nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Forwarded, with permission, from my friend tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. - I think this raises interesting questions about the integrity and politics of open content, collaborative online projects and knowledge repositories. -F - Forwarded message from anonymous [EMAIL PROTECTED] - From: anonymous [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: A Puff Piece of Wikipedia Dear Florian, It appears that Wikipedia is used as an advertising outlet for elite institutions. Note the alterations I made to the Johns Hopkins University entry below. I'm sure you'll be able to pick them out. They're only in the 1st paragraph. My additions were replaced w/in 23 minutes! I suspect that a PR person for JHU monitors polices all content relevant to them. Johns Hopkins University (Revision as of 15:54, 24 Sep 2003) The Johns Hopkins University is an elite institution of higher learning located in Baltimore, Maryland. As such, it is known to some as The Plantation. Most of its students are rich people being groomed for ruling elite positions who are blissfully ignorant of the extremely impoverished conditions that surround their highly privileged environment. Their wealth helps drastically escalate the rents beyond the means of working people. The university opened February 22, 1876, with the stated goal of The encouragement of research ... and the advancement of individual scholars, who by their excellence will advance the sciences they pursue, and the society where they dwell. (first President Daniel Coit Gilman). It is named for Johns Hopkins, who left seven million dollars (ill-gotten gains from gun running during the Civil War) in his 1867 will for the foundation of The Johns Hopkins University and The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Johns Hopkins was the first research university in the United States, founded on the model of German research institutions. As such, it was the first American university to offer an undergraduate major (as opposed to a purely liberal arts curriculum), and the first American university to grant doctoral degrees. The university was designed from the start to marry scholarship and research, and graduate education has always been paramount. Students at Johns Hopkins are encouraged to pursue original research at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and nearly 80% of Johns Hopkins undergrads produce research by the time of graduation. The School of Medicine is highly revered, and the Bloomberg School of Public Health is renowned for contributions worldwide to preventive medicine and the health of large populations. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, located in Washington D.C. is recognized as a world leader in international affairs, diplomacy and government studies. The university offers education internationally through centers in China, Singapore and Italy. Johns Hopkins receives more federal research grants than any other university, and operates the Applied Physics Laboratory which specializes in nuclear research for the Department of Defense. Johns Hopkins also offers superior undergraduate programs based at the Homewood campus in Baltimore: The Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts Sciences and the G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering, which contribute to Johns Hopkins' reputation as one of the nation's most prestigious universities. Some of the many strong departments at Johns Hopkins are History, International Studies, English, Political Science, Biology, German, Near Eastern Studies, Romance Languages, Art History, Biophysics, Biomedical Engineering, Film and Media Studies, and Astronomy. The French Department is recognized as a center of excellence in the study of French culture and language by the government of France. The school's sports teams are named the Blue Jays. They participate in the NCAA's Division III, and the Centennial Conference. The school's most prominent sports team is their Division I lacrosse team, which has won 42 national titles. The National Lacrosse Hall of Fame is adjacent to the university. Some well-known alumni: Spiro T. Agnew - Vice President of the United States Madeleine Albright - Secretary of State under Bill Clinton John Astin - actor, Gomez Adams on The Addams Family Russell Baker - author, Pulitzer Prize winner, host Masterpiece Theater John Barth - novelist Michael Bloomberg - Founder of Bloomberg LP, mayor of New York City Rudy Boschwitz - Republican Senator from Minnesota Rachel Carson - enivornmentalist, Silent Spring J.D. Considine - music critic Richard Ben Cramer - journalist, author What It Takes, Pulitzer Prize winner Wes Craven - film director Robert W. Fogel - economist, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1993 Herbert Spencer Gasser - Nobel Prize in Physiology, 1944 Paul Greengard - biophysicist, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2000 Rafael
Re: nettime review of George Monbiot - The Age of Consent
hi Geert, Nice review. Mind if I pick up on a little tidbit? In the network age ideas are carefully designed 'memes' that travel far out without losing their core meaning. sample If, in the age of the subculture, concepts travelled as memes through the fledgling networksas concepts to be remixed into new contexts, and where the concept was about the application of the contentthen today the concept is the network. In fact the network is both concept and context, and the meme is only the static concept within the network's transactions. The active idea that expresses itself as a force is the seme. What matters is not the meme, but the point at which the meme becomes inverted, where the idea is no longer sampled into different contexts, but the context is sampled into different ideas, and where the context itself is already the network. The seme is the point at which the meme is forced to undergo a translation and an extroversion at the limit of its identity by the force of its trajectorythe act of its self-sampling. The inversion of its innards