Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder (etc)
Kermit Snelson wrote: I disagree with Ken here. Knowledge-based parts of the economy (aerospace, pharmaceuticals, software, telecoms, etc.) are characterized by increasing returns on the margin, not by the decreasing returns characteristic of resource-based industries (agriculture, mining, etc.) [1]. Yeah that was the line during the boom, but how true is it? Boeing has a profit margin of 3%, which is five times better than GM's, but only a fifth Merck's, and not all that great. (And Boeing gets subsidies from the Pentagon, which never hurts.) Pharmaceuticals have long been the most profitable industry. Software isn't immensely lucrative, either; sure Microsoft is vastly profitable, but we learned the other week that it loses money on everything it sells but Windows. The rest of the software industry isn't gushingly profitable. Telecoms is the scene of one of the biggest disasters of modern times. So this general principle is looking empirically rocky - though as David Laibman once told me, you can't refute a theory with empirical evidence, but only with another theory. -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer Village Station - PO Box 953 New York NY 10014-0704 USA voice +1-212-741-9852 fax+1-212-807-9152 cell +1-917-865-2813 email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] webhttp://www.leftbusinessobserver.com # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime re: joxe's empire of disorder (etc)
As Are reminds us, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is no joke, and there is already a criminal proceeding. Heiko points out that there are 'traditional exceptions' in the WIPO treaties. I would say these reveal a kind of 'class compromise', which in any case may be made moot by developments in the 'technical-economic base' which make read- write media a thing of the past. While I agree with Phil that we ought not to take the dogmatic versions of 'base and superstructure' too seriously, the coherence of a Marxist view of history does depend on showing a coherent relationship between economic development and class conflict. This is what my Hacker Manifesto text seeks to do. It looks at the same nexus Marx looked at: property. Property is what connects the possessing classes to the dispossessed, and its evolution in the institution of law formalises the relations of production. To pick up the thread of a debate between John H and Felix: the abstraction of property has proceeded through three rough phases. 1. The astraction of land as property, cut from a continuum or fabric of relations. This is the basis of agrarian commodity production and the rise of a landlord or pastoralist class. 2. The abstraction of the thing from the land. This is the basis of manufacturing and the rise of a capitalist class. 3. The abstraction of information from the thing, which is the basis of the current phase of the commodification of information and, i argue, a new fraction of the ruling class, the vectoralist class. In each phase, the abstraction of property creates a plane upon which resources can be combined in new ways, and a new phase of economic development. But it also creates a class antagonism, of have and have nots, which is quite different from traditional forms of the 'commons' or communal right. We are experiencing the potential extinction of the last domain of common right, common cultural and communication rights, as we speak -- witness the ElComsoft Prosecution, as just one example. Note, please that while information can now be abstracted from any *particular* material base, it cannot be abstracted from materiality in general. One avoids flights of cyberhype fantasy -- the 'weightless economy' etc by making this clear conceptual distinction. Kermit has as usual contributed a very dense and thought-provoking post. I would like to see some of these connection spelled out more. Perhaps I can start where I think I follow the arguement. Negri's concept of the 'general intellect' comes from Marx. It's not quite the case that the Negrists and the neoliberals are agreed that knowledge is capital. The Negrist position is Marx's: knowledge may be capital, but capital is labor. Marx's critique of liberal economic theory applies just as readily to the neoliberal. In treating only the space of exchange, not the space of production, (neo)liberalism erases the space of exploitation, where property is at work not as trade among its possessors, but as (unequal) exchange between its possessors and those it has dispossessed. Knowledge is labor. But labor is dispossessed of its capacity to utilise the value of what it 'knows'. It has to sell what it knows to those who possess the means of realising its value. Knowledge, however, is very slippery stuff. As information, it has no particular material expression. And so it is quite difficult -- and contrary to nature -- to make it a commodity, where its value rests on its unique attachment to a material form which can in turn be commodified. Far from being progress, the commodification of information retards its development by *limiting* the range of possible combinations and permutations intowhich it can be put. Commodity development really does reach a limit, as Marx anticipated, although not in the form he anticipated. To put it another way: As Lessig argues, information is a non-rivalrous good. My possession of it need not dispossess you of it. This is not true of either the land or the thing. The property relation, when applied to the land or the thing, is always a relation of dispossession. At the price of the inequality this dispossession causes, one gets a remarkable economic development. The abstraction of property allows for a remarkable permutationof combinations of things. Yet with information, this is not the case. Property intervenes as an *artificial* scarcity. It extends commodity logic where it need not belong. Unlimited wants do not confront scarce resources, where information is concerned. The continuous innovation in the process of production is a given in Marx's thinking. If one finds this idea in Negri and the Austrians, it is not necessarily from Sorel, but from Marx, who in turn takes in from some of his sources in classical political economy. But as a *theory*, it is Marx's. It arises out of the producing classes, the dispossed classes. Only those classes are no longer farmers and workers, but also
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
[Thought this was a nice deconstruction of the current maps of Empire that are floating around and also good footnote to the Joxe discussion - r] The decline and fall of the American empire An expert on geopolitics says forget Islamic terrorism -- the real future threat to America's supremacy will come from Europe. http://www.salon.com/books/int/2002/12/02/kupchan/index.html There is a nice response on that on: http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/kolumnen/mar/13692/1.html It is written in German so that can be a problem... It says that allthough the facts stated are true, the biggest problem Europe has and will have is its indecisiveness. Which is true I think. On the other hand the European Union is still in 'progress' and one of its characteristics has always its 'consensus solutions'. So when the needs are the biggest the solutions tend to come. However on this subject it may yake years. Arie van Schutterhoef ^ Arie van Schutterhoef | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ^_±±±__ # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Dow and Verio shut down thing.net, rtmark.com, theyesmen.org, dow-chemical.com, nettime. etc etc bov!nez
Howdy there, kou boy It is quite dramatic how much more both Dow and Verio esteem Dow's image over the 20,000 people dead from Bhopal over the years, plus the estimated 500,000 suffering permanent damage over the years from the catastrophe--which has STILL not been cleaned up 18 years later! They esteem the Dow image so much, in fact, that they don't mind wiping an entire activist and artistic network right off the face of the internet, indefinitely! as if thing.net. nettime. etc okzident !tch! b!tch! pop.t-art konglome.ratz differ from dow okzident neo-fascist bovines http://www.eusocial.com/242.art.mafia/ # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime law and theft
special mixture of rather open rules and faits accomplis, the many copyprotected cds allready on the market. Most people like more to read There is, to be precise, article 6 paragraph 2 subparagraph 2 or the eu directive, which isnt a must but a may regulation, states may force the industry to deliver the necessary tools for privat copies of cds, but they must not (in contrast to other exeptions where they must). And there is time pressure, the new law must be ready before the 22th of december, in two or three weeks, so the german lawmaker has excluded this difficult point from the german WIPO and EU translation (changes to the Urheber Gesetz). While there is chrismas with millions of copyprotected CDs unter the tree. Bom Sharkar! H. # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
