not

Open Organisations – Toni Prug, Richard Malter and Benjamin Geer – until recently united in belief in radically liberatory potentials of openness | ‘supernodes’ not only route more than their ‘fair share’ of traffic, but actively determine the ‘content’ that traverses them. They do not (necessarily) constitute themselves out of malicious will-to-power: rather through personal qualities like energy, commitment and charisma, and ability to synthesise politically important social moments into identifiable ideas and forms | Crypto-hierarchies suppress individual contributions, and produce layers of authority contingent on individuals’ intellectual or social dominance. The inability to question theoretical questions independently leads the individual to take refuge behind authority of another member who becomes, objectively, leader, or behind group entity, which becomes gang.’ | really open org can’t be realised without a prior radicalisation of social-political field in which it operates
http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Packet-Gang

His work could be posited as the flip side to Bourriaud’s ‘micro-utopias’ the dark side of relational aesthetics, or micro-dystopias perhaps. He destabilizes the very idea of collaboration as something that offers real social utility in contradistinction to the autonomous art object. Artist thus delivers what could be described as a critique of collaborative, or what Kester terms ‘dialogic’, practices, by simultaneously ‘maximising the creative potential of a given constituency’ and subjecting that constituency to sustained critical scrutiny. This critical scrutiny doesn’t simply undermine authority of that constituency or parody its function, but rather defines the limits of or possibilities for meaningful collaboration per se. Deconstructing the very notion of collaborative activity can reveal as much about the limits of current art education in the UK as it can about the processes of co-optation of art and culture by state controlled public sector bodies and global corporations.
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/kidner.html

After 30 years into the ‘aftershock’ of modernism, then into necessary post-colonial reexamination of our cultural frames, Altermodern intends to define specific modernity according to context we live in – globalization + its economic/political/cultural conditions | pomo is coming to an end | Core of this new modernity is experience of wandering — in time/space/mediums | Multiculturism and identity are being overtaken by ‘creolization’, artists start from a “global state of culture” | Sticking to multiculturalist dogma jails the individuals into their ‘origins’ & ‘identities’ | I’m interested in artists who produce singular itineraries within different streams of knowledge, not ones who insist on ‘representing’ their cultures | I try to understand&explain what I see emerging | The Radicat insists on difference bwn appropriating and ‘formal collectivism’, and attributes a positive value to precariousness as cultural phenomenon. it is about the value of programming and DJing as methods
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2009-03-17/altermodern-a-conversation-with-nicolas-bourriaud/

How do you behave when confronted with something that you should actually admit responsibility for? These are the sort of strategies that interest me, talking yourself out of guilt. It’s like this: we all believe we’re so fantastically liberal. None of us want to see immigration laws tightened. Yet when someone comes to me and asks if I could take in a foreign family, then I say, well, not really. Charity begins at home with the door firmly shut. Most people are as cowardly and comfortable as I am. | I can’t pretend I don’t come from this Judeo-Christian tradition. The issue of guilt is always in the air at such latitudes. Which is why I always come back to it. One of the thoughts which inspired the film was to confront someone with something that he’d done as a child. In cases like this we find it particularly comfortable to talk ourselves out of the problem. Georges takes a couple of tablets to help himself sleep. This is the sort of awkward situation I find fascinating.
http://www.signandsight.com/features/577.html

Bourriaud: Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alter-Modernism

origin of the ‘creative industries’ term: 1) in 1997, within newly created Dept. of Culture+Media+Sports much revolved around IP rights through booming TV sales of soccer plays. This is how the IP story (measuring creative industries through IPR income) got connected to “creative industries”; 2) more obvious reference is Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’; 3) the creative industries meme itself was developed by a small group of consultants and New Labour politicians (amongst them Charles Leadbeather) that plotted how to increase the budget for arts by giving it more sexy name. This, still elitist approach, then got out of control. | Lazzarato: Creativity is sign of poverty, not wealth. Creative industry is still fordist term; old-fashioned way to think about economy | Sarkozy has proposed to create 2-layer system aimed to constantly monitor the productivity of university personnel. What system qualifies as ‘dead time’ is in reality the most creative time.
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2009/04/02/critique-of-the-creative-industries-event-in-vienna/

Instead of further promoting “free culture” I called for sustainable models for independent content producers. Code words here would be micropayments inside peer-to-peer networks, cultural flat rate, citizen-to-citizen loans and gifts, and more commercial concepts such as crowdfunding and the ‘freemium’ model in which payment finally becomes a possibility with the free and open no longer the only option.
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2009/04/24/the-future-after-intellectual-property-a-report-from-brussels/