now expresses the trajectory of its form. The seme thus comes to express the force of form in the stitching of the network to the content of the meme. The seme is the meme of the power of dissemination. It's the name we give to the transformational properties of the network, where the network forms the content. The seme is the theoretical framework in which the practical forces of contemporary microcultures express themselves. It is not an idea-thing that travels, like the dualist concept of meme, but the point at which the thing, at the moment of its translation or transformation at becoming something other to itself, undergoes a forceful expression of the path of its movementits network. The seme demonstrates the digital network of transduction. If we may sample Brian Massumi: There is no inside as such for anything to be in, interiority being only a particular relationship to the exterior to itself (infolding) (115). /sample. source: van Veen, tobias c. Hearing Difference: The Seme. IASPM-edit. IASPM International Conference Proceedings (2003). (CD-ROM). .PDF posted online: http://www.quadrantcrossing.org/papers/Seme.IASPM.edit.tV.pdf No matter how hard ignorant newsrooms editors are trying, ideas cannot be turned in lies. Until recently they could be just be ignored and condemned as marginal, academic or irrelevant, but the present demand can no longer be denied. Ideas easily withstand misinterpretations caused sloppy research of journalists and evil-minded reviews of grumpy commentators. The main reason for this is that we live in the post-deconstruction age. theory I'd like to propose an understanding of deconstruction that has less to do with negative critique--the Adorno mutant that masqueraded as deconstruction--and more to do with understanding the network of meaning as that classic word, différance. By simply negating deconstruction as both history and effect, the process of sublimation is once again set to the wheel. By opening deconstruction to the more sexy understanding shared in becoming-, there might be a chance to understand the ways in which meme-based patterns are no longer the dominant force. /theory sample 2 [snip] The content of sampling is no longer the issue; what is at stake is not the contentthe traditional territory of politicsbut the form, or method, of distribution. The fight today is primarily not over sampling and copyright, but the transference of information-music into a different form and its global disseminationie, from sampling a '70s funk record to ripping MP3s via peer-to-peer filesharing. [snip] If the TAZ was a meme in late-80s cyberculture and '90s rave culture, then the TAZ today finds itself living up to its acronymTemporary Autonomous Zoneas the context of today's ideas, rather than being the idea itself. It thus becomes a problematic of how to disseminate the context in an expression that fosters anti-capitalist networks. In other words, how to expose the movement of the seme itself, in its multiplicity of difference. /sample - source=same best, tV tobias c. van Veen --- http://www.quadrantcrossing.org http://www.thisistheonlyart.com - [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---McGill Communications-- ICQ: 18766209 | AIM: thesaibot # 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 Re: Community, what is it, and Nettime
All that being said, it's clear why nettime can't respond to Beth, etc.; there's no one, no/thing to respond - which is nettime's very strength. i think nettime *can* respond. anyone can sit on their panels, give speeches for nettime, anyone who subscribes to the list can receive the oscar nobel prize for nettime. nettime has no leader - i think anyone who represents it is just fine (as long as they are actually subbed to it). whether it be berobed honored academic in ivory tower, founder moderator plower through emails and selector of content, be-pimpled geek with monitor tan and code flowing out of ears, foppish net artist with vector graphics always on the backburner. it doesn't really matter who it is now does it in my opinion, for this kind of thing, the less sensible the better. can't someone just *volunteer*? hell i volunteer. beth, count me in. sorry to harsh on your soundbite alan, it was convenient, - respect. steven # 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 Re: markets, states, associations (was: reverse engineered freedom...)
Just to continue this dialogue with Ryan on the idea of concieving society as a force field between three poles: the US New Deal policies could be seen as restrictive on markets or as a tactic of preservation of them by the state. Those policies did both: and don't forget the threat posed to markets by the Soviet revolution at exactly that time. The state effectively saw restriction as preservation. Ultimately that would develop into the general picture of Keynesianism, which only took holdin Europe after the war. One of the founding analyses of Italian autonomism says that the Keynesian notion of effective demand (meaning that better wages should be paid so that worker demand can fuel the economy) is a recognition - and integration - of the working class into state capitalism. That gives you the consumer society. The whole point of autonomia in the sixties was to exit from this system of co-management. Which was an attempt to reassert some kind of existence for a pole outside both market and state. but that example only holds for the historical and ideological conditions of the US. Not at all: Nazism itself was also considered a third way between capitalism and communism. All the retreats to national management of the economy, after the breakdown of the late-nineteenth century form of globalization, were attempts to put the lid back on the detabilizing, innovating, atomizing forces of free markets and recover some kind of national, territorial cohesion. Even Stalin set out for socialism in one country. This is a kind of territorial imperative that emerges in reaction to the deterritorialization of the earlier period. I believe it lets you see a state function of solidarity (or