from Sony BMG, Warner, Atlantic Records, Arista Records, and UMG Records) claiming “copyright infringement”, and told him that he could settle the case for $3,500 (via 1-800-DONT-SUE-ME-style call centre). He offered $500, and sent a money order in that amount. That offer was denied.
* 30,000 people have been accused and almost every single case has settled. * The average settlement is between $3,000 – $12,000. * There are actually 133 people in the same docket as Joel (??)
* In 2007, a complaint showed up on his doorstep after years of silence requiring that Joel appear in court. Rather than backing down, like the other 30,000 people, Joel chose to stand his ground and elected to proceed pro se with the help of his mother. Joel filed an answer with a counterclaim asserting abuse of federal power and that the excessive damages were unconstitutional. Joel appeared in court where the Judge ordered the parties into settlement. In the settlement, Joel offered to settle for $5,000. The opposing counsel denied and counter-offered a settlement of $10,500 to be paid over 1 year. Joel declined.
* Aug 2007 – suit filed, accusing T of C infringement for the downloading of 7 music files
* Shortly before the trial, the RIAA increased the number of songs he was being sued for from 7 to 30.
* last week of July 2009 (till 31st) – trial: T is guilty; $675,000 award (jury decided to go to the lower end of willful and chose $22,500 a song); T admitted he down’ed many mp3s; lawyer Charles Nesson said he was a ‘kid’ and internet changed things and music industry had been ‘slow to adapt’; T claimed the law under which he is being prosecuted is unconstitutional
* next: appeal, if fail then file for bankruptcy

Joel Tenenbaum – *1983, @Providence RI, MA in phy+math @Maryland, currently PhD phy

JP Barlow/EFF @ court as expert:
– “economics of ‘file-sharing’ can work to the great benefit of musicians and creators”
– Grateful Dead let audience tape their shows and invented ‘viral marketing’, solving the advertising problem
– internet/p2p “allow us to do which we, as humans, fundamentally need to do: share art”
– “music industry will never be endangered because [..] we as humans absolutely require music, and because in the music business as i know it, familiarity, not scarcity, creates value”
– “online world presents us with a ‘gift economy’, where no moral blameworthiness attaches to non-commercial sharing, and [..] this does not threaten the music industry”
– “recording industry is complicit in allowing itself to hold on to antiquated business models rather than adjust to the changing landscape around them”

Nesson, 2009: RIAA is shifting strategy – contract deals with ISPs, three strike rule ~ 3 times infringes copyright and you’re cut off internet

in email debate the copyleft experts (whom Nesson had planned to call as expert witnesses to testify on Tenenbaum’s behalf) tell Nesson in no uncertain terms that his plan to mount a fair use defense of Tenenbaum’s peer-to-peer activities is a sure legal loser.
* Lessig urges Nesson to argue for outright jury nullification: “I am surprised if the intent is to fight this case as if what joel did was not against the law. of course it was against the law, and you do the law too much kindness by trying to pretend (or stretch) “fair use” excuses what he did. It doesn’t. But if you want to argue it does, then I should think it a big mistake to include Terry on the team, or me for that matter. I have given literally hundreds of speeches where I expressly say p2p filesharing is wrong, and kids shouldn’t do it. I think FREE CULTURE says that more than a dozen times. ”
* William Fisher [proposes replacing much of copyright and DRM with a gov-administered tax-funded reward system, making songs/movies legal to download; pro semiotic democracy]: “neither civil suits against individual downloaders nor secondary-liability suits against intermediaries will solve the crisis in the entertainment industry. The best solution to the crisis, rather, is some variant of the blanket licensing system that I, Neil Netanel, and the EFF have been advocating for some time and that now appear to be gaining some traction.”

lessons:
* you don’t have to accept phone contact from the RIAA lawyers, but could demand correspondence by mail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_v._Tenenbaum
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/jul/27/filesharing-music-industry
JP Barlow: http://beckermanlegal.com/pdf/?file=/Lawyer_Copyright_Internet_Law/sony_tenenbaum_090410ExpertWitnessReportBarlow.pdf
Nesson, Lessig, Zittrain, Barlow, etc: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13831120/Nessonblog33009

To make the case for “no technical solutions”, Hardin notes the limits placed on the availability of energy (and material resources) on Earth, and also the consequences of these limits for “quality of life”. To maximize population, one needs to minimize resources spent on anything other than simple survival, and vice versa.

hypothetical example of a pasture shared by local herders. individual herder will continue to add additional animals to his or her herd. However, since all herders reach the same rational conclusion, overgrazing and degradation of pasture is its long-term fate.

examples of latter day “commons”, such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, national parks, advertising, and even parking meters.

potential management solutions: commons problems including privatization, polluter pays, and regulation.