In Anglophone and international media studies, “media” mostly stands for contemporary mass media, with traditional media studies covering news media, radio and TV and “new media” researching computing and Internet. | In the last decade, German humanities have developed a broad, general and transhistorical notion of media as “mediality” (“Medialität”) in which any material or imaginary carrier of information qualifies as a medium, from CPUs to angels. The notion of “medium” has thus replaced and superseded the older semiotic-structuralist term of the “sign”. | “Kulturwissenschaft” thus should not be mixed up with Anglo-American “cultural studies”. In the German context, it means cross-disciplinary humanities study of the arts and history of knowledge. | “cultural studies” of the Birmingham School were a straightforward adaption of the 1970s post-Frankfurt School German “Kultursoziologie”. | books of Anthony Grafton are Kulturwissenschaft while those of the Birmingham School are not
http://medienumbrueche.uni-siegen.de/groups/medienwissenschaften/weblog/38962/Antworten_von_Florian_Cramer.html

German media theory that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s | Siegen, Freiburg, Kassel | philosophical underpinnings: There must be reference, something outside of the text, beyond hermeneutics. The exodus of spirit out of humanities. Desire for reference. Then there is the substance concept. Obviously there is deconstruction of subject. Special interest in history and fascination for philosophical antropology and long cultural shifts (dating 50k-100k years back). Early pressure, and desire, ever since Humboldt and the way he designed the university system, to innovate. Ordinary knowledge needs to be taught in highschool or polytechnics. The university is a place for new thinking. This could explain why there is a permanent revolution inside the German universities ever since the post-war era. | Kittler laments the lack of technological knowledge in the humanities and is sceptical about the wishy-washy term ‘media theory’ that has been misused to such a vast extend.
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2009/04/23/debating-german-media-theory-in-siegen/

Out of 8 largest political parties in Sweden, 7 of their youth wings support the decriminalization of filesharing and are sympathetic to the PB. | TeliaSonera, a major broadband provider is refusing to block access to TPB (where business continues as normal), a position shared by Bahnhof, Bredbandsbolaget and Com Hem. Explaining their position Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung said, “We will not censor sites for our customers, it’s not our job. Anything that violates the principle of a free and open internet, I think, is bad.” In addition two ISPs have stated that they will not comply with IPRED provisions requiring operators to hand over information linking users to IP addresses for use in copyright infringement investigations. All Tele and Bahnhof have said that the requirements imposed by IPRED are at variance with their obligations under Data Protection legislation and that they will comply with the latter rather the former. Bahnhof has said that they simply do not keep such information.

More on The Pirate Bay Conviction

They were convicted on one charge, assisting in copyright infringement (violation of the ‘making available’ right), and cleared on the other – ‘preparing a violation of copyright law.’ Sentence: 1 year in jail. In addition ordered to pay 2.7 mln euros in damages to entertainment companies. That sum was calculated in relation to 33 works listed on the indictment, distributed on TPB bwn 7/2005 and 31.5.2006 | The court found that TPB was a commercial information service provider as defined by the law (the commercial element being derived from their advertising revenue). As they stored torrent files, rather than providing transient storage necessary for a given transmission, they would have had to have in place a process for dealing with copyright complaints in order to be exempted from liability. They didn’t do this, although they knew that some of the torrent files related to copyrighted materials. He concluded that TPB’s operations were conducted in a commercial and organised manner.

Pirate Bay Defendants Convicted

Capitalism is, he believes, incapable of resolving the biggest challenges of the day: environmental catastrophe and the abuse of information technology, intellectual property rights and biogenetics. | what particularly fascinates him is the ideological battle over how to interpret the financial crisis. | According to Žižek, the reason Hitler came to power in the 1930s was because he offered the most attractive interpretation of disastrous events. He simply flattered the Germans by claiming that their army had been betrayed in the first world war and by laying all the blame at the feet of the Jews. | Žižek is obsessed with the way that societies interpret events and the belief systems that underpin politics.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/06b42e32-09dd-11de-add8-0000779fd2ac.html