redistribution, if you prefer) that is not reducible to the notion of the state as executive committee of the bourgeoisie (Marx). The point is that solidarity is not always pretty, even if it is sometimes very necessary. Responding to a world market crisis that is overdetermined by the extreme alienation of large parts of the world-system, Bush and the neocons are attempting to generate a new form of national cohesion and discipline on the basis of a more-or-less fascist rhetoric and division into us and them. The deterritorialization of the market-driven nineties has wreaked tremendous effects. Democratic politics is essentially the different kinds of responses that can be brought to the need for some kind of solidarity, and then the responses to the more-or-less repressive functioning of that solidarity, once it's established. But as Rancière has observed, politics in this sense is rare. Please note: I'm not saying all these things because I'm either pro-state or anti-market. It's like being for or against a hurricane. These processes are beyond us. We have to try to inflect them within the range of our capacities (generally very small). And with the commercial interests invested in military ventures in the US, which pole is dominant there? In these reactionary moments, there seems to emerge a perfect synergy betwen the private arms industry and the state's attempt to acheive national cohesion by emphasizing the role of the military. Hard to tell who's leading who: the industrialists see war as a chance to jump start the economy, the state power brokers see it as a chance to get hold of society again. But it's a dead-end synergy: after all, it was Hitler's recipe too. Today, with less intensity than in the 20s-30s, you also see the assertion of the forces outside state and market, perceived as dangerous by both. Seattle or S-11 anyone? There again, no guarantee that the autonomous demands are going to be the right ones. One of the more somber things that you can perceive with historical goggles is that the assertion of free association has in the past led to a new pact between market and state in order to just wipe out the destabilizing demands emanating from citizens (Spartacus rebellion, Spanish anarchists, the entire Western European left in the 30s, the Italian movements of the 70s, etc.). don't many of the desires shaping all of the poles transgress those boundaries? Probably it would be more clear and intuitive if you imagined the situation as a kind of love-and-death mating ritual between two armored dinosaurs, capitalism and the state, applauded, advised, hissed and booed and cheered by ecstatic and terrified citizens about the size of contemporary mice, who are constantly in danger of being crushed by either or both. If you invented coalitions of hardy spectators daring to climb up the tyranosaurus-like backbone of one of these raging monsters so as to point its head in a particular direction, or at least blinker an eyeball, then you could inject the dimension of free association into the picture. And if you revealed that the dinosaurs were actually mechanical robots, then you include the revolving-door phenomenon of all the work teams and engineers
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 17:33:53 +0200, Florian Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Forwarded, with permission, from my friend tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. - I think this raises interesting questions about the integrity and politics of open content, collaborative online projects and knowledge repositories. I am not sure it does. While the alterations made are surely a matter of opinion or perspective: If someone 'messes' with 'my' wiki in a similar way I'd also re-edit it. (Go and try: http://carpe.com/wiki/ ;-) ) Specially the remark, that this was done within less than 30 minutes points more to the activity of a WikiGardener than to one of a person from the said instituion. You would not EARNESTLY (pardon me for shouting) believe, that a PR person from Johns Hopkins has nothing else to do than monitor a WikiPage several times an hour (even if by a script or changedetection.com or the likes) and re-edit it if necessary? But then I'd never dream of using wikipedia as a source for encyclopedic content. (I'd consider putting some there, ok ;) ) And you? I mean: You might dream, but would you do it in scholarly work( without consulting other sources)? The sentence (you were quoting) It appears that Wikipedia is used as an advertising outlet for elite institutions. speaks for itself. Remember: That you are paranoid does not mean that they are not after you. ;) And: I do not see any reason for anonymity in trhis case. That is childish. OK, except if the writer was a professor at JHU ;) Let's see if he was, OK? http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_University - revision history (Revision as of 15:54, 24 Sep 2003) (cur) (last) . . 20:06, 29 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . 20:01, 29 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . M 04:24, 28 Sep 2003 . . ThereIsNoSteve (cur) (last) . . M 20:22, 25 Sep 2003 . . ThereIsNoSteve (cur) (last) . . 18:35, 25 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . 18:32, 25 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . 17:27, 25 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . 17:26, 25 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . 17:23, 25 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . 17:21, 25 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . M 17:19, 25 Sep 2003 . . Frecklefoot (+wikilinks) It was later corrected by a person regularly working on that page, probably really someone from JHU, we will check that. (cur) (last) . . 17:13, 25 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . 17:12, 25 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 (cur) (last) . . 16:17, 24 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 This was done by your anonymous writer (cur) (last) . . 15:54, 24 Sep 2003 . . 206.80.158.11 (cur) (last) . . 15:44, 24 Sep 2003 . . 