The metaphor illustrates the argument that free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately dooms the resource through over-exploitation.

as architect consider “software” of space (sounds, smell, light, temperature, electromagnetic fields, social relationships, etc) rather than “hardware” (floors, walls, roof, etc) | The City… takes everything explored in Everyware as a given, and a point of departure | not just a social networking project for sensor data | emphasis on contextually specific “environments” rather than object-centric “sensors” | Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) | backend capable of handling millions of users | internet of things | technologies of “extreme connectivity” | ‘eco-system’ of conversant devices, buildings & environments

Pachube evolved out three strands of thought:
1) the geographical non-specificity of architecture these days as people live their lives in constant connection with people in remote spaces
2) a desire to open up the production process of “smart homes” in reaction to current trends for placing the design and construction process solely in the hands of knowledgeable others.
3) an emphasis on contextually specific “environments” rather than object-centric “sensors”
– environment is a construction process and not a medium; nor is it a state or an entity
– one of the major failings of the usual ubicomp approach is to consider the connectivity and technology at the object-level, rather than at the environment-level. It’s built into much of contemporary Western culture to be object-centric, but at the level of “environment” we talk more about context, about disposition and subjective experience.

I asked Bruce Sterling to be a “visionary” adviser because he was one of the people early on to envisage the concepts and ramifications of “spimes” (his neologism for ’space-time objects’). While I agree that “spimes” are directly relevant, what I found most important from his conception was the concept of “wrangling” – being actively and productively engaged and responsible in the development of spimed environments. I think it was a crucial leap: to talk about “wranglers” rather than “end-users”.

A central task for reimagining society today is to develop an alternative management of the common wealth we share.

two distinct but related domains of the common:
– ECO ecological (natural) common [but this category is insufficient] – earth and all of its ecosystems, including the atmosphere, the oceans and rivers, and the forests, as well as all the forms of life that interact with them.
– ART social and economic (artificial) common [but this category is insufficient] – products of human labor and creativity that we share, such as ideas, knowledges, images, codes, affects, social relationships, and the like.

ECO & ART:
common in both domains confounds the traditional measures of economic value and imposes instead the value of life as the only valid scale of evaluation.

contradictions (ale ukazuju sa ako complementaries):
ECO – pro conservation, since earth is limited, logic of scarcity; ART – pro creation, open/limitless nature of production of common; ALE: both perspectives refer fundamentally to production/reproduction of forms of life, which are happening simultaneously (since eg. work-time vs non-work time collapsed)
ART – interests of humanity as central (ie. extend our politics to all humanity, overcome hierarchies/exclusions of class and property, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity..); ECO – interests much broader than human/animal worlds; ALE: navzajom sa mozu ucit eko-aktivisti a humanrights-aktivisti

The claim for centrality of the common relies on the hypothesis that we are in the midst of an epochal shift from a capitalist economy centered on industrial production to one centered on what can be called immaterial or biopolitical production. Toni Negri and I have argued this hypothesis over the course of three books — Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth.
– {industrial capitalism THEN} Industrial production has been central, rather, in the sense that the qualities of industry — its forms of mechanization, its working day, its wage relations, its regimes of time discipline and precision, and so forth — have progressively been imposed over other sectors of production and social life as a whole, creating not only an industrial economy but also an industrial society.
– {industrial capitalism IS OVER} industry no longer marks the hierarchical position in the various divisions of labor and, more significantly, that the qualities of industry are no longer being imposed over other sectors and society as a whole.
– {immaterial/biopolitical production NOW} (central position of industry is taken over by) production of immaterial goods or goods with a significant immaterial component, such as ideas, knowledges, languages, images, code, and affects (health care workers and educators, fast food workers, call center workers, and flight attendants). The cognitive and affective tools of immaterial production, the precarious, non-guaranteed nature of its wage relations, the temporality of immaterial production (which tends to destroy the structures of the working day and blur the traditional divisions between work-time and nonwork-time), as well as its other qualities are becoming generalized.
+ property: immobile (eg. land) => mobile (eg. commodities) => immaterial (discussions about patents/copyrights; question of exclusivity and reproductibility)

2 contradictions, 2 shared logics form significant basis for understanding guises of common & struggle to preserve/further them; foundation for linking forms of political activism aimed at the autonomy and democratic management of the common:

I. contradiction between private property and the common.
ART: bwn need for common in interest of productivity and need for private in interest of capitalist accumulation
ECO: bwn private nature of accumulation and social nature of resulting damages

II. the common defies traditional capitalist measures of value (or obey radically different scale based on value of life, which we have not yet invented)
ART: value of biopolitical/immaterial goods is immeasurable using traditional system of measure of econ.value; economists cast them as “externalities”, accountants as “intangible assets” (of esoteric value), (global bankrupt largely derives from this)
ECO: value of the common is immeasurable (eg. how much $ is damage costs of having half of Bangladesh under water? or permanent draught in Ethiopia? or destruction of trad. Inuit forms of life?)

watch out (when struggle for the common operate according to opposing logics in ECO and ART):
III. preserve ECO vs limitless prod ART
IV. humanity as frame of reference @ART vs broader @ECO

next: UN Climate Conference, Copenhagen, Dec 2009

next: the common @identity and identity politics; the common @social institutions (family, nation, ..)

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There are media theories (plural) because we do not agree on what media are. I propose that if a theory is a media theory, it should take as axiomatic that mediation is primary, and that everything else (sex, power, exploitation) are effects of mediation and its vicissitudes. If everything from architecture to sunshine mediates, we have the critical agenda mapped for us ­ issue sof reciprocation and mutuality, solidarity, dependence and contingency. Once that is set out, we disagree on other issues ­ modes of causality, interplay between media formations
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-July/003817.html

For then, the audiences will feel increasingly concerned with such questions as “What mechanisms or technical procedure produced that expression?” and “Why did that expression have such an effect upon me, my minds, and my emotion?” and, finally, “What kind of mechanism or procedures must exist within myself, in order that effect or experience could be produced?”
link

Gilbert Simondon criticized Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics, arguing that, “Right from the start, Cybernetics has accepted what all theory of technology must refuse: a classification of technological objects conducted by means of established criteria and following genera and species.” Simondon aimed to overcome the shortcomings of cybernetics by developing a “general phenomenology” of machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon#Individuation_and_technology

Alain Badiou, who has written that Meillassoux’s first book Après la finitude (2006) introduces an entirely new option into modern philosophy, different from Kant’s three alternatives of empiricism, scepticism, and dogmatism | correlationism = humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans => BUT Meillassoux claims that mathematics is what reaches the primary qualities of things as opposed to their secondary qualities as manifested in perception | there is no such thing as causal necessity at all + it is absolutely necessary that the laws of nature be contingent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux

The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze | It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts | the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself.
http://www.anthem-group.net/2009/07/04/the-speculative-turn/

# Connectivity – the capacity to aggregate by making connections at any point on and within itself. # Heterogeneity – the capacity to connect anything with anything other, the linking of unlike elements # Multiplicity – consisting of multiple singularities synthesized into a “whole” by relations of exteriority # Asignifying rupture – not becoming any less of a rhizome when being severely ruptured, the ability to allow a system to function and even flourish despite local “breakdowns”, thanks to deterritorialising and reterritorialising processes # Cartography – described by the method of mapping for orientation from any point of entry within a “whole”, rather than by the method of tracing that re-presents an a priori path, base structure or genetic axis # Decalcomania – forming through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation, thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organization and restriction
http://capitalismandschizophrenia.org/index.php/Rhizome

Agonists believe that we should design democracy so as to optimise the opportunity for people to express their disagreements. However, they also maintain, we should not assume that conflict can be eliminated given sufficient time for deliberation and rational agreement. In other words, conflict has a non-rational or emotional component. These two positions mean that they are opposed to aspects of consociational and deliberative theories of democracy. The former, because it wants to mute conflict through elite consensus, the latter because it gives a rationalist picture of the aspirations of democracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agonistic_pluralism

I use the concept of agonistic pluralism to present a new way to think about democracy which is different from the traditional liberal conception of democracy as a negotiation among interests and is also different to the model which is currently being developed by people like Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls. While they have many differences, Rawls and Habermas have in common the idea that the aim of the democratic society is the creation of a consensus, and that consensus is possible if people are only able to leave aside their particular interests and think as rational beings. However, while we desire an end to conflict, if we want people to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and to provide an arena where differences can be confronted. The democratic process should supply that arena.
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article563.html

The Charter of the Forest assumes a notion of the ‘commons’ or a practice of subsistence commoning in the hydrocarbon energy resources of the time. | they refer to those classes of people whose goal in economic life is the consumption of uses rather than the accumulation of money. In short, they refer to the Many not the Few | Subcommandante Marcos provided the voice of the Zapatistas and the indigenous people of Chiapas calling for the return of Article 27 and the ejidos, or common land, while reminding us of the Magna Carta. As the Many demand water, energy, and wherewithal against the surplus value hogged by the Few
http://www.metamute.org/en/Charters-of-Liberty-in-Black-Face-and-White-Face-Race-Slavery-and-the-Commons

user is not only consumer, but always-already also creates a value; financial crisis (2008) ~ collapse of system of consumerism; Stiegler’s “associated media” (web2) ~ new form of capitalism (not end of it); old school consumerism = dissassociated media (financial crisis is also effect of the end of this kind of world); CC – new form of intellectual property; “process of transindividuation”; co-individuation – we exchange music files and thus transform our musical taste / we produce metadata / produce links / produce attractor, which becomes meta-stabilisation (eg musical fashion); it’s both bottom-up (peer-to-peer) and top-down (owned by companies) = this is the CONFLICT ~ role of philosopher is to produce critique of top-down logic (not denialisation, because we need this logic); we need power developed through “critical apparatuses”; interests of bottom-up VS top-down are not the same (like workers VS capital), but they need each other (workers need get work from capital)

“Richard Florida’s exotic city, his creative city, depends on ghost people, working behind the scenes. Immigrants, people of colour. You want to know what his version of creative is? He’s the relocation agent for the global bourgeoisie. And the rest of us don’t matter.” | the creative class notion gaining traction. “I watched how, in consulting, these ideas took off and became trends,” she said. They suggested an easy fix to increasing urban ills, served with a smile. “It’s palatable, interesting and fun. It’s hard to compete with that.” | new era of socially tolerant capitalism. “But really, it’s a very celebratory and safe way of looking at capital accumulation,” she says. “People like cool places, sure; they’re positive stories. But there are people that get dispossessed, or removed, or erased in these narratives. If you’re a hospital worker, or a child care worker, you’re just erased completely” | “skilled people” – not artists, by any measure – “are key to urban success.”
http://www.thestar.com/article/656837

Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory, are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4

National TV, radio, and newspapers under state control. Text messaging is blocked, web sites filtered | Decisions are made centrally by Mousavi and Karoubi and their campaigns, and are published on their websites, eg. Kalemeh and Ghalam news | Mousavi’s FB calls for demonstrations, every message reaches 65,000+ supporters in his FB group directly | Karbaschi, top adviser to Karoubi, tweets about his activity (@gkarbaschi, in Farsi). Only here Twitter is actually being used to organize protest inside Iran and again, this is centralized organization coming from the campaign of a reformist candidate. @gkarbaschi has 4,700+ followers but is not following feeds of any other users. He is using social media to broadcast to a domestic audience, not to interact | People in Iran are using Twitter as an important broadcast (rather than organizing) tool to report events, slogans, and protest movement + upload videos on YouTube and int’l mainstream media use these in their Iran coverage
http://www.digiactive.org/2009/06/20/iran-beyond-headlines/

When it comes to social media sites (and particularly those that involve photo-sharing), you might want to also account for 1) the people who are forced to spend all day every day with politicians, attorneys general, and policy makers in every state and every country; 2) the hundreds of people who sit and sift through photographs/video looking for illegal content; 3) the round-the-clock staff who field calls from FBI and police; 4) the large teams who battle spam, phishing and hacking; 5) the legal team who has to deal with everyone and then some suing them over issues of safety, porn, etc.
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-June/003646.html

BRIC on 5 June in St Petersburg: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth. | “The artificially maintained unipolar system,” Mr. Medvedev spelled out, is based on “one big centre of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks.”2 At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is that the United States makes too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting is its military spending, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia announced just last week, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and the US buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13969