Badiou agree with Negri’s formulation that for this reason socialism (which is a statist imaginary) can only be replaced by communism which is radically anti-state. However, Zizek struck a pragmatist note here to argue with Badiou and Judith Balso as to what, operationally, this ‘at a distance’ can possibly mean and how this is a pathetic anarchist recipe for marginality. | Zizek proclaimed that if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that ‘Mother Earth no longer exists’ – amidst a slightly emabrassed applause from the audience. “We must remain resolutely modern” he further proclaimed.
http://kafila.org/2009/03/16/evangelist-st-zizek-and-the-end-of-philosophy-ii/

The key reference points for Badiou’s anti-statist version of communism are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Jacobins and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He rejects the idea – fundamental to Marx – that the economic and the political are indivisible.
http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=99

Great Depression was offspring of killing fields @EU: WWI had destroyed trading patterns, undermined currencies and produced massive public debts. Who would foot the bill for this catastrophe? US had financed UK and FR victories, and expected to be paid back in full. UK and FR demanded that DE carry the cost by paying reparations. DE —which been victorious on their Eastern front and had prevented Allied forces from entering their territory—had agreed to end war in part because of Wilson’s promise not to impose a victor’s peace. When this promise was broken and massive reparations were imposed, a bitter decade-long battle over who would pay what ensued. From this toxic environment of distrust and enmity emerged a series of unsustainable deals,whereby US financed DE’s reparations to UK and FR, which were recycled back to US in form of war debt payments. If US financing dried up –which it did during the late 1920s—the whole scheme would collapse, taking the int’l monetary system with it
http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/globalization/getting-history-right

The challenge is how to give more citizens a voice in governance without overwhelming their representatives. There are two approaches; both rely on existing technology. In order to participate in online democracy, one needs a verifiable identity. The current version of that technology is the “digital certificate”. Members of Congress and Hill staffers tell me that a message from a verified member of their district carries far more weight than a (possibly mass-produced) e-mail. That’s one near-term way to move closer to networked democracy. A more ambitious approach would involve large-scale discussion boards in which every citizen, with a verified identity, could weigh in on issues. The challenge here would be to sort the wheat from the chaff. The solution is to let the citizenry to do the sorting itself by filtering up the best suggestions online. Early forms of such methods are visible on slashdot.org, digg.com, and even Amazon.com.
http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/internet/participatory-technocracy

The next 10 to 20 years will be marked by two trends. First, there will be systemization and widespread adoption of social practices that engage millions of people in effective, self-directed, socially motivated production. Second, there will be an increasing sophistication of what I call “social contract enterprises”—companies that have learned how to become trusted platforms for productive social practices. | A new social contract. Over the course of modern economic history, markets became evermore separated from social relations; people specialized and segmented their moral outlook. People behave differently when they understand themselves to be acting in the market, as opposed to acting in social relationships. Peer production and other forms of collaboration reverse that by breaking down the barrier between the market self and the social self. | Vermont is introducing a special category of corporate registration: the low-profit corporation.
http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/internet/the-collaborative-company

Net as social platform shaped it in the interplay of military, scientific, entrepreneurial, activist, artistic, and altruistic agendas | art historian Claire Bishop: “[A]ctivation; authorship; community — are the most frequently cited motivations for almost all artistic attempts to encourage participation in art since the 1960s” | Baran demonstrated that sections of a distributed network could be destroyed while the message would still reach its destination | US government, for example, preferred another protocol but TCP/IP was non-proprietary | At a time when hippies dominated the campus, the first machine arrived at UCLA in a military, fridge-sized container, moveable by helicopter | 70 wireless network @Hawaii | 72 email @BBN co Boston | 77 mailing list @ARPANET | 78 BBS @Chicago | 78 USENET @North Carolina uni’s | 81 IBM PC+mouse | 81 BITNET flat fee | 85 community BBS: The Well @CA in order to experience communal living without actually having to move into a community | 84 Lyotard and Chaput @Les Immateriaux were mainly interested in the way, in which this collaborative writing changed the experience of the act of writing itself | 88 IRC | 89 Berners-Lee described WWW “as an altruistic, non-proprietary, vendor-neutral contribution to society” | 94 CERN convened 1st web conference in Geneva, so well attended that not even CERN employees could get in, later called Woodstock of the Web | 93 De Digitale Stad | 94 weblog Links from the Underground, about his most intimate experiences, incl. delicate details about his (girl)friends | 94 Nettime | 95 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron describes Californian Ideology as it simultaneously reflects “the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship” | Silicon Valley weas responsible for 13% of the new American jobs created between 1996 and 2000 | years after the dotcom crash, the parking lots of Silicon Valley were empty | 00s rapid growth of niche communities and self-help groups
http://web.archive.org/web/20071024042812/http://www.collectivate.net/journalisms/2007/9/26/a-history-of-the-social-web.html

Affiliations based on shared interests, political views, activities, identity, passions, location | SNS core features: profiles, Friends, comments, private messaging | Friendster gained traction among 3 groups of early adopters—bloggers, attendees of Burning Man, and gays—and grew to 300k users through word of mouth | MySpace was able to grow rapidly by capitalizing on Friendster’s alienation of its early adopters; then bands-and-fans dynamics helped to expand beyond them—into 3 populations: musicians/artists, teenagers, and post-college urban social crowd | Personalising “feature” emerged because MySpace did not restrict users from adding HTML into profile frame forms | Facebook was designed to support distinct college networks only, later expanded to include hi school students, professionals @corp networks, and, eventually, everyone | SNSs are primarily organized around people, not interests | Friends provide context by offering users an imagined audience to guide behavioral norms
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Nyní, kdy jsou finance americké federální vlády kritickým způsobem závislé na pokračujícím přílivu zahraničního kapitálu, americkou hospodářskou budoucnost budou určovat země, které odmítly americký model kapitalismu. [..] Dochází pouze k odumření jednoho určitého typu kapitalismu – oné zvláštní a vysoce nestabilní verze, která existuje v Americe pouze po dobu posledních dvaceti let. Experiment ve finančním laissez-faire skončil. Tržní ekonomiky, které se nepodrobily deregulaci amerického stylu, tuto krizi přežijí nejstabilněji.
http://www.blisty.cz/2008/9/30/art42968.html

Vztah občana té či oné členské země a představitele Unie není standardním vztahem voliče a politika, který jej reprezentuje. Mezi občany a představiteli Unie je navíc vzdálenost, a to nejen v zeměpisném slova smyslu, která je podstatně větší než je tomu uvnitř jednotlivých členských zemí. Označuje se to různými termíny: demokratický deficit, ztráta demokratické accountability, rozhodování nevolených, ale vyvolených, byrokratizace rozhodování, a podobně. Návrhy na změnu dnešního stavu obsažené v zamítnuté Evropské ústavě či od ní fakticky málo odlišné Lisabonské smlouvě, by tento defekt ještě zvětšovaly. [..] Řešením není ani přitápění pod “tavícím kotlem” dosavadního typu evropské integrace, ani potlačování role členských států pod heslem nové multikulturní a multinacionální evropské občanské společnosti. [..] ..mylné interpretování příčin dnešní finanční a ekonomické krize, jakoby ji způsobil trh, zatímco skutečnou příčinou je pravý opak. Způsobilo ji politické manipulování trhu.
http://zpravy.idnes.cz/dokument-projev-prezidenta-klause-v-evropskem-parlamentu-pny-/domaci.asp?c=A090219_130248_domaci_lpo

Here’s a quick rundown (based on my analysis of the help pages and this video) of what Google’s done to help give users control of their information flows in Latitude: * Only friends you have explicitly invited or accepted can see your location * You can hide your location to everyone so no friends can see where you are (and neither will Google) * You can hide your location to select friends * You can share only city-level data with select friends * You can manually select a location on the map that will be shared with friends (which means you can send the wrong location to obfuscate your location) * And, perhaps most importantly, Google is not logging your pings to servers; they only keep you latest location on file
http://michaelzimmer.org/2009/02/06/with-latitude-google-actually-got-it-mostly-right/

When US forces went into Iraq in 2003, they had zero robotic units on the ground. Now they have as many as 12,000. Some of the robots are used to dismantle landmines and roadside bombs, but a new generation of robots are designed to be fighting machines. One robot, known as SWORDS, can operate an M-16 rifle and a rocket launcher [..] Basically there’s a do-it-yourself kit for building very similar to a Raven drone.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/6/wired_for_war_the_robotics_revolution

I am not saying that power as such disappears, but there is certainly a shift, away from the formal into the informal, from accountable structures towards a voluntary and temporal connection. We have to reconcile with the fact that these structures undermine the establishment, but not through recognizable forms of resistance. The ‘anti’ element often misses. This is what makes traditional, unreconstructed lefties so suspicious, as these networks just do their thing and do not fit into this or that ideology, be it neoliberal or autonomous Marxist. Their vagueness escapes any attempt to deconstruct their intention either as proto-capitalist or subversive.
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-February/003381.html

Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline. British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon’s Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority. [..] The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. [..] In 2001 .. Ariel Sharon stated unequivocally that “Israel would never buy gas from Palestine” intimating that Gaza’s offshore gas reserves belong to Israel.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11680

Ruská strana má záujem udržať vysokú cenu plynu, aj keď cena ropy, od ktorej sa cena plynu odvíja, klesla zo 150 dolárov ešte v júni na 50 dolárov za barel. Príjmy ruského štátneho rozpočtu predpokladajú, že cena ropy nebude nižšia ako 53 dolárov, čiže Rusko má veľký problém už teraz ho naplniť. Rusko vyvoláva takúto situáciu, aby zmenilo formulu výpočtu ceny plynu. Ukrajinským problémom je, že zmluva o dodávkach plynu na Ukrajinu a tranzite plynu z Ruska cez Ukrajinu je veľmi nevýhodná. Je tam veľmi nízky tranzitný poplatok pre Ukrajinu za prepravu plynu (u nás okolo 3 a viac $ za tisíc kubíkov na sto kilometrov, a cena na ukrajinskom území je asi 1,6 $), zatiaľ čo cena plynu pre Ukrajinu je trhová.
http://ekonomika.sme.sk/c/4252462/analytik-duleba-rusko-ukrajinskemu-sporu-davam-mesiac.html

key events that led up Operation Cast Lead: 1. The assassination in November 2004 of Yaser Arafat (ordered in 2003 by the Israeli cabinet); 2. The removal, under the orders of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005, of all Jewish settlements in Gaza, a Jewish population of over 7,000 was evacuated; 3. The building of the infamous Apartheid Wall was decided upon at the beginning of the Sharon government; 4. Hamas election victory in January 2006 (without Arafat, the Israeli military-intelligence architects knew that Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas would loose the elections. With Hamas in charge of the Palestinian authority, using the pretext that Hamas is a terrorist organization, Israel would carry out the process of “cantonization” as formulated under the Dagan plan. Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas would remain formally in charge of the West Bank. The duly elected Hamas government would be confined to the Gaza strip)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11606

In September 2006, a lengthy article written by web journalist Trent Lapinski, “MySpace: The Business of Spam 2.0,” was published by the Silicon Valley gossip blog, Valleywag. The article recounted a detailed corporate history of MySpace, alleging that MySpace was not organically grown from Tom Anderson’s garage, but rather was a product developed by eUniverse aimed at overtaking Friendster, and that had initially gained popularity through an intensive mass internet campaign and not by word of mouth. Amongst other claims was the assertion that Tom Anderson had originally been hired as a copyeditor and his “founder” and “first friend” status was a public relations invention. Lapinski suggested that News Corp. had attempted to suppress the publication of the history by threatening his original publisher. In addition, Tom’s age on the site was lowered to “appeal” to younger users.
http://www.valleywag.com/tech/myspace/myspace-the-business-of-spam-20-exhaustive-edition-199924.php

One of the most popular filtering SW is SmartFilter, owned by Secure Computing in California, a company that’s just been bought by McAffee for $465m. SmartFilter has been used by some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes: Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, as well as in US and UK. The list of sites that are blocked by SW is so secret that not even the countries that use the technology know what is actually being censored. These lists are the IP of SW companies and are protected by copyright. / Last month, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft signed up to a code of conduct (the Global Network Initiative) that will require them to pay special regard to free expression and privacy as part of their business practice. It has taken 18 months and some very tough negotiation to hammer out the agreement, led by Leslie Harris at the Centre for Democracy and Technology and Dunstan Hope at Business for Social Responsibility. The plan now is to bring others into the fold, including European telecoms.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/17/censorship-internet

From the ancient world of Theory we know why people invent foundational myths: to protect those in power (in this case US-American IT firms and their academic-military science structures that are losing global hegemony). The Zittrain myth says that, compared to centralized, content-controlled systems such as AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, the ‘generative’ Internet of the late 1980s was an open network. But this was simply not the case, it was closed to the general public. [..] The first decades the Internet was a closed world, only accessible to (Western) academics and the U.S. military. In order to access the Internet one had to be an academic computer scientist or a physicist. Until the early nineties it was not possible for ordinary citizens, artists, business or activists, in the USA or elsewhere, to obtain an email address and make use of the rudimentary UNIX-based applications. Remember, this was the period between, roughly speaking, 1987 and 1993
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2008/10/12/zittrains-foundational-myth-of-the-open-internet/