67.87.234.159 So let's look at the IPs tracert 206.80.158.11 - zbay5-11.fyi.net A sDSL Provider and the likes. Would 'bay' point to the SF Bay area? tracert 67.87.234.159 - *.optonline.net 'High speed internet and cable modem provider' (Rather definitely not someone on the campus of JHU, right?) He had edited the page only 10 minutes before the 'hack', so it's only normal he'd override a silly edit like the one mentioned. Another regular editor is 68.198.191.117 who also connects from 'optonline' so I'd guess it is the same person. Let's complete this with a tracert www.jhu.edu - jhuniverse.hcf.jhu.edu [128.220.2.80] No similarity to any of the other IPs. So. Before anyone indulges in paranoia they should just check the obvious: Someone writing about JHU every day would rather not want the stuff from the fyi-guy in there. Rightyright? IMO this quick re-edit is proof that the wiki-system (or: wikipedia) works: Any nonsense will quickly be removed ;) OG -- oliver gassner - radbrunnengasse 1/2 - D-71665 vaihingen an der enz [EMAIL PROTECTED] - mobil 0179 297 234 2 - http://www.oliver-gassner.de/ literatur: http://www.carpe.com/ literaturwelt-links: http://literaturwelt.de/links/ # 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 Of Men and Monuments
well.. this is a piece done for 21C - we're just in the final phases of setting it up as a quarterly, and julian Laverdiere is one of the people who designed the cover for the new issue. He was, along with Paul Myoda, and also one of the principal folks involved with designing up the Towers of Light/Tribute in Light Memorial for the World Trade Center victims. Like Maya Lin's 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial - the Towers... sought to commemorate a dilemma of American culture - a dilemma usually implies a situation that requires a choice between options that are or seem equally unfavorable or mutually exclusive. One monument was about permanence and the American aspiration to monumentalism. The other, made of light, was about transparency and impermanence. Light and text - permanence and impermanence - these are issues that info culture faces - in the tradition of Virilio, this is certainly no Albert Speers with lights intimating a 1000 Year Reich, but then again, hey... under the Bush Admin. maybe it could be after all, Leni Riefenstahl was a pretty good film maker too... this is art that asks - imperial time aspires to be universal, but how are we to think about the forms that represent the idea of empire? Anyway... read on here's the essay. you can check the rest at www.21cmagazine.com pax, Paul Of Men and Monuments, Vessels and Vectors... Julian Laverdiere 's Art of Uncertainty: Goliath Concussed at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery NYC by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid in architecture form is a noun, in industry form is a verb R. Buckminster Fuller In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows. I am great Ozymandias, saith the stone, The King of kings: this mighty city shows The wonders of my hand. The city's gone! Naught but the leg remaining to disclose The sight of that forgotten Babylon. We wonder, and some hunter may express Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What wonderful, but unrecorded, race Once dwelt in that annihilated place. Horace Smith, Ozymandias 1817 Horace Smith composed this sonnet on 27 December 1817, during an evening sonnet-writing session with P.B. Shelley, but the echo, the sense of quotation of content and context is what I want to evoke with this piece. Think again: Rhetorical bodies, matter and memory, teleplex tautologies, suture and synedoche... codes and modes... like I always enjoy saying: it all just flows. It's been a long time since 1869 when the U.S., as an aspiring regional super-power, laid the first trans-continental telegraph and railroad lines throughout the newly reconsolidated polity that the Civil War had given birth to. It was an ambitious project, but like all American endeavors of size it had a small beginning. During the month of May 1869, in the middle of Utah, and at a place very few of us would ever check out, a silver spike hammered into the a railroad track that was almost finished completed a continent wide circuit in the newly linked transcontinental rails. The spike set off a electronic trigger pulse that was supposed to celebrate the occasion: a current moved through the newly connected and then infantile networks linking the East and West, and spread throughout the rail and telegraph lines like some newly remade disembodied Paul Revere howling through the wires. In New York and in San Francisco two cannons - one facing the Atlantic and the other, the Pacific Ocean - fired a shot triggered by the phantasmal pulse sent from the joining of the railroads in the middle of America, making the newly ambitious U.S.'s sense of Manifest Destiny telephonically clear to the rest of the world - from the heart of the country a silver spike closed the circuit on reality as our ancestors knew it. The rest, as it's always said, is another story. Ah, the logic of history. Like the poem that I begin this essay with, its something that at first glance evokes a series of historical allusions, and then one realizes the legerdemain - it's not Percy Shelley's, but an echo, a remix, a quote within a quote. One could argue that that's the sense of uncertainty of origin that Laverdiere strives to convey with his work. The above mentioned event is true but hovers someplace in my imagination at a point mid-way between Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, with dashes of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow thrown in for good measure. That's what Julian Laverdiere's work is like: it puts a spin on a commonplace situation and for better or worse creates a place where fiction and reality, like everything else these days, seem to be completely meshed with one another. In Forbidden Aspirations for Ascendancy, Laverdiere's first solo show at Gallery Andrew Kreps back in 2000, one entered a room where two capsules sat