Member states have been given two years to introduce the legislation to their own legal systems and parliament has asked the EC to review the rules after three years to judge its impact, particular on the digital market. | Directive is now being held up in the Council of Ministers awaiting further debate on the issue. | Artists commonly get between five and 15 percent of sales, with music companies traditionally taking the rest to pay for CD production and distribution. But with CD sales in decline and digital distribution increasing many challenge whether labels deserve to benefit on the same terms for an extra 20 years. Or as Bill Bragg told AP, “Now that they no longer have to (make CDs), that money will go straight into their bottom line.” | “Parliament’s vote will be music to the ears of the big record companies and top-earning artists”
http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-euro-parliament-ups-music-copyright-term-from-50-to-70-years/

The divide is between those nations which are still embedded within the dollar system, including countries in the Eurozone, versus those emerging economies—especially the BRIC—Brazil, Russia, India, China—where new economic markets and regions are rapidly replacing their over-dependence on the United States as prime export market and prime source for investment finance. | BRIC have demographic advantage. | Interesting to recall is that the hidden story of the pre-1914 German ‘economic miracle’ was based on a similar ‘secret’—rapid and dynamic young and growing population, while that of Great Britain and France was stagnant or in decline after the British Great Depression of 1873 which led to huge emigration of population to the USA.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13926

inspirovany real banking skandalom v 91 | MI5 had learned in 1987 that Abu Nidal had been using a company called SAS Trade and Investment in Warsaw as a cover for ANO business deals, with the company director, Samir Najmeddin, based in Baghdad. All SAS’s deals went through BCCI in Sloane Street, where the balance in the SAS account always hovered around ₤50 million, and consisted largely of selling guns, night-vision goggles, and armored Mercedes-Benz cars with concealed grenade launchers, each deal often worth tens of millions of dollars. Bank records showed ANO arms transactions with many Middle Eastern countries as well as with East Germany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_(film)

With 99.9% of the districts counted the Pirates have 7.1 percent of the votes, beating several established parties. This means that the Pirate Party will get at least one, but most likely two of the 18 (+2) available seats Sweden has at EP | The turnout at the elections is 43%, a little higher than the at 2004 elections. This would mean that roughly 200,000 Swedes have voted for PP. This is a huge increase compared to the national elections of 2006 where the party got 34,918 votes | After the Pirate Bay verdict, PP membership more than tripled and they now have over 48,000 registered members, more than the total number of votes they received in 2006. | With their presence in Brussels, Pirate Party hopes to reduce the abuses of power and copyright at the hands of the entertainment industries, and make those activities illegal instead. On the other hand they hope to legalize file-sharing for personal use. | In Germany Pirate Party got cca 1% of votes, not enough for a seat in EP.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-wins-and-enters-the-european-parliament-090607/

prerequisite for every intervention is the invitation of an art institution, which provides an infrastructural framework and cultural capital | exhibition space itself serves as a studio from which the intervention is conducted | projects are collective efforts that take place in the concentrated atmosphere of a closed-session working situation | strictly limited timeframe – usually eight weeks – gives rise to an unusual concentration of the six participants’ energies, allowing the planned interventions to be realized very quickly | issue to be addressed is usually established before the project begins | Rarely have art institutions approached us with a specific request | After extensive research, the group makes a final decision concerning what is in fact to be accomplished | WochenKlausur works toward concrete goals. When project is completed, it is possible to observe how many of its objectives have been achieved. It is then the task of critic to compare the intention with result.
http://www.wochenklausur.at/methode.php?lang=en

Looking back, the idea of “altering social relationships by altering form” appears a little naive. Of course attitudes and habits, thinking patterns and value standards can be marginally influenced through forms. The whole advertising field is sustained by this thesis. But people’s ideological principles, their worldviews and values can not really be changed through colors, sounds and forms | For Situationists and Lettrists what came after the destruction was of lesser importance. Path was the goal, and goal was conflict with high culture | 1970s artists wanted to make contributions to improving coexistence: in psychology and sociology, with healing methods or in incarceration. Avant-garde wanted to choose living localities for their creation, to stop working for eternity, and to address more than just the educated classes of the public | Social renewal is a function of art after art of treating surfaces. It makes more sense to improve the carrying structure before improving surface
http://www.wochenklausur.at/kunst.php?lang